Classics professor Max Nelson has published a paper proposing a new meaning of the coded 666 in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation.
Classics professor Max Nelson of the UWindsor Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures believes he has found a new answer to a 2,000-year-old puzzle: the meaning of the number of the beast in the Book of Revelation.
“People have been working on this since the second century,” Dr. Nelson says. “It’s the ultimate puzzle and, as classicists, we see our work as kind of puzzling things out.”
The book, the last in the New Testament and therefore the Christian Bible, takes the form of a prophetic vision and is dated to the late first century.
The passage in question is chapter 13, verse 18, translated from the ancient Greek in the King James version as “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”
Scholars have generally agreed that the author was setting a code in which 666 is the numerical equivalent of a word or phrase in Greek, assigning values to the letters.
“Most solutions for 666 … have been unconvincing for one reason or another,” Nelson writes in an article published in The Journal of Theological Studies.
In an analysis of solutions proposed over the succeeding centuries, he identifies several hurdles: introducing anachronisms or misspellings or the addition of extraneous words to force a sum of 666 — notably in the most commonly-accepted solution, which appends the title Caesar to the name Nero.
“There is no reliable evidence that at the time of the writing of Revelation Nero was viewed as a particularly fierce enemy of Christianity,” Nelson argues.
Instead, he posits the code points to “Claudias,” meaning a member of the imperial dynasty founded by the ascension of Claudius to Roman rule in 41 CE and ending with the death of Nero in 68 CE.
“Rather than 666 referring directly to Nero, as is often believed, it could rather indicate a descendant or relative of Nero, of unknown name and presumably hidden away and lying in wait until he will return as the beast,” Nelson writes.
He had begun looking into the question about 15 years ago, treating it as a game.
“I’m not a New Testament scholar,” says Nelson. “I just happened to find that if you use the genitive of the name of the dynasty, it works.”
And in considering the many possibilities, he highlights one other: the pagan god Sarapis, first raised by Nicetas the Paphlagonian in the ninth or 10th century.
“The solution … might have seemed a particularly appropriate one for an apocalyptic beast since some pagans reportedly claimed that there would be eschatological repercussions from the destruction of the statue of Sarapis,” Nelson writes.
“Although I like my own solution, I have pointed to Sarapis as another plausible possibility,” he says.
He identifies two challenges in devising solutions to this puzzle.
“We can never know for certain, and this is the first problem. No one can claim to have found the single correct solution.”
And second, because the concept of 666 has entered popular culture, inspiring horror stories in books and film, “when people find out you’ve hit upon a solution, you sound like a crank.”
Read his entire article, “A Concealed Claudian: The Meaning of 666 in Revelation.”
