In the Scripture regarding the mark of the anti-Christ, '666' was in greek?

[BlueSapphire]

Here is a link to an article written on the subject!

The Anti-Christ is Islam

 

[m8g8]

I don’t believe there is enough back up evidence for this, so I’m going to disregard it unless there is.

However, Muhammad denied Christ and told people it was religiously correct to stage a war against anyone who didn’t share his beliefs. I think that anyone who denies Christ and justifies violence isn’t giving a message from God. Evil only comes from Satan.

 

[NotCrazyDan]

I don’t believe there is enough back up evidence for this, so I’m going to disregard it unless there is.

However, Muhammad denied Christ and told people it was religiously correct to stage a war against anyone who didn’t share his beliefs. I think that anyone who denies Christ and justifies violence isn’t giving a message from God. Evil only comes from Satan.

True, and I agree this guy’s theory is probably false.

 

[NHInsider]

St. John in his epistle mentions multiple “antichrists” and indicates that they are already active in the world at the time he is writing. Anyone who opposes Jesus is anti-christ in the simplest meaning of the word.

But the other thing about John’s vision in the apocalypse is that there are a whole series of “counterfeits” - another meaning of “anti,” of course, is “opposite” (like “anti-matter”). The whore city Babylon is the counterfeit of the bride Jerusalem. Her blood/wine is an anti-Eucharist. The wounded hero who died and was restored to life is an anti-Jesus. So, in chapter 13, there is an anti-Trinity: the Dragon, the Beast of the sea (to whom the Dragon gives “his own power, throne and authority”) and the beast of the land (who performs miracles and forces people to worship the Beast of the sea and to have the mark placed on their foreheads or hands). The mark is an anti-baptism (compared to the mark or seal of God in chapter 7). We are told that the mark of the beast is the number of a human or a man’s name (depending on the translation). Immediately after (and remember that the chapter/verse breaks are not in the original) we are told that the redeemed are marked on their foreheads with the name of the Lamb and His father.

The “human number/man’s name” riddle has at least two meanings, which is doubtless intentional (the best puzzles incorporate multiple levels). In Jewish numerology, “6” was the number of humankind (created on the 6th day) but also could represent sinful humanity, falling short of God’s perfection (7). So triple-6 would be emphatically human and superlatively evil. AND it apparently can also be arrived at mathmatically from the numeric values of the letters of Nero’s name in either Greek (666) or Aramaic (616, which appears in some ancient manuscripts). And of course there was the legend of Nero revividus, a belief/hope that Nero would be revived and restore order/grandeur to the Empire, which seems to be echoed in the head that had recovered from a fatal wound. Nero was the emperor under whose reign both Peter and Paul were executed, and who blamed the Christians for the fire that destroyed much of Rome, in order to incite popular anger against them.

To OP’s concern about his Muslim friend - the Church’s position is that there is only One God and to that extent that the three monotheist religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) share a faith in the God revealed to Abraham.

“Allah” is the word for “God” in Arabic. It’s what Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews call God the Father/Creator. It’s not a Muslim term, although since the Koran is written in Arabic, it is what Muslims call God.

We do not, of course, accept Muhammad as a true prophet since his teaching is opposed to the Truth revealed by the prophets and ultimately by Jesus, but that does not negate the original claim of the descendants of Ishmael to the blessings God promised to Abraham and his descendants. You can certainly pray that your friend will come to know the Way that the Lord has made for us to approach Him, but I seriously doubt that any attempt to prove that Muhammad was “The Antichrist” will sway him and it will probably just make him defensive.

 

[m8g8]

Thank you, NHInsider,

This is a really balanced opinion. If Nero was the anti-Christ, then wouldn’t it be more certain by now, because of all the warnings in revelations that would have followed?

I spoke to my Muslim friend about this as he would have more knowledge. Being a Muslim, he is farmiliar with the Arabic script. He said that he sees why the script is similar, but it is too dissimilar for it to be convincing. Muslims believe that Jesus is Christ and the Messiah, but believe he did not die for us and is our saviour, but not by death.

I think that the anti-christ would be more against Jesus than this.

 

[patrick457]

Was the mark of the beast really written in Greek?

Yes. The majority of manuscripts have it written in full as ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ hexakósioi hexēkonta héx (“six-hundred sixty six”). A variant which employs Greek numerals χξς, is found in Papyrus 47 (3rd century), Uncial 051 (10th century), and the Byzantine text-type. We also need to consider other manuscripts which have the variants 646, 616, and 665 in it.

 

[m8g8]

So, why would he write that the mark counts to 666. It was a vision in a dream, so he must have actually seen that it counts to 666 somewhere? Because if he knew the name, why would he write what it counts to?

 

[patrick457]

So, why would he write that the mark counts to 666. It was a vision in a dream, so he must have actually seen that it counts to 666 somewhere? Because if he knew the name, why would he write what it counts to?

A simple hint to that is: in some ancient cultures, the letters of their alphabets could also double as numerals. For example, the first letter could double as a numeral for ‘one’ (1), the second as ‘two’, and so on. Such is the case both in Hebrew and Greek. Coming up with 666 or 616 or any other number is actually pretty simple in gematria: you just add together the numerical values of all the letters in a name or word.

Now, why would John write the Beast’s name in its numeric equivalent?

One explanation that I can think of right now (I’ll leave other posters to guess out other ones) is that overtly writing the Beast’s name could cause danger should a copy of the work fall into the wrong hands. That was still a time when Christians were outlawed in many regions: any possible evidence could and would be used to incriminate you. If Christian communities were found having in their possession a work which portrays a monstrous antagonist which suspiciously could fit certain living or dead Caesars, it would be construed to be a case of blasphemy against the divi filius (‘son of god’; a common title of a Roman Emperor) and fomenting sedition. The authorities would crack down hard on these churches and probably drive many of them extinct. So in one sense, encoding the Beast’s name is maybe St. John’s way of being prudently careful not to let out too much that which could be the bane of him and all the Christians - he uses a code probably known only to him and most of the people he was writing to.

 

[m8g8]

A simple hint to that is: in some ancient cultures, the letters of their alphabets could also double as numerals. For example, the first letter could double as a numeral for ‘one’ (1), the second as ‘two’, and so on. Such is the case both in Hebrew and Greek. Coming up with 666 or 616 or any other number is actually pretty simple in gematria: you just add together the numerical values of all the letters in a name or word.

Now, why would John write the Beast’s name in its numeric equivalent?

One explanation that I can think of right now (I’ll leave other posters to guess out other ones) is that overtly writing the Beast’s name could cause danger should a copy of the work fall into the wrong hands. That was still a time when Christians were outlawed in many regions: any possible evidence could and would be used to incriminate you. If Christian communities were found having in their possession a work which portrays a monstrous antagonist which suspiciously could fit certain living or dead Caesars, it would be construed to be a case of blasphemy against the divi filius (‘son of god’; a common title of a Roman Emperor) and fomenting sedition. The authorities would crack down hard on these churches and probably drive many of them extinct. So in one sense, encoding the Beast’s name is maybe St. John’s way of being prudently careful not to let out too much that which could be the bane of him and all the Christians - he uses a code probably known only to him and most of the people he was writing to.

Thank you. That’s a really good explanation. So it seems that it was for people of the time when it was written and since people say it adds up to ‘Nero’, that’s probably the most likely theory?

 

[NHInsider]

A simple hint to that is: in some ancient cultures, the letters of their alphabets could also double as numerals. For example, the first letter could double as a numeral for ‘one’ (1), the second as ‘two’, and so on. Such is the case both in Hebrew and Greek. Coming up with 666 or 616 or any other number is actually pretty simple in gematria: you just add together the numerical values of all the letters in a name or word.

An example of this with which we are all still familiar is Roman Numerals - those I’s, V’s and X’s weren’t only numbers, they were letters.

I believe one of the great contributions of Arabic culture to the world is the system of numbers.

 

[Ruthie_again]

That Walid fellow is stretching things mightily to make the Greek letter, sigma, look like that “in the name of” character in Arabic.

Here’s an article about him from the Jerusalem Post. Unfortunately, there are no paragraphs, which makes it hard to read. jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=96502

The fact that he calls the Greek letter “stigma” shows the level of his Greek scholarship.

What I have heard about the number 666 is that the number signifying “covenant” is 7; thus 6 is an incomplete or deformed covenant. It is a symbolic number rather than a mathematical one.

In Mt 18:22, Jesus tells Peter to forgiver his brother “seventy times seven.” He didn’t mean that Peter could stop forgiving his brother after he had done it 490 times. 666 is the same kind of symbol.

So the mark of the beast is the mark of continual deformed or incomplete covenants.

Ruthie