In A Nutshell
“666,” the oft-quoted number of Satan, or perhaps his area code, is not the Mark of the Beast as most people believe. Though it’s less memorable and certainly not as cool-looking, the oldest surviving fragment of, you guessed it, the Bible puts the number at 616. The fragment predates every other copy of Revelation, where John, the mysterious author, mentions the Mark of the Beast as the tattoo you’ll have to get if you want to conduct business in the new apocalyptic world.
The Whole Bushel
If you’re not familiar with the Book of Revelation, it’s the last book of the New Testament, in which the world essentially comes to an end, and good finally overcomes evil. But not before a whole bunch of terrifying things unfold. The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine, and Death) are released to wreak havoc on the world. Following this is some kind of huge event that also devastates the globe. Before anything else is done to ruin Earth, the faithful are rewarded with exemption from the next round of horrors. Fire falls from the sky, some kind of creatures described as locusts (but not what you’re thinking) sting anyone without the previously mentioned immunity, and one-third of whatever remains of humanity is wiped out by a demonic cavalry.
Eventually, two “beasts” make an appearance, with one convincing humans to worship the other beast. It’s at this point in the Apocalypse that mankind is talked into getting the Mark of the Beast, either on their foreheads or on their right hands. John writes that people willingly allow themselves to be marked because they can’t “buy or sell” without it. The mark itself can be any one of three things: a symbol, the beast’s name, or his number. And it’s here that the traditional number of “Six hundred threescore and six,” or 666, comes from.
However, back in 2005, the number was revised, or should have been, to 616 after experts deciphered a fragment from a large collection of really old papers, most of them unreadable. The scraps had been dug out of an ancient Egyptian dump just outside of Oxyrhynchus more than a century earlier. Among them was a piece of a third-century manuscript that just happened to be from the Book of Revelation. In this piece, as well, was the new number, 616, given as the number of the Beast.
This isn’t just some random number either. In ancient times, people used numbers to disguise the name of an enemy, spelling it out with the values of its letters. Most scholars read both 666 and 616 as a coded jab at the Roman emperor Nero, who was busy persecuting Christians at the time. Written in Hebrew letters, his name and title add up to 666 with one spelling and 616 with another. Professor David Parker, who thinks 616 is the original, has suggested it points instead to an earlier emperor, Caligula. Even so, 666 still turns up in the large majority of surviving manuscripts, so which number John first wrote is not settled.
So the swap from 666 to 616 matters for how we read the Book of Revelation. It leans toward reading the book as a coded political dig at the Roman Empire, dressed up in symbols and numbers to dodge an imperial crackdown, and away from treating it as a literal apocalypse still to come.
Show Me The Proof
Revelation! 666 is not the number of the beast (it’s a devilish 616)
Revelation 13:11-18 (King James Version)
The 616 manuscript reading
