The Number 666

Few numbers have a single source as clear as this one. The book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, was written in the late first century CE by a prophet named John, exiled on the Aegean island of Patmos. In chapter 13 he describes a monstrous beast rising from the sea, worshipped by the whole earth and making war on the faithful, and a second beast that forces everyone to bear a mark on the hand or forehead in order to buy or sell. The imagery is not new. In the book of Daniel, written in the second century BCE under the Greek king Antiochus IV, four beasts rise from the sea, each standing for an empire that oppresses God’s people. John’s readers knew Daniel well and would have understood a beast from the sea as a coded empire, and in their own day the empire was Rome. Like Daniel, Revelation speaks in symbols because plain speech about rulers could be dangerous. Then he sets the reader a puzzle: “Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

To John’s first readers, “calculate” would have suggested a familiar practice. In Hebrew and Greek there were no separate digits; letters also served as numerals, so every word had a numerical value. Turning a name into a number was a common game. On a wall in Pompeii, buried in 79 CE, someone scratched in Greek, “I love the girl whose number is 545.” John was inviting his audience to do the same in reverse: to find the man whose name added up to 666, without naming him openly under a hostile government.

The answer most historians accept is the emperor Nero. Written in Hebrew letters, his Greek title Neron Kaisar becomes NRWN QSR, and the letters add up to 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 = 666. The spelling is not a modern invention: a similar form of the name appears in an Aramaic document found in the Judaean desert. Nero fits the picture well. He blamed the Christians of Rome for the great fire of 64 CE and had many executed, and after his suicide in 68 rumours spread that he had not really died and would return from the East with an army. A beast with a mortal wound that has healed, as Revelation describes, would have reminded readers of exactly that story.

A remarkable detail strengthens the case. Some early manuscripts give the number not as 666 but as 616. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180 CE, knew of these copies and dismissed them as errors. A papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, dated to the third century CE and widely publicised in 2005, also reads 616. If the name is spelled the Latin way, Nero Caesar, without the final N, the Hebrew letters total 616. Many scholars think a copyist who knew the Nero solution adjusted the number to match the Latin form of the name.

The Nero reading is still an interpretation, not a certainty. Irenaeus himself, only a century after Revelation was written, did not know it and suggested other names. Some scholars stress a symbolic reading instead: 666 is a triangular number, the sum of all numbers from 1 to 36, and six falls short of seven, the biblical number of completeness, so the beast may be imitating perfection and falling short. These readings can sit alongside the Nero solution rather than replace it.

Once the original reference was forgotten, 666 became a key that could open any lock. Medieval Christian writers, merging the beast with the figure of the Antichrist, applied the number to Muhammad and calculated when Islam would end. During the Reformation, Protestant writers claimed that the Latin title Vicarius Filii Dei, “Vicar of the Son of God”, totals 666 in Roman numerals, and Catholic writers answered by finding the number in Martin Luther’s name. In later centuries Napoleon, various popes, Hitler and modern politicians were all “proved” to be the beast by arithmetic flexible enough to produce almost any name.

In the twentieth century the number passed from theology into popular culture. Aleister Crowley adopted the title “the Great Beast 666” to provoke the Christian morality of his upbringing. Films such as The Omen (1976), heavy metal albums and horror novels made it a shorthand for evil. Everyday superstitions followed: some people refuse addresses, telephone numbers or car registrations containing 666, and in 2003 US Route 666 in the American Southwest was renumbered as Route 491, partly because of its nickname, “the Devil’s Highway”. Rumours have periodically claimed that barcodes, identity cards or computer chips are the mark of the beast; none contains such a code.

Most Christian churches today read Revelation as a book of hope written for persecuted communities, promising that cruel powers will not have the last word. In that light, 666 is less a curse than a coded protest against a first-century empire. Elsewhere it can even be lucky: in Chinese, 666 sounds like “smooth, smooth, smooth”.