Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse 14: “And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those on the earth to make an image to the beast, who was wounded by the sword and lived.” Still a pin in it—we’re almost there, though! [Laughter]

“He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.” What is this in the sort of original application? In the first century, this is riding the crest of the beginning of emperor-worship: temples being built to the Julio-Claudian dynasty in different places. They’re being set up. Rome is setting up colonies, and they’re coming to these other places, and then once they come there they’re compelling everyone: you’re going to fit into this way of life, you’re going to offer sacrifices here, you’re going to worship here, you’re going to do this. And that kind of colonialism takes a lot of different forms, but it’s sort of always been with us.

Now it’s more cultural and technological and economic. There’s this sort of Western way of life and consumer capitalism and this sort of thing that shows up everywhere. Our TV and movies and entertainment products, all of that spectacle gets exported everyplace. And when it goes to everyplace, what does it do everyplace? “Oh, that’s a big—! Oh, that’s wonderful! I want to go there. I want to be like that. I want to live like that. I want to look like that.” Well, what is that, as we were just talking about? That’s a person not looking at the saints, not looking at Christ and saying, “I want to live like that; I want to be like that.” That’s them looking at wealthy people in the West, saying, “I want to eat like that. I want to dress like that. I want to have a huge house like that. I want to drive a car like that.”

This is a different way of life. It’s a different way of being in the world, which means it’s a different religion that people are being indoctrinated in. It’s a different ultimate value that they’re pursuing, that isn’t Christ and isn’t the life in Christ. We’re not bringing that to them; we’re bringing them “hey, you could be rich and famous and pretty and look young, no matter how old you get.” Now, none of that’s actually true, but it’s still what’s sold. It’s what’s sold to people, just like worshiping the gods of Rome wouldn’t make you beautiful or successful or victorious in battle or strong or powerful, but that’s what was sold.

And what happened at the end of verse 15? What happened to those who wouldn’t conform to the Roman way of life?

Q1: Like Christians, they got killed?

Fr. Stephen: They got killed. They got killed.

Verse 16: “He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.” Okay. So, remember, this is a previous pin. We’ve seen this idea of the mark of the forehead or right hand before. This is not the first time we’ve seen it; we’ve seen it before. Do you remember where it was? It was a while ago, I know. It’s a couple months ago that we actually read this. Back in chapter seven, when the angel came with the seal of the living God and sealed the 144,000 whom we talked about on their foreheads, stamped them. So they were already stamped.

This stamp is just a different stamp. As we said at the time, whatever you say the mark of the beast is, there’s also a corresponding mark of God. So if you’re going to say the mark of the beast is a vaccine, there’s going to have to be some kind of Church vaccine or holy vaccine or something. If it’s a bar code tattoo, then there’s going to be some, I don’t know, QR code that leads to biblegateway or something that Christians are going to get on their foreheads. I don’t even know what that would be. But most of those theories kind of fall apart when you see that St. John has this symmetry here. Those who were worshiping the true God are sealed by him, and those who are worshiping the dragon, worshiping the devil through the beast, are sealed and marked by him. So that’s the idea here.

And they set up the system in such a way that, unless you’re willing to buy into the system, you’re not going to be able to operate in the system. So in the immediate term, if you’re not willing to offer sacrifices, usually of incense, because it was cheaper and easier, to Caesar—technically the genius of Caesar—then you’re going to be executed, or at the very least you’re not going to be able to join a trade guild, you’re not going to be able to— We talked about this when we talked about St. Paul’s letters to Corinth, how the fact that they couldn’t participate in the sacrifices in the city meant that they couldn’t participate in the feasts, they couldn’t participate in the civic life, they couldn’t participate in the trade guilds. They were completely cut off from the rest of the city life, and therefore seen as traitors, as outsiders. And then as soon as something went wrong, anything—natural disaster or anything else—why did this happen? Well, we’ve got these outsiders here who are causing it. It’s their fault. Lo and behold, they then go and kill those people to make up for it.

And if that sounded familiar in terms of some things that happened in medieval Europe…

Q1: I was thinking more of the 20th century with the Jews.

Fr. Stephen: Because, as I said, the system is adept—the world system is adept at taking movements that start out opposed to it and co-opting them. That happened to Christianity, especially in the West but not only in the West, and a lot of places in the East, wherever it wasn’t persecuted in the East, frankly, and whenever it wasn’t persecuted. Same thing happened. So then it became the Jews or whoever else. Some natural disaster happened? “They’re outsiders. It’s their fault. They’re not part of the system.” And they found a compromise where you could be a Christian and still go along with everything your society and your culture was doing.

This is a thing that happens, and it didn’t just happen then, but that’s what this is getting at with the mark of the beast. The idea is that refusing— And this goes back to Daniel, too, but refusing to participate in some part of the system tends to exclude you from the whole thing. It’s sort of an all-or-nothing buy-in. And the reason for that is the devil’s goal isn’t to get you to do any of these rudimentary things. The devil doesn’t care if you go and buy food at the food market that all the pagans buy food at. Whoopee. The whole point is you have to have some other ultimate value other than Christ, and so it has to be totalizing. It has to require your total devotion, and you have to sacrifice following Christ for it for it to be worthwhile for him. And so that’s why it ends up being an all-or-nothing kind of thing.

You can’t have two ultimate values. You couldn’t be a good Roman and a good Christian at the end of the first century when St. John is writing. And the truth is, you’ve never been able to be a good fill-in-the-blank and a good Christian at the same time, whatever that fill-in-the-blank is, because eventually there will be a rub. If you want to come to me and say, “Well, you could be a good son and a good Christian,” then I will point out to you where Christ says, “Unless a man hates his father and mother, he is not worthy of me.” Now, he’s not saying you should hate your parents; he’s saying that, if it comes down to a conflict between your parents and what your parents are telling you to do, and following Christ, you’ve got to follow Christ, which means when the rubber hits the road, you’re not going to be able to be a good son or a good daughter.

This is something we still deceive ourselves about. We want to pretend these conflicts don’t exist or won’t exist. “Whatever I need to do to keep my friends or not upset my family members or get along or whatever, that’s got to be okay, right? because those are good things, so there can’t really be a conflict between that and following Christ.” But the truth is there can be. In our culture, maybe not as often as in some other places, probably not as often as in first-century Rome, but there still are plenty of them and where we have to choose. That doesn’t mean we have to hate everything else, that doesn’t mean we all have to go become monks and hermits, but it means, when the chips are down and we have to choose, Christ has to be what we choose every single time.

Okay, so now we also get this first drop: “the name of the beast or the number of his name.” Don’t worry. This pin won’t last long. It’s the next verse.

Verse 18: “Here is wisdom.” Okay, so what does this “here is wisdom” mean? This is a parenthetical tip of the hat. “I’m about to tell you something that you’re going to have think about.” This is sort of a “let the reader understand” saying. [Laughter] “I’m sliding you a note. I’m not going to speak plainly here in a second.”

“Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man”—meaning a particular man. “It is the number of a man. His number is 666.” Or, if you’re reading the earliest manuscripts of Revelation that we have, 616, Six-sixteen. So this is going to be another one of those, if you ask me, “Which one is right, 666 or 616?” my answer’s going to be, “¿Por qué no los dos? Why not both?” Because there’s a way of calculating this where it refers to the same person.

He gives us this whole cue: Let the reader understand; if you know what I’m doing here, you can figure out the number, figure it out… We’ve talked about before how, one of the reason why numbers get slippery in Scripture and in other ancient texts is that they didn’t have numerals. They didn’t have numerals like what we call numbers, so they conveyed them using letters. If you wanted to say “six,” you used the sixth letter of the alphabet, that kind of thing. So that also means you can do codes like this. You can give a number that’s like the sum of a bunch of letters, so you can use this as a kind of subtle way, like a cipher, to kind of communicate.

If you take 616 for a certain person’s name in Aramaic, and 666 for that same person’s name in Greek—which also explains why it’s the earlier manuscripts that have the 616, because after a while there weren’t people using Aramaic—those both add up to the title of—I know I’m drawing this out on purpose—Nero, the Emperor Nero. Now, why do I say it’s Nero? Well, aside from the facts I’ve just listed, as we’ve already talked about, Revelation is not predicting the future, and people have been trying to figure out— do stuff with this number to identify different people—my personal favorite are the people who pointed out that “Ronald Wilson Reagan” had six letters in each of his names… Duh-naa!

Q1: [Laughter] Ooh!

Fr. Stephen: Anyway. So it turns out Ronald Reagan wasn’t the Antichrist. I don’t know, some of you might not be aware of that. He’s dead; he can’t be. [Laughter] He’s been dead for a while. Even though he did get shot and survived—people pointed to that, too. “Look! Deadly wound that was healed! He got shot and he survived!” But, no.

So why Nero? Well, part of it is actually that reference to having this wound that was healed. Nero—obviously: bad guy, not a great guy, not a great emperor—killed Saints Peter and Paul, but he’s dead at the time St. John is writing this. He’s been dead for a while—or had he? Because there was already a tradition—we have this attested in various places. The one that we still have that’s closest to when St. John was writing this— St. John had the vision, according to St. Irenaeus, around 96, AD 96. So in AD 88, not that long before this, we have a poem from Dio Chrysostom—no relation to St. John Chrysostom. That’s not a last name; it’s a title. It means “golden-mouth.” It was just: “Oh, you’re a great orator.” It’s an honorific title, so no relation. But Dio Chrysostom, who was a Roman poet, wrote about this in 88. This is current to St. John’s time.

There was a persistent belief that Nero was not really dead, that he had survived, and he had snuck off to Asia Minor, the place where St. John happens to be writing from, and hid out there and convalesced. And he was going to return and restore the glory of Rome, when he returned and became emperor again. Dio Chrysostom writes about this, and this was so powerful in the Roman imagination St. Augustine writes about it in The City of God—in the fifth century, people still believed this. Nero would have been, like, 400 years old! [Laughter] But there were people, as the Western empire was falling— St. Augustine had to write against this. There were Romans that believed Nero was going to come back and save them.

Q1: Nero was not at all popular with the Romans when he was alive…

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter]

Q1: Why Nero, not Augustus, for example?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it was because there were these weird— There was a weird religious cult around Nero, and that cult was particularly strong in Asia Minor where he was supposed to be hiding out, and so it looks like they were keeping it alive, probably to try to gain more influence, that particular cult, more influence on the emperor at that time. By the time you get to the fifth century, I’m not super sure! [Laughter] But it was still around.

Q2: I’ve heard that there were weird theories that he was going to come back like the opposite of what he was, like instead of being this—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, somehow the experience of—

Q2: That he was going to be, like, pro-Christian or something.

Q1: That he was going to be a good emperor instead of a bad emperor?

Fr. Stephen: I haven’t heard that he was going to be Christian.

Q2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because St. Augustine’s attacking it because it was the opposite.

Q2: Well, yeah…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] For St. Augustine, the people he was dealing with, it was the opposite.

Q2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Nero’s going to come back and restore the traditional and bring Rome back to glory. Now, they may have— In the fifth century, he may have been just the only emperor they knew of who had a rumor he might come back at that point.

Q1: I have a question: at the time that Nero…

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah, no one liked him.

Q1: ...was murdered, people were pretty glad. Even Romans were pretty glad.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but Rome did not do well at the end of the first and beginning of the second century.

Q1: They had a bunch of emperors…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, things were not going great. So I think part of it was: We didn’t know how good we had it, maybe. But I think a lot of it was that particular cult kind of jockeying for power. There was already an East and West separation happening. Caligula had tried to move the seat of the empire to Alexandria because of that. So I think that was part of it. Those stories were coming more out of the Eastern Roman Empire than the Western Roman Empire at the end of the first century.

Q1: Well, emperor worship was stronger, the further away you got from Rome, so that may have had something to do with it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So it seems—

Q2: That’s pretty wild, too. I mean, if you’re not experiencing him as a Roman in Rome, they do sound kind of like Hercules.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And he’s this divine figure, this incredible power. How could—? You know. So St. John is clearly pulling on these traditions. That said, St. John is not endorsing: “This is Nero.” So there are people called Preterists who are kind of silly people, but they want to argue sort of the opposite. We’re used to, in America, sort of American Evangelicalism wants to see everything in Revelation as happening in the future: this is all just a record of stuff that’s going to happen in the future. Preterists just decided to go the exact opposite direction and say, “No, all this stuff all happened in the first century. It’s all over already.” Some would even say Christ has returned in some sense. Yeah, I know it’s crazy. [Laughter] But most of them don’t go that far; most of them have the last couple of chapters of Revelation still in the future, but the rest of it’s all in the past. I say it’s kind of silly, because it’s kind of obviously inaccurate, because as we’ve talked about, the whole structure of apocalyptic visions in general and this one in particular is that we’re seeing a heavenly perspective on things. So, yes, it’s all true at the time St. John is writing it. It’s also all true in the 13th century AD and the 17th century AD and today.

Nero here is being identified as a type. He’s sort of one example. It’s interesting: we talk about the mark of the beast, and we talk about the beast in terms of the antichrist, but you may have noticed the word “antichrist” appears nowhere in here. That’s not because that’s not the term St. John uses, because the place where it is used was in 1 John. St. Paul in Thessalonians, we saw, uses— refers to the “man of lawlessness” or “the man of Belial” when he refers to this figure. But do you remember what St. John said in 1 John? He said, “You have heard that an antichrist will come. I tell you that antichrists (plural) were already abroad in the world.”

Remember, “anti-” doesn’t mean “opposed to”; it means “instead of”: someone who sets themselves up in Christ’s place. Every Roman empire did that, but Nero’s an especially good one to pick out, having killed Saints Peter and Paul, having conducted this mass persecution of Christians, having set these various trajectories, played into the emperor-worship, all of these things. So he’s sort of an— If you’re writing at the end of the first century, he’s sort of an Exhibit A of the bad emperor, the antichrist figure. He’s sort of your Exhibit A in the same way that, when you’re reading Daniel or in the gospels they refer back to the abomination of desolation: they talk about Antiochus Epiphanes as sort of Exhibit A. But these are exhibits of the same kind of thing. This is one person who represents the beast, of the beast embodied, the world system embodied. Nero was the empire embodied, the Roman Empire embodied.

And, by drawing on this tradition of him coming back, not only is he a figure who set himself up as a false Christ previously, but people are now putting their hope in him instead of in Christ. They’re hoping for Nero’s return, not Christ’s return. They’re hoping for the Roman Empire’s return to prominence, not Christ’s return in his kingdom. The hope for the return of the Roman Empire is a lot of the medieval period. [Laughter] And after the medieval period. And Napoleon. And… [Laughter] That ideal of Rome, that embodiment of Rome, was very powerful in the Western imagination, in all the wrong ways.

It is referring to Nero, but it’s not just referring to Nero; it’s referring to Nero as this type. So these people emerge… My position is less that all the people who’ve played “pin the tail on the antichrist” over the centuries, trying to pick him out, have been wrong; I think most of them were probably right. Some of them were silly, like Jack Van Impe saying it was Juan Carlos, King of Spain? I think he was a little out to lunch on that one. I think Juan Carlos died before Jack Van Impe did, and he didn’t take it back; that’s the other thing. Harold Camping at least admitted he was wrong. But I think a lot of them were right when they were saying that Napoleon was the antichrist: kind of was. And when they were saying Lenin was the antichrist: kind of was. Hitler the antichrist, Stalin the antichrist: kind of were.

It’s not that “Oh, we’re trying to guess who it is and we’re all wrong”; these are all that type. These are all people who embodied the world system, of violence, of authoritarianism, of setting up an ideal other— Again, it doesn’t have to be opposed to; it just has to be other than Christ, a way of living and being in the world other than Christ.

Q2: It’s like you said: Why not both?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Drawing them into that system. And lots of other people whom we could name, in various societies and cultures at various times. So, yeah, it’s less about “oh, we need to decode this and figure out who it is”; it’s a bunch of people. He’s setting up the type.

Q1: You said that the number derives from a title of Nero’s?

Fr. Stephen: Nero Caesar, yeah, not any long title. Nero and Caesar, yeah. If you transliterate that into Aramaic, you get 616 when you add it up; in Greek you get 666. Those early manuscripts were still Jewish Christians who knew Aramaic, who were in the know; later on, not a lot of those, so most everybody’s speaking Greek.

I thought we might get into chapter 14 tonight, but I don’t think we will, looking at the time. Now you notice, remember, it was the 144,000 who were sealed, over against the mark of the beast? And if you look at the heading, guess who’s coming back in chapter 14.

Q1:

Fr. Stephen: Just in case we didn’t remember to go back to chapter seven. These are going to be drawn back together again. Yes, sir?

Q2: Do you think that Iron Maiden knows that that’s what the number of the beast meant?

Fr. Stephen: I doubt it. [Laughter] Slayer, also, I think has no idea. Okay. You have something.

Q1: Just this number word game.

Fr. Stephen: It’s called gematria, if you want to be fancy.

Q1: I’ve encountered it because my students encountered it. This is late 19th-century American author, claiming that the dimensions of the pyramid, of the Great Pyramid, have been added up and manipulated to the [Inaudible]. Of course, that would be of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, there you go, yeah. There’s lots of those. Like I mentioned Harold Camping: they usually don’t work out so well for people when they make the predictions. Okay, so when we get back together next time, we’ll pick up in chapter 14. Thank you, everybody.