AntiChrist

The winning number for the Illinois lottery a few days back was "666" - apparently the sign Newsweek was waiting for so they could run an article about the speculation of Obama being the Antichrist.

Steve Benen helpfully points out that equating the number 666 with the Mark of the Beast is biblically wrong, but maybe you want to know why.  If you do, head below the jump and we'll talk about it and some other stuff that makes this speculation so stupid.

Revelation 13:18 says that the number of the Beast is the number of humanity:  666.  This number could be marked on people, or it could be the Beast's name.  So I guess they're half right, if an idiosyncratically literal reading of the text is your goal.  But as I keep arguing, to read the Bible in such a way robs it of all meaning.  The real message here comes from the ancients' understanding of numbers.  Numbers had significance for ancient Jews - and the writer(s) of Revelation had extensive and very likely first-hand knowledge of 1st-2nd century CE Judaism and its apocalyptic literary genre.  The reason that numbers like 3, 7 and 40 keep appearing in the Bible is because they were shorthand for certain concepts.  3 and 7 were markers of completion and wholeness, while 40 was a way of saying "a lot" or "a long time."  When you combine this with the ancient Hebrew practice of repeating something three times for emphasis - such as "holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts" - then the number 777 becomes the highest level of perfection.  The number 6, on the other hand, has special significance for being nearly but not all the way there, with 666 referring, then, to a sort of total or perfect imperfection.

It's a weird concept, but think about humanity and the way we manage to combine, often in the same person, such beauty, love, grace, fear, hate and bigotry.  Think of how we can argue that what makes us human and not merely animal is our capacity for music, poetry, painting and sculpture - and war and genocide. 

The warning here is not to be on the lookout for someone using the number 666.  The warning is to beware of those who seem to represent the message of Jesus at first blush, but who, upon further inspection, actually fall short of it in every way.  That's why in the past the Pope was a favorite target for American fundamentalists' Antichrist speculation.  But Benedict XVI is really anti-gay and anti-choice, so he's obviously ok for a Pope. 

If you looked at Revelation 13, then you saw that Obama can't be the Beast that requires everyone to have his mark, because that's the second beast, and we know Obama can't be the second beast, because there hasn't been a first beast that was fatally wounded and miraculously healed.  But that's where we get into the weeds of just what the fundies want to take "literally" and what they ignore; the problem is that the material appearing in either category is constantly changing.  Pretty much every day brings about an event which contradicts or negates yesterday's interpretation.

And of course equating any of the Beasts which appear in Revelation with an "Antichrist" is completely unsupported by the Bible, since the word "antichrist" only appears in 1st and 2nd John, and those references are not to "Antichrist" as a proper name, but as a description of those who oppose Jesus.  Most importantly, these letters plainly state that an anti-Christ spirit is already around, present in anyone who denies Jesus's physical body or otherwise participates in the various Gnostic heresies.  Pretty much the Johannine canon of the Bible can be summed up as "Gnosticism = bad.  Don't believe it."  Indeed, if you just read Revelation as an anti-Gnostic treatise written to a persecuted, still largely Jewish sect, it starts to make a lot more sense.

Of course, it's difficult to use that type of interpretation in a cynical enterprise dedicated to separating gullible Christians from their money and freedom.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

But Stephen . . . the Revelation Index is at 161. Surely that has to mean something.

[litbrit]

The warning here is not to be on the lookout for someone using the number 666. The warning is to beware of those who seem to represent the message of Jesus at first blush, but who, upon further inspection, actually fall short of it in every way.

Exactly. And wow, there are quite a few of those "falling-short-of-Christ-like" sorts around, aren't there?!

A bumpersticker I love seeing here and there: Jesus is coming, and boy, is He pissed.

What an excellent post, Stephen. Thank you.

[Stephen]

Sir Charles,

Yup. It means that dude voted for McCain.

[Corvus]

because there hasn't been a first beast that was fatally wounded and miraculously healed

Reagan?

[big bad wolf]

actually, corvus, even before the shooting, there were those who worried that reagan might be the beast---ronald(6) wilson(6) reagan(6). that was back when it was not yet settled that the antichrist, if from the u.s., had to be a democrat.

great post, stephen.

[MR Bill]

And a minor point: the early church fathers were not all accepting of the Revelation of John: From Wikipedia:
"A number of Church Fathers weighed in on the authorship of Revelation. Justin Martyr avows his belief in its apostolic origin. Irenaeus (178) assumes it as a conceded point. At the end of the 2nd century, we find it accepted at Antioch, by Theophilus, and in Africa by Tertullian. At the beginning of the 3rd century, it is adopted by Clement of Alexandria and by Origen of Alexandria, later by Methodius, Cyprian, and Lactantius. Dionysius of Alexandria (247) rejected it, upon doctrinal rather than critical grounds. Eusebius (315) inclined to class the Apocalypse with the spurious books.[12] Jerome relegated it to second class.[12] Most canons included it, but some, especially in the Eastern Church, rejected it. It is wholly absent from the Peshitta.[12]" and
" Protestant founder Martin Luther at first considered Revelation to be "neither apostolic nor prophetic" and stated that "Christ is neither taught nor known in it",[6] and placed it in his Antilegomena. John Calvin believed the book to be canonical, yet it was the only New Testament book on which he did not write a commentary.[7]

In the 4th century, Gregory of Nazianzus and other bishops argued against including this book in the New Testament canon, chiefly because of the difficulties of interpreting it and the danger for abuse. Christians in Syria also reject it because of the Montanists' heavy reliance on it. In the 9th century, it was included with the Apocalypse of Peter among "disputed" books in the Stichometry of St. Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople. In the end it was included in the accepted canon, although it remains the only book of the New Testament that is not read within the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. "

And Corvus is doing what thousands (though few as profitably as Jenkins and LaHaye) have done: place the empty symbols of the Apocalypse over the events of the day and one's own inclinations. I seem to remember a general in Dostoevsky's The Idiot pontificating how the "Star that is wormwood" is the European railway system, and by this we can know him to be a true idiot, unlike the unworldly Prince Mishkin..
It's almost, almost, worth having this mad if inspired (but not the in religious way) work of free form hallucination in the Bible, if only to lead to William Blake, who gets a last word:

"The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine,
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;
Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.
Socrates taught what Meletus
Loath'd as a nation's bitterest curse,
And Caiaphas was in his own mind
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white."- from The Evelasting Gospel

[litbrit]

(italics fixed)

Mr. Bill--Dickens, and now Blake?

Be still, litbrit's beating heart!

[litbrit]

Umm, apparently not fixed.

[BruceMcF]

But it was rendered as 616 in some early copies of the Book of Revelation ... so was it upgraded to 666 because of the "repeat something three times" habit, or did it start out that way, and if so, why would it slip to 616?

[Stephen]

Bruce,

There's really only one manuscript with 616, and ISTM that it's probably a typo - well, not a typeo, but you know what I mean - since the characters that represent 1 and 6 aren't that dissimilar. Maybe that's why the manuscript was found in an ancient garbage dump and not preserved in caves near the Dead Sea or something.