The Number of the Beast

In the earlier books I set out the reasons why God allowed these things to be made, and I showed that all of them were created for the good of the human nature that is being saved. They ripen for immortality what has its own free will and its own power, and they prepare it and make it fitter to be subject to God forever. So the creation is fitted to what man needs; man was not made for the sake of the creation, but the creation for the sake of man. [a]

As for the nations who never lifted their own eyes to heaven, never thanked their Maker, and never wanted to look at the light of truth, but stayed like blind mice hidden in the depths of ignorance — the word rightly counts them “like waste water from a sink, and like the tipping of a scale — in fact, as nothing.” They are useful and of service to the righteous only in the way that stubble helps the wheat grow, and its straw, once it is burned, serves for working gold. And so, when at the end the church is suddenly caught up out of all this, it is said, “There will be trouble such as there has not been since the beginning, and never will be again.” For this is the last contest of the righteous, and when they win it they are crowned with a life beyond decay.

So in this beast, when he comes, there is a summing-up of every kind of wickedness and every deceit, so that all the power of the apostasy may pour into him and be shut up in him, and be sent into the furnace of fire. It is fitting, then, that his name should hold the number six hundred and sixty-six, since he sums up in himself the whole mixture of wickedness that took place before the flood, when the angels fell away. For Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came on the earth and swept away the rebel world, on account of that most notorious generation that lived in Noah’s day. And Antichrist also sums up every error of the idols men have invented since the flood, along with the killing of the prophets and the cutting down of the righteous. For the image Nebuchadnezzar set up stood sixty cubits high and six cubits wide — about ninety feet by nine — and because Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael would not worship it, they were thrown into a furnace of fire. What happened to them pointed ahead, like a prophecy, to the fury against the righteous that will rise up toward the end. The image, taken as a whole, was a figure of this man’s coming, decreeing that he alone, beyond any question, was to be worshiped by everyone. So Noah’s six hundred years — the years of the flood that came because of the apostasy — and the count of the cubits of the image for which those righteous men were sent into the fiery furnace, together point to the number of the name of the man in whom the whole apostasy of six thousand years is gathered up, and injustice, and wickedness, and false prophecy, and deception. And it is for these things that a flood of fire will come as well.

That, then, is how matters stand. This number is found in all the sound and ancient copies, and the men who saw John face to face bear witness to it. Reason brings us to the same place: the number of the beast’s name, worked out the Greek way by the value of the letters in it, comes to six hundred and sixty-six — the tens equal in count to the hundreds, and the hundreds equal in count to the units. The figure six is held to all the way through, and that points to the summings-up of the apostasy in its whole extent: what happened at the beginning, what happened in the stretches between, and what will happen at the end. [h]

Given all this, I do not know how some have gone wrong by following the way people ordinarily talk, and have spoiled the middle figure of the name, taking fifty off it, so that instead of six tens they make it only one. I am inclined to think this happened through a copyist’s mistake, as often happens, since numbers are written with letters too: the Greek letter that stands for sixty was easily opened out into the Greek iota. Others then took this reading over without examining it. Some, in their simplicity, used the number with only one ten in it, on their own authority; and some, out of inexperience, went so far as to hunt for a name that would contain the mistaken and false number. For those who did this in simplicity and meant no harm, we may fairly suppose that God will pardon them. But those who, to show off, lay it down as certain that names containing the false number are to be accepted, and claim that the name they hit on themselves is the name of the one who is coming — such people will not get away without loss, because they have led both themselves and those who trusted them into error. To begin with, it is loss simply to stray from the truth and to imagine a thing is so when it is not. And then, since no light punishment is coming on anyone who adds anything to Scripture or takes anything away, that is the sentence such a person must fall under. There is another danger too, and no small one, waiting for people who wrongly take it that they know Antichrist’s name. If they settle on one number and he comes with another, they will be carried off by him easily enough, since they will suppose he is not the one they were expecting and were told to watch out for.

These men ought to learn how matters really stand, then, and go back to the true number of the name, so as not to be counted among the false prophets. Knowing the sure number Scripture gives — six hundred and sixty-six — let them wait, first, for the kingdom to be divided into ten; and then, when those kings are reigning and beginning to put their affairs in order and build up their kingdom, let them recognize that the one who comes claiming the kingdom for himself, terrifying the men just spoken of, and carrying a name that contains that number, is truly the abomination that makes desolate. The apostle says as much: “When they say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction will come on them.” And Jeremiah does not merely point out how suddenly he comes; he even shows the tribe he will come from, when he says: “We will hear the sound of his swift horses from Dan; the whole earth will be shaken by the sound of the neighing of his galloping horses. He will come and devour the earth and everything in it, the city too, and those who live in it.” This is also the reason why that tribe is not counted in the Revelation among the tribes that are saved.

It is surer, then, and less risky, to wait for the prophecy to be fulfilled than to guess and cast about for whatever names turn up. Many names can be found that hold the number in question, and after all that the same question is still left unanswered: if many names are found with this number, which of them will the coming man bear? I do not say this because names with that number are scarce, but out of the fear of God and out of zeal for the truth. The name Euanthas (ΕΥΑΝΘΑΣ) contains the required number, but I make no claim about it. Lateinos (ΛΑΤΕΙΝΟΣ) also has the number six hundred and sixty-six, and it is a very likely answer, since this is the name of the last kingdom — the Latins are the ones who hold power now. Still, I will not boast over that. Teitan too — ΤΕΙΤΑΝ, with the first syllable written with the two Greek vowels epsilon and iota — is, of all the names in use among us, rather more deserving of belief. It holds the predicted number in itself; it is made of six letters, three to each syllable; and the word is ancient and out of everyday use. Among our kings we find none who bears the name Titan, and none of the idols worshiped in public among the Greeks and the foreign nations carries it either. Many people count the name divine, so much so that even the sun is called “Titan” by those who now hold the rule. The word also has a look of vengeance about it, of someone dealing out deserved punishment — and Antichrist does pretend that he is avenging the oppressed. Besides that, it is an old name, a believable one, with a royal dignity to it, and on top of all that, a tyrant’s name. Since the name “Titan” has so much to recommend it, there is a strong likelihood that out of the many names put forward we may conclude that the one who is coming will perhaps be called “Titan.” All the same, we will not run the risk of stating Antichrist’s name for certain. If it were necessary for his name to be plainly disclosed at this present time, it would have been announced by the man who saw the vision. For that vision was not seen very long ago, but almost in our own day, toward the end of Domitian’s reign.

He does give the number of the name now, so that when this man comes we may keep clear of him, knowing who he is. The name itself is held back, because it is not worth the Holy Spirit’s proclaiming. For if the Spirit had declared it, Antichrist might perhaps have lasted a long time. As it is — since “he was, and is not, and will come up out of the abyss and go to his destruction,” as one who has no existence — his name has not been declared either, for the name of a thing that does not exist is not proclaimed. But when this Antichrist has laid everything in this world waste, he will reign three years and six months and take his seat in the temple at Jerusalem. Then the Lord will come from heaven on the clouds, in the glory of the Father, and will send this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire, while for the righteous he brings in the times of the kingdom — that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day — and gives back to Abraham the inheritance that was promised him. Of that kingdom the Lord said, “Many will come from the east and from the west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.”

Again: some who are counted among those who believe rightly go past the plan already laid down for the lifting up of the righteous, and do not know the ways in which the righteous are trained beforehand for a life beyond decay; and so they end up holding the opinions of the heretics. For the heretics look down on the handiwork of God and will not allow that their flesh is saved. They treat God’s promise with contempt, and in the notions they form they go clean past God himself, claiming that the moment they die they will pass above the heavens and above the Demiurge and go to the Mother — Achamoth — or to the Father they have made up. [s]

So when people rule out a resurrection that takes in the whole man, and, so far as it lies with them, remove it from the middle of everything, why should anyone be surprised that they know nothing about how the resurrection works either? They will not see that if things are as they say, then the Lord himself, the one they claim to believe in, did not rise on the third day. He must have gone straight up on high the moment he breathed his last on the cross, leaving his body to the earth. But in fact he stayed three days in the place where the dead were, as the prophet says of him: “And the Lord remembered his dead holy ones, who had fallen asleep before this in the land of burial; and he went down to them to rescue them and save them.” And the Lord himself says, “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth.” Then the apostle says, “But when he went up, what does it mean except that he also went down into the lower parts of the earth?” And this is what David says, prophesying of him: “And you have rescued my soul from the lowest part of Hades.” And when he had risen on the third day he said to Mary, who was the first to see him and worship him, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet gone up to the Father. But go to the disciples and tell them, I am going up to my Father and your Father.”

If, then, the Lord kept the law of the dead so that he might become the firstborn from the dead, and waited until the third day “in the lower parts of the earth,” and then rose in the flesh — so that he even showed his disciples the mark of the nails — and only after that went up to the Father: how are these men not put to shame, who claim that “the lower parts” means this world of ours, and that their inner man leaves the body here and climbs to the place above the heavens? For the Lord “went away in the midst of the shadow of death,” where the souls of the dead were; and afterward he rose in the body, and after the resurrection was taken up. So it is plain that the souls of his disciples too — the people for whose sake the Lord went through all this — will go away into the unseen place assigned to them by God, and will stay there until the resurrection, waiting for it. Then they will receive their bodies and rise whole, that is, bodily, just as the Lord rose, and so come into the presence of God. “For no disciple is above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” So our teacher did not go off at once and take flight, but waited for the time of his resurrection that the Father had set — the time that had also been shown beforehand through Jonah — and after three days rose again and was taken up. In the same way we too ought to wait for the time of our resurrection, set by God and foretold by the prophets, and so rise, and be taken up, as many of us as the Lord counts worthy of it.