A few years ago, I was in Ireland for a couple of weeks. Just after Sunday lunch I was watching a programnme on Irish TV that caught my interest. It did so for two reasons. The programme was about Mary Magdalene, and given the nature of Catholicism in Ireland, I was surprised by the openness of the programme, which detailed how Mary Magdalene had in fact been the most important of the Apostles, closest to Jesus and who as a result had been carved up by the other Apostles in the political jostling after Jesus' death. This included the actions of their followers who in writing the New Testament deliberately confused Mary Magdalene with Mary the prostitute, an act which apparently the Catholic Church has only fairly recently apologised for. The second reason it caught my interest was that, like many other people, I enjoy a good mystery, and these kinds of historical revelations seem to hold our attention, which is why 40 years on conspiracy theories still abound over the assassination of JFK. Theories surrounding Jesus and Mary Magdalene abound. There have been documentaries detailing their supposed marriage, that Mary gave birth to a child after having gone to live in France and that the Holy Grail protected by the Templars is not in fact the Holy Grial San Greal but Royal Blood - Sang Real. Its the stuff of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code"
According to Jonathan Miller in his series on disbelief, humans seem to have a need for such a belief in something beyond what can be easily explained by material facts. He argued that such beliefs and mysteries preceded religion and cannot be explained simply in terms of trying to understand events with inadequate tools, but that such phenomena seem to be built into the human psyche, hardwired into our brains.
Such mysteries, conspiracy theories etc. continue to abound and provide lucrative earnings for authors and publishers. Mostly they are pretty harmless, sometiems they may have a particualr purpose e.g. the US definitely encouraged belief in UFO's to cover its own high tech military experiements, but when coupled with religion such things can have a powerful and often reactionary effect.
In order to debunk at least one of these religious mysteries, which is a fundamental part of Judaeo-Christian religion, but also the basis of many modern occult thrillers (when I told someone at work a few years ago that when I watched The exorcist it made me laugh because it was so ridiculous and so bad, they said "But would you have laughed if you'd known it was based on a true story", which just made me laugh even more.) the Revelation of John, I thought it would be useful to give Engels explanation of the Revelation as contained in his "On the History of Early Christianity." Engels explains the numerology of 666, and despite the fact that these explanations have been known for a long time, few people are actually aware of them, which is why filmmakers can continue to make films about the coming of the antichrist, and provide all kinds of possible interpretations of the Revelation. Numerology was big in early Christian times, it features in the occult novels of Dennis Wheatley too, and many of the more successful examples of the genre, whilst not being based on numerology as such, are based on numbers and codes for example the Da Vinci Code, Bible Code etc. This probably reflects our interest in numbers too which have a similar kind of mystery to them - magic squares etc.
As Engels points out the treatment of John and his Revelation is similar to the treatment of Mary Magdalene. We are led to believe that the John providing the Revelation is John the Apostle, but in fact he is not. The authors of the Bible created the confusion deliberately in order to give this John greater clout. Anyway here is Engels explanation.
"For the interpretation of these prophecies, as far as they refer to events of that time, we are indebted to German criticism, particularly Ewald, Lücke and Ferdinand Benary. It has been made accessible to non-theologians by Renan. We have already seen that Babylon, the Great Whore, stands for Rome, the city of seven hills. We are told in Chapter XVII, 9-11, about the beast on which she sits that:
The seven heads" of the beast "are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even. he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.
According to this the beast is Roman world domination, represented by seven caesars in succession, one of them having been mortally wounded and no longer reigning, but he will be healed and will return. It will be given unto him as the eighth to establish the kingdom of blasphemy and defiance of God. It will be given unto him
...to make war with the saints and to overcome them.... And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb.... And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (XII, 7-18.)
We merely note that boycott is mentioned here as one of the measures to be applied against the Christians by the Roman Empire -- and is therefore patently an invention of the devil -- and pass on to the question who this Roman emperor is who has reigned once before, was wounded to death and removed but will return as the eighth in the series in the role of Antichrist.
Taking Augustus as the first we have: 2. Tiberius, 3. Caligula, 4. Claudius, 5. Nero, 6. Galba. "Five are fallen, and one is." Hence, Nero is already fallen and Galba is. Galba ruled from June 9, 68 to January 15, 69. But immediately after he ascended the throne the legions of the Rhine revolted under Vitellius while other generals prepared military risings in other provinces. In Rome itself the praetorians rose, killed Galba and proclaimed Otho emperor.
From this we see that our Revelation was written under Galba. Probably towards the end of his rule. Or, at the latest, during the three months (up to April 15, 69) of the rule of Otho, "the seventh." But who is the eighth, who was and is not? That we learn from the number 666.
Among the Semites -- Chaldeans and Jews -- there was at the time a kind of magic based on the double meaning of letters. As about 300 years before our era Hebrew letters were also used as symbols for numbers: a=l, b=2, g=3, d=4, etc. The cabbala diviners added up the value of each letter of a name and sought from the sum to prophesy the future of the one who bore the name, e.g., by forming words or combinations of words of equal value. Secret words and the like were also expressed in this language of numbers. This art was given the Greek name gematriah, geometry; the Chaldeans, who pursued this as a business and were called mathematici by Tacitus, were later expelled from Rome under Claudius and again under Vitellius, presumably for "serious disorders."
It was by means of this mathematics that our number 666 appeared. It is a disguise for the name of one of the first five caesars. But besides the number 666, Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, knew another reading -- 616, which, at all events, appeared at a time when the number puzzle was still widely known. The proof of the solution will be if it holds good for both numbers.
This solution was given by Ferdinand Benary of Berlin. The name is Nero. The number is based on xxx xxxx Neron Kesar, the Hebrew spelling of the Greek Nerôn Kaisar, Emperor Nero, authenticated by means of the Talmud and Palmyrian inscriptions. This inscription was found on coins of Nero's time minted in the eastern half of the empire. And so -- n (nun)=50; r (resh)=200; v (vau) for o=6; n (nun)=50; k (kaph)=100; s (samech)=60; r (resh)=200. Total 666. If we take as a basis the Latin spelling Nero Caesar the second nun=50 disappears and we get 666 - 50 = 616, which is Irenaeus's reading.
In fact the whole Roman Empire suddenly broke into confusion in Galba's time. Galba himself marched on Rome at the head of the Spanish and Gallic legions to overthrow Nero, who fled and ordered an emancipated slave to kill him. But not only the praetorians in Rome plotted against Galba, the supreme commanders in the provinces did too; new pretendants to the throne appeared everywhere and prepared to march on Rome with their legions. The empire seemed doomed to civil war, its dissolution appeared imminent. Over and above all this the rumour spread, especially in the East, that Nero had not been killed but only wounded, that he had fled to the Parthians and was about to advance with an army over the Euphrates to begin another and more bloody rule of terror. Achaia and Asia in particular were terrified by such reports. And at the very time at which the Revelation must have been written there appeared a false Nero who settled with a fairly considerable number of supporters not far from Patmos and Asia Minor on the island of Kytnos in the Aegean Sea (now called Thermia), until he was killed while Otho still reigned. What was there to be astonished at in the fact that among the Christians, against whom Nero had begun the first great persecution, the view spread that he would return as the Antichrist and that his return and the intensified attempt at a bloody suppression of the new sect that it would involve would be the sign and prelude of the return of Christ, of the great victorious struggle against the powers of hell, of the thousand year kingdom "shortly" to be established, the confident expectation of which inspired the martyrs to go joyfully to death?
Christian and Christian-influenced literature in the first two centuries gives sufficient indication that the secret of the number 666 was then known to many. Irenaeus no longer knew it, but on the other hand he and many others up to the end of the third century also knew that the returning Nero was meant by the beast of the Apocalypse. This trace is then lost and the work which interests us is fantastically interpreted by religious-minded future-tellers; I myself as a child knew old people who, following the example of old Johann Albrecht Bengel, expected the end of the world and the last judgment in the year 1836. The prophecy was fulfilled, and to the very year. The victim of the last judgment, however, was not the sinful world, but the pious interpreters of the Revelation themselves. For in 1836 F. Benary provided the key to the number 666 and thus put a torturous end to all the prophetical calculations, that new gematriah."
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