Fear of the Number 666

Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, one of the four great uncial codices, spells the same figure out in full. Tyconius's Latin version gives DCXVI, and an ancient Armenian version agrees. Some scholars now regard 616 as the original number, which leaves the most feared number in Western culture as possibly a copying variant of a different one.

Why Irenaeus kept the larger number

The variant is not a modern discovery. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, knew about the 616 reading and did not adopt it, reporting instead that people who had spoken with the Apostle John face to face said the number was 666. In the 380s Jerome retained 666 while correcting the existing Latin New Testament.

Paul Louis Couchoud offered two reasons why 666 might have replaced 616. Gustav Adolf Deissmann proposed the pull of 888, which is what the Greek letters of Jesus add up to. The other is that 666 is a triangular number, the sum of every number from one to thirty-six.

Why the variant exists

The broad consensus in contemporary scholarship is that the number refers to the Roman emperor Nero, by gematria, in which every letter carries a numeric value.

Nero Caesar written in the Hebrew alphabet is NRON QSR, and the standard values, 50, 200, 6, 50, 100, 60 and 200, total 666. The Latin form of the name drops the second nun, giving NRO QSR, which totals 616.

That is the explanation and the evidence at once. Two spellings of one name produce the two numbers in the manuscript tradition, which is close to proof that the name is Nero and that the variant arose from which form a scribe had in front of him. A scroll in Aramaic recovered from Wadi Murabba'at, and dated to the second year of Nero's reign, names him with that title attached.

What the dating problem is

On the preterist account Revelation predates the Temple's destruction, and it was Nero who sent John to Patmos. Most scholars hold it was written after Nero's suicide in AD 68, and one Catholic encyclopedia dates it to the latter part of Domitian's reign, probably AD 95 or 96.

That gap of some thirty years is used to argue Nero cannot be the referent. Two answers exist in the material. The Nero Redivivus legend held that Nero had not really died and would return, a belief widespread in the eastern provinces to which Revelation was principally addressed. Suetonius records that court astrologers had predicted Nero's fall and a subsequent power in the east, and at least three false claimants presented themselves as Nero returned. Separately, it has been suggested that the reference to Nero was a code implying Domitian without naming him, whose style of rule resembled Nero's and who taxed Asia heavily.

Which interpretations did not survive

Three readings were argued and none held:

• Maometis, described by scholars as a dubiously obscure Latinisation of a Greek transliteration of Muhammad
• the Antichrist as king of a restored Israel
• Aleister Crowley, who identified himself as the Beast

Gematria was applied to Maometis first. Its most prominent advocate was Walmesley, Roman Catholic bishop of Rama, with Gilbert Genebrard, François Feuardent and René Massuet arguing the same case.

Thom rejected it in 1923 on a straightforward philological ground: of the seven ways Muhammad's name is written in Euthymius and the Byzantine historians, not one is the spelling in question, and none of the spellings actually used totals 666. Setton's criticism in 1992 sets it inside a tradition of defamation, in which it was asserted that Muhammad died in 666 rather than 632, and 666 was also used for the period Muslims would hold the land.

Fr. Sloet proposed the Antichrist as king of a restored Israel, noting that the Hebrew for the phrase reaches 666 only if a medial kaph is used where a final kaph belongs. Aleister Crowley, who founded Thelema, went the other way and identified himself as the Beast, taking the name To Mega Therion.

What the word for it is

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is thirty-three letters spelling out six hundred and sixty-six in Greek and attaching phobia to it. No clinical literature exists under it, no prevalence figure and no study. The other numbered fears here, thirteen and four, at least have populations. Nothing in the material identifies a coiner or a date.

A term built by transliterating a number is a list-maker's construction rather than a clinician's, and the correct form for the older reading would have to be built from scratch. There is no word at all for a fear of 616.