666 Question (Martin)
Phipps, John Phipps@info.pmeh.uiowa.edu
Fri, 9 Jan 1998 09:39:27 -0600 (00884381967, F28C10F306F4D011A8B40000C041A1F411E9DA@info.pmeh.uiowa.edu)
Hey Martin,
This was posted back in November by Joseph Crea, I'm forwarding it back
to the list for you.
> Hello, John!
>
> At 04:21 PM 11/25/97 +0000, you wrote:
> >Since we are talking about it, maybe one of you folks knows about
> this:
> >
> >A few years back, I read on a usenet group that not all mss have 666
> as
> >the beast's number. The individual claimed (I think) 616 appeared
> >sometimes. The interesting thing was that this person said that
> there
> >are two ways to spell Nero Cesar, one of which added up to 666, but
> the
> >other one added up to 616. Pretty neat. Does anyone know whether
> 616
> >does really appear in some manuscripts? Does anyone have a book or
> >journal article recommendation on the subject?
>
>
> See the article on "Six Hundred Sixty-six" in __The Oxford
> Companion to
> the Bible__ where the author, David H. van Daalen writes: [ in the
> interests
> of accurately reproducing my quoted text, I'm taking the liberty of
> representing long vowels by the doubling of the appropriate letter --
> thus a
> "long e" would be represented as "ee"]
>
> "The number was arrived at by presenting Nero's Greek name Kaisar
> Neroon
> in Hebrew letters which also function as numbers: qsr nrwn; q = 60, s
> =
> 100, r = 200, n = 50, w = 6, so qsr nrwn adds up to 666. (Some
> western
> manuscripts read "six hundred sixteen"; the scribes possibly did not
> understand John's usage of the Greek kaisar theos, the "god-emperor",
> which
> would add up to 616 using the Greek letters as numerals; but it is
> more
> likely that they simply dropped the final n: qsr nrw for Kaisar
> Neroo,
> making 616."
>
<snip>
> Joseph Crea
> <Joseph.Crea@worldnet.att.net>
>