So then, guys, gals, and non-binary pals, let’s figure it out – who could the mysterious “Beast” be? “So it's almost as if the text is saying, ‘I’m gonna give you a riddle, you need to calculate the number of the Beast.’” “Now what this means is that every word also has a numerical value,” explained Numberphile’s Pete Watts in the channel’s “666” video. Remember that this was well before the rise of Hindu-Arabic numerals, and contemporary readers would have been used to a range of alphabetical representations of numbers. 'Much of what we find in the Book of Revelation couched in the fantastic imagery are descriptions of events that for John were very close - the war in Jerusalem, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Roman Emperors who were ruling at the time.”Īnd it’s that last example that’s key to understanding the importance of the number 666 – well, that and a bit of numerology. That would be 60 years after the death of Jesus, and the eruption of Vesuvius happened in the year 79,' she said. 'Most people think John was writing at about the year 90 in the first century. There’s a great scarlet beast mentioned that has seven heads and seven crowns, for instance – not something you’re likely to see in the real world, but a thinly-veiled reference to the dynasty of Julius Caesar, Pagels explained. When looked at through that lens, the text starts looking a lot less like a vision of the literal apocalypse and a bit more like the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a therapeutic writing class.

“It comes out of that war,” Pagels said, “and it comes out of people who have been destroyed by war.” And there’s a good reason for that: 'it's wartime literature,' Pagels said, written by “John” – likely a refugee from Jerusalem, which had recently been destroyed by the Romans in the First Jewish-Roman War.

What is the meaning of 666