Today there are literally hundreds of books and pamphlets that are about the Antichrist and the number 666. And in fact, there are thousands of Christians who are almost paranoid about accidentally carrying or using the number 666. I remember not too long ago when a lot of Christians thought that barcodes maybe had something to do with the number 666. At that time, my wife and I were managing a nonprofit Christian bookstore.
This was in the mid-80s, and we were there when Christian books first started coming out with barcodes on the back cover. Now, we didn't have the sophistication at that time to scan anything. Like I say, it was just somewhat new that barcodes were on Christian books and music, things like that. But like I say, we weren't even set up yet to be able to scan them. But I remember a lot of people, they would pick up the book and almost drop it, you know, back on the shelf when they saw a barcode on the back of it.
And before it was barcodes, you had credit cards that began being introduced in the 60s and became much more prominent in the 1970s. And again, a lot of Christians, oh, these are something to do with the Antichrist. Well, what is all this paranoia even about in the first place? Well, it all comes from a passage in the book of Revelation and a passage that is so misinterpreted today that it's almost laughable when you understand what that passage meant to John's original readers.
I want to just read to you the passage very quick. It's Revelation 13, verses 16 to 18. And it's talking about the beast. It says, "He causes all both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man.
His number is 666." It's interesting there that the writer says, "Let him who has understanding calculate the number." What we have today are lots of people who don't have understanding, who are busy calculating the number and making money by selling books about it. Now, I don't have any particular wisdom in this regard either. This isn't a message about, "Ah, I figured all of this out." This is a message about what John's hearers understood John to be saying.
Now, I'm of the very firm opinion that the Christians who lived at the time when the New Testament was written were in a far better position to understand what the Bible writers, the New Testament writers, were saying than we are today. Now, the Bible was written for people in all centuries, and if we never did any historical research, never read a commentary or anything else, all of the essentials for salvation are right there in the scriptures and can be understood by anybody in any age.
So I'm not suggesting that, oh, without historical research, we're not going to be able to understand the basics of the scriptures and somehow we could maybe miss out on salvation. No, that's not there. But I think sometimes we can be so messed up by literature that's out today and things that are preached from the pulpit that our eyes are blinded to what's in the scriptures.
And there again, I think the writings of the early Christians are very valuable because they were written before so many of these doctrinal controversies and before there was a multiplication of sects and denominations and all of that. But even though the Bible was written for all centuries, the point is that it was inspired and it was written at a particular point in time in the history of mankind. And that's what we know today as the first century AD.
And it was written in a particular language, and that was Greek. I'm talking about the New Testament. So if we're going to properly understand what was written there on all of the details, and again, I'm not talking about saying that we can't understand the basic gospel of Jesus Christ, the basic message of salvation without doing some historical research. I think all of that is quite clear.
But if we're going to understand everything in the New Testament the way the writers intended it to be understood, then we need to get back into their minds, into the minds of first-century Greek-speaking people, because that's how the gospel message was framed, it's how it was written. And the ones who, like Paul, who wrote so much of the New Testament, they were addressing it to people who spoke Greek, who lived in their Mediterranean culture.
And there's probably no subject that better illustrates the need to do that than this matter of the number 666. Because as soon as I read what the early Christians were saying about it, I realized that what I had been told all of my life was totally absurd because I was hearing it from people who never had done any historical research. And so they were putting a modern-day interpretation, trying to make sense of it using our culture and our English language when it meant something so different to people back then.
And like I say, today you have all these books that invariably portray the message that somehow the mark of the beast has something to do with currency or mediums of exchange. And nobody in the early church thought that. And yet it's almost a given.
I mean, flip through a book in almost any Christian bookstore on the subject, and the first thing is, "Aha, okay, this has something to do with how, because it says you can't buy or sell something." Well, there were a lot of other impediments to buying and selling in those days than just currency that perhaps you were not allowed to buy and sell if you didn't have a statue of a god in front of your store or you refused to burn incense to a particular god or something like that.
In other words, in their mind, they wouldn't necessarily think, "Oh, this is something to do with currency," when they read what John was saying there, what had been revealed to him. Now, I want to first talk about just the number itself, 666. And you may have noted that each time I say that number, I'm very careful to say 666, not 666. Actually, most of my life, I've always said 666, and that's how most of us say it today.
And when we do that, right there, we reveal that we're in a whole different mind of thought than it was John who wrote the book and his hearers who first read that. And that's because, number one, we speak the English language. And number two, we've all been raised being taught arithmetic as part of the decimal system. The decimal system, in it, you only need 10 numerals or integers if you include 0. And then to make 10, you just add a 0 after the number, and that moves it up 10.
If you add 2 0s, it moves it up to 100. 3 moves it up to 1000, and like that. But see, that was not the number system that was around when the book of Revelation was written. In fact, our system of decimals and using a 0 was not even invented until the 7th century, and that was over in India. And it made its way to the west through the Arabs, and it took quite a long time for that. So back there in the first century, no one even had a concept, let alone would think of things this way.
They didn't even have a mental concept of decimal places or a concept of a 0. That just wasn't in their way of thinking. And so instead of having the numbers that the Arabic numbers that we all know, they had what we call Roman numerals. But you didn't write 666 by using decimal places, having a 6 and then move it over another 6 and move it over another 6. In other words, if you were a Roman writing a number, the number 666, you didn't put, you know, a V and an I, what we call a V and I, was 6.
Well, you didn't just then repeat that three times, and that gave you 666. No, you would have to move to other parts of their alphabet. And it was very similar in Greek. Basically, the Roman system had been borrowed from the Greek. So the first thing we have to do is just totally purge your mind.
I'm going to ask you for the next hour, just if you can, just flush everything out of your mind that you've ever heard on this subject, unless you're one of the few very privileged ones who happen to be given a correct explanation on this at some time in your life. A few people have come up and told me, "You know, David, what you said, that's what, you know, I heard, you know, somewhere. I read that somewhere." I mean, this isn't something I've invented. I mean, it's out there for everyone to see.
So I would expect that it would be somewhere in books. But like, say, surprisingly, as so easy as it is to find this out, there's really no excuse that there should be any misinformation being spread. But the sad truth is that at least 95% of the information that is spread about 666 is based on misinformation instead of truth. Now, what I want to do is explain to you the Greek number system, and it's fairly easy. The first letter of the alphabet, alpha, was also the number one.
So if you wanted to write a one, you would write an alpha, which looks like our A, or from where we got our A. All right, the second letter, beta, which in the capital form looks like our capital B, was a 2. And you just go on down their alphabet until you reach 10, which is the Greek letter iota, or sometimes as we're inclined to say in English, iota, i-o-t-a, looks like a capital I. And that was their 10.
Now, maybe they had a little concept of a decimal system in that once you reach 10, you go to 11 by using a 10 and a 1. So there was some concept there, but they didn't have the concept of 0, and so they really couldn't think in decimal places like we do. So once you reach 10, which is iota, then you go to their next letter, kappa, is a 20. In other words, you don't go from 10 to 11 as you're going up the alphabet.
For one thing, see, you would, as I think you could see, you're going to run through their alphabet, and you'd only have, I don't know how many letters were in their alphabet, maybe 22, 20, something like that, and then that would be it. You couldn't make any more numbers. So like I say, there was sort of the beginning maybe of the decimal system in their thinking in that once you got to 10, then you made 11 by adding a 1 to it, adding you got to 12 by taking 10 iota and adding a 2 to it, which was beta, and so on.
And that's exactly how Spanish, if you happen to know Spanish, how that works, that 10 is 10, but if you're going to say 16, for example, you say 10 and 6. So that thought is still there in some languages because Spanish is a direct derivative of Latin. But like I say, in English, there isn't any such noticeable thinking that way.
Okay, so we said that K or Kappa was their 20, and then their next letter is their alphabet represented a 30, their next one represented a 40, all the way up to you get to 100, which is their letter Rho, which would be R, but it looks like our capital P. All right, then the next letter after that, Sigma or S, would be 200, and Tau would be 300, and so on. So that's, I could say, how they were able to build their number.
Now, one thing that might throw you off just a little bit is the fact that this system of using letters of the alphabet for numbers was invented several centuries before Christ, and it's based on the Greek alphabet that was being used around 500 BC. And the alphabet at that time, the Greek alphabet, included three letters that were no longer in use by the time you got to New Testament times. And one of these was the letter Digamma, which represented 6, and it's written like a capital F.
Now, you might already be realizing in your mind that if each letter of the alphabet also stood for a certain number, then any word, I mean, you could go pick up a page of the New Testament, and every single word there would also be a number. So you don't know if you're reading a list of numbers or a list of words other than the context, I think, would be rather obvious. And maybe it'd be more correct to say that every word in the Greek language then had a numerical equivalent.
Let's just say it's one of the simple words, Abba, perhaps the first word that a Greek child would have used, which is alpha, beta, beta, alpha. Okay, what would that be a number? Okay, they look at it, a 1, a 2, a 2, and a 1. Now, if you're like me, right away you revert back to our modern way of thinking and say, "Oh, 1221 or 1221." No, no, see, that's not how they thought in those kind of terms.
They would look at that, Abba, and say, "Okay, that's a 1 plus a 2, that makes 3, plus a 2, that makes 5, plus a 1, that makes 6." So the numerical equivalent of Abba is not 1221 or 1221, it's 6. You could change the letters around, make it Baba, B-A-B-A, Beta, Alpha, Beta, Alpha. It's still 6, see, because the order doesn't mean anything. Now, in the decimal system that we're used to, the order means everything. A 6 followed by two zeros is very different from two zeros followed by a 6. One is 6, one is 600.
Now, the other thing I mentioned earlier about the English language that also throws us a curve in that it is very normal, I say, when we look at that number, 666, most of us say 666. And that's a perfectly legitimate way to express yourself in English. Other languages don't express themselves that way. And ones who do have often borrowed that kind of thinking from English. I know originally in Spanish, you would not say 666. If you said that, they would not know what you were talking about. You would say 666.
Like when they say the year, when they're giving a date, 1997, I mean, see, for us, we say 1997. We just look at that and we put the two first two numbers together, 1 and 9, we say 19, and we take the last two, 92. Well, see, in Spanish, you don't say 1992. Or like I say, those who would understand you is because they've been influenced by English. But the correct way to say that, you'd say 1992, which has always made it for me awkward or hard to express dates in Spanish.
It's a whole lot easier now that we've passed the year 2000. I'm very glad for that. Okay, are you with me so far? We said every word then in Greek also has a numeric equivalent. And so you could take any word and say, "Well, that word equals this number." Likewise then, anybody's name was also a number. So when John speaks about the number of the beast's name, he's saying that when you treat each letter in the beast's name as a number, those numbers will add up to 666. Again, not 666, but 666.
In other words, you can't take the letter for 6, which was Digamma, and then write it three times, and that would equal the number of the beast. Now, in their minds, if you did that, you would be saying 18. The number of that would be, if you have Digamma, Digamma, Digamma, they'd say, "Oh, that's 18." I mean, that's how they would think of that. Now, to arrive at this 666, again, my first thought would have been, "Okay, what is the Greek letter for 600?" And it happens to be Chi. Okay, what's the letter for 60?
Well, it's their letter Z. And the letter for 6, I've already said, is Digamma. So you have Chi, Z, Digamma, or Zai, maybe pronouncing that wrong, 666. That's how you would write the number if you were just wanting to express the number. And that also, you know, would add up to 666, but you're not limited to that, see? You could take the letter Tau, which is their letter for 300, and put it down twice, and then the letter for Z or Zai, and the one for 6, Digamma. And that would equal 666.
I mean, you see there would be thousands of possibilities because you could arrange a whole lot of numbers in various ways to come up to a value of 666. So see, when John's readers are reading this, the number of his name, see, this is how they're thinking. And so often I see that the explanations, the things that made sense to them back there, don't make a lot of sense today.
And so often explanations of scripture are more readily received when they make sense to our minds, even though they would make no sense to their minds living back then. And this is such a fallacy because, again, God didn't expect them to jump in their minds to the 21st century into America and figure out how we think today. Now, he revealed the message once for all to them in their culture, in their language.
And so we've got to put our minds back where they were if we're going to properly understand these fine points of the New Testament. So as I said, since they don't have a decimal system back there, there's a whole host of names that could add up to the number 666. I mean, you could take the letter Alpha and write it 666 times as somebody's name, ah, etc. And the number of that name would be 666. So you take the letter Beta, 333 times.
You could take the letter Gamma, which would be a 3, 111 times, and that would have an equivalent of 666. Of course, those wouldn't be real names, but hopefully you get the drift of what I'm saying. But now let's look at some real names. I want to read to you a passage from Irenaeus, and it was this passage that when I read it, I suddenly realized, uh-oh, I've totally misunderstood this passage all of my life.
And when I went back to look at some commentaries and things, I realized it wasn't just me who was misunderstanding it, that it was a lot of people, and people were putting out some bad information. You find this in volume 1, page 559 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. And let's just say, well, okay, Irenaeus, when did he write? Well, it was around the year 170 or 180. You say, uh-huh, see, that was 70, 80 years later. Yes, it was after the book was written.
And it's easy to think that, okay, in 70 years, language culture would have gone through quite a lot of changes. If you go back 70 years from now, it gets you in the early 1930s. Well, radio was just coming along. You didn't have any computers. Homes generally weren't air-conditioned. Refrigerators were ice boxes with a chunk, a big block of ice to keep things cold. Television may have been invented, but it wasn't around in anyone's homes at that time.
And so many things, you know, the internet's things that are part of daily life for most people today, none of that was around back then. And with all of these changes in culture and means of transportation, the car was around in the early 30s, but certainly not quite like our cars today. Airplanes were around, but not the kind of airplanes that we know today, the big airliners or the military sort of planes and all of that. The world has just changed dramatically.
Our culture, our language has gone through a lot of change as a result. The word mouse, for example, in 1933, that would have meant one thing, a little animal that sometimes gets in your house. Well, today it would still mean that, but it could also mean something you move around on a computer in order to point or click on something on the screen. But see, it wasn't like that when you go back to the early centuries.
I mean, there was practically no change in society or the Greek language between the time when John wrote Revelation and the year 170. I mean, life went on just like it had been. That's the way life was for so long.
I mean, changes that we see in just, say, 20 years, major changes in the way we do things, that would maybe back in the before the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, changes like that that we would do in 20 years now would have been more like 500 to 1,000 years back then before you would have that much change. Okay, let me read now from Irenaeus. If there are many names found possessing this number, he's talking about 666, it will be asked, which of them will the coming man bear?
I do not say this because of a lack of names that contain the number of that name. Rather, I say it out of fear of God and zeal for the truth. For the name Evanthus contains the required number, but I make no allegation regarding it. Then also Latinus has the number. Titan too is rather worthy of prayer, for it has in itself the predicted number.
However, I would not incur the risk of dogmatically announcing the name of the Antichrist, for if it were necessary that his name should be distinctly revealed in this present time, it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision. Okay, so he's saying, okay, so what is the Antichrist's name? Well, as he points out, we don't know. God did not choose to reveal it, and yet he chose to reveal a lot of information about it.
So that when the Antichrist appeared, his people would have a clue to be aware that this is the Antichrist. Now, of course, we don't have any clue today if we are unwilling to do a little bit of digging into historical research and finding out what historically this passage meant. If we're going to impose 21st century American English thinking, superimpose it over the scriptures, then it's hopeless. We're not going to ever understand it.
Now, I want to just go over some of these names that Irenaeus ventured some guesses, and he made it clear, look, I'm not saying this is going to be the name. I'm just saying, hey, here's some possibilities. He, first of all, mentions, I'm pronouncing it in an English way, Evanthus, which in English is E-V-A-N-T-H-A-S. Okay, in Greek, though, this was Epsilon, which was a five, Upsilon, which was a 400, Alpha, which is a one, Nu, which was 50, Theta, which was nine, Alpha, which was one, and Sigma, which is 200.
You add all of those together, it adds up to 666. Okay, here's another one, Latinos. In English, it's L-A-T-E-I-N-O-S. Now, in Greek, it was Lambda, which was 30, Alpha, which is one, Tau, which is 300, Epsilon, which is five, Iota, which is ten, Nu, which was 50, Omicron, which was 70, and then Sigma, which is 200. That adds up to 666. And he mentions, I'm calling it Titan. In English, T-E-I-T-A-N. In Greek, you have Tau, 300, Epsilon, five, Iota, ten, Tau, another 300, Alpha, one, and Nu, 50. That adds up to 666.
So, as the early Christians, the New Testament Christians were understanding this, when the Antichrist or the beast appears, the letters of his name in Greek will add up to 666. This gets fairly interesting when we think of the possibilities. But we have one major problem today. We have to know what the Greek equivalent of a person's name is. And that's not too hard for Bible names or even for ancient names that were around, like Alexander, and that word is in the Bible too, in the New Testament.
But what do you do with a Chinese name or a Japanese name or any other name not related to Greek or Western culture? I don't know. I don't know. I have no doubt that this prophecy will be fulfilled just as the primitive church understood it. But it's possible that we won't have an easy time identifying the Antichrist, at least not in advance. It may well be like the prophecies about the Messiah.
To my knowledge, there was absolutely no one, I mean, zero, nobody whatsoever who correctly predicted what the Messiah would be like. I mean, you had all sorts of rabbis, famous teachers who settled on about the Messiah. You had various sects who were eagerly looking for the Messiah. But none of them, none of them understood in advance what he would be like.
But once the, and so when the Messiah came, many of them stumbled over him because they were expecting this triumphant military figure who would free Israel from its from her enemies. And then when Jesus comes along and says, well, no, he can't be the Messiah. But when Jesus opened the eyes of his disciples and revealed to them what had been written, then they realized, wow, all of this was in scripture, hundreds of prophecies that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and yet they had been hidden.
I mean, the Jews often recognized these passages as Messianic prophecies, but they were expecting a different kind of Messiah. Okay, well, so even though it's unlikely that we're going to guess in advance the name of the Antichrist, we have a little bit of fun with this. Where should we start? If you're like me, you're probably curious about your own name. What is its numerical equivalent? I've wondered what my name adds up to. And at first, I was a little hesitant to check.
It was a little bit scary, but I thought, well, I'm named after David, King David. It's unlikely that Antichrist would have the same name as this ancestor of Jesus. But anyway, so I added it up. David, you have Delta, which is four, Alpha, which is one. That gets us to five. Upsilon, which is 400, gets us to 405. Getting a little closer here. Epsilon, five. That gets us up to 410. And then Iota, which is 10, that gets us to 420. And then finally, Delta, which is only four. So my name adds up to 424. Whew!
Glad I'm off the hook there. Well, who else can we check? I've got a friend named Joseph. Let's check on that. In Greek, this would be Joseph. You've got Iota, 10, Omega, which is 800. So right there, we know that that can't be it because we're already over 666. Sigma, which is 200, that gets us to 1010. Zeta, which is 8, that gets us to 1018. And finally, phi or phi, which is their 500. So the name Joseph adds up to 1518, which again, is no surprise.
It would be hard to imagine that God would have had Jesus have a personally father who would have the name of the Antichrist. So this is kind of fun. Who else can we check out? How about our former President Clinton? Well, of course, as I was saying, it's a problem when we have a name that doesn't have an obvious Greek equivalent. But let's say we make it Greek by substituting a K for the first C. Then after that, everything else will fit the Greek alphabet.
Okay, we start with the Kappa, which is the equivalent of K in Greek, which is 20. Lambda is their 30, so that gives us 50. Iota, which is their 10, that gives us 60. Nu, which is their 50, gives us 110. Tau, which is 300, that gives us up to 410. We're getting a little close here. Omicron, which is 70, that gives us up to 480. And then Nu, which is 50, and we end at 530. So probably we can rule out President Clinton. Or maybe whatever the Greek equivalent of William is, maybe there would be something there.
But you can take it from there. And I think you can see the point. There's a lot of interesting possibilities. You can have a little bit of fun with it. But probably none of us are predicting in advance the beast before he comes. Now, I want to read to you a few more quotes from the early Christians on this subject. And then we'll move a little bit more to the significance. This next quote is from Hippolytus, written about the year 200. Find it in volume 5, page 215.
He says, "With respect to his name, it is not in our power to explain it exactly, not as the blessed John understood it and was instructed about it. Rather, we can only conjecture about it. For when the Antichrist appears, the blessed one will show us what we seek to know. Yet as far as our doubtful apprehension of the matter goes, we may speak. Indeed, we find many names for which the letters equate to this number.
For example, there is the name Titan, an ancient and notable name, or Evanthus, for it too makes up the same number. And many others can be found. It is evident to everyone that those who at present time hold power are the Latinos. If then we take the name as the name of a single man, it becomes Latinus. However, we should neither give it out as if this were certainly his name, nor again should we ignore the fact that he may not be otherwise designated." That's interesting. That name Latinos would mean Latins.
And so maybe it has something to do with Rome. A possibility we can't ignore. He says, "But having the mystery of God in our hearts, we should in fear keep faithfully what has been told us by the blessed prophets. That way, when those things come to pass, we may be prepared for them and not deceived." All right, Victorinus writing about the year 280. This is in volume 7, page 356. And this is interesting because he plays with it both in Greek and in Latin.
He says, "As they have figured it out from the Greek characters, they thus find it among many to be Titan. For Titan has this number, which the Gentiles call Sol and Phoebus. And it is figured in Greek in this manner. Tau, 300, Epsilon, 5, Iota, 10, Tau, 300, Alpha 1, Nu, 50. When these are totaled together, they add up to 666. To the extent it belongs to the Greek letters, they fill up this number and name.
But as we've seen, there's other names that fill it up too." He says, "If you wish to turn this name into Latin, it is understood by the word Diclux. These letters are figured in this manner." I don't know the names of the Roman letters, so I'm going to just give their English names. D, which is 500. I, which is 1. C, which is 100. L, which is 50. V, which is 5. And X, which is 10. By counting up these letters, it likewise totals 666.
Maybe at some point, someone will be able to put all of this in a computer and can instantly calculate the numerical value of someone's name. All right, but now I want to look at what the early Christians had to say about the significance of this man's name adding up to 666. Irenaeus wrote, "Let no one imagine that the Antichrist performs these wonders by divine power. Rather, he does it by the working of magic. And we must not be surprised that he performs wonders through demonic means.
For the demons and apostate spirits are at his service. By these wonders, he leads the inhabitants of the earth astray. And the number is 666. That is six times 100, six times 10, and six units. This represents his summing up of the whole of that apostasy that has taken place during 6,000 years." And that's on page 557. Again, on 558, he says, "Fittingly, therefore, will his name possess the number 666.
For he sums up in his own person all the mixture of wickedness that took place previous to the deluges due to the apostasy of the angels. For Noah was 600 years old when the deluge came upon the earth. Thus, in the 600 years of Noah, prefigured the number of the name of the man in whom is concentrated the whole apostasy of 6,000 years." Again, he says, "This number is found in all the most approved and ancient copies," he means of the book of Revelation.
"Furthermore, those men who saw John face to face give their testimony to it. Reason also leads us to conclude that the number of the name of the beast, according to the Greek mode of calculation by the letters contained in it, will amount to 666." So, as many commentators say today, probably the significance of having that number does relate to the imperfect number 6. And instead of it being 666, that is three times, it's 6 times 100, 6 times 10, 6 times 1 in the Greek way of thinking.
Several years ago, when I was reviewing all of this, I decided to see what Jesus' name adds up to if you calculate the number of his name. I found that it adds up to exactly 888. And I'm sure that's no accident. Of course, I expected maybe it would add up to 777 because we think of the number 7 as a perfect or complete number. But the number 8 also had special significance to the early Christians in relation to Jesus. In fact, they referred to Sunday as the eighth day.
It's partly based on a prophecy in the 43rd chapter of Ezekiel. And I'm not going to go into this detail. You can check that on your own. But that chapter says that in the New Temple, sacrifices would be offered on the eighth day. And Jewish boys were circumcised on the eighth day after their birth. So even though Sunday is in one sense the first day of the week, they also thought of it as the eighth day, the day that came after the Sabbath in which the first seven days were all wrapped up.
So to them, it would have been very significant that Jesus' name adds up to 888. Well, we've probably spent all the time we need to on the number 666. In the remaining few minutes, I'd like to just briefly share what the early Christians understood about the Antichrist, who he was and what he would do. Now, like us, when it comes to future prophecy, they were simply having to guess.
So I'm not presenting this as dogma, just what they were expecting to happen, which I think at least, the very least, what we should do is keep our eyes open. Since they were living closer to the time of John and had the same mindset that he would have had, it's very possible that their surmises or guesses will be accurate. But it's just as likely that, as with so many other prophecies, that they're fulfilled in a way that Bible readers don't expect.
But anyway, this is what they believed, it seems like as a general thought, that the beast or Antichrist would be an evil ruler who would claim to be God or would claim to be divine. For example, Irenaeus wrote on page 553 of volume 1, "By means of the events that will occur in the time of the Antichrist, it is shown that he, being an apostate and a robber, is anxious to be worshipped as God. For he is endowed with all the power of the devil.
He will come not as a righteous king nor as a legitimate king in subjection to God, but as an unholy, unjust, and lawless one. He will set aside idols to persuade men that he himself is God.
Daniel foresaw the end of the last kingdom of the ten last kings, among whom the kingdom of those men will be partitioned and upon whom the son of perdition will come." Again, from Irenaeus, it was very commonly held by the early Christians, and I'm not going to have time to go into the reasons in detail, but they typically understood that the Antichrist would be a Jew or an Israelite and that he would be from the tribe of Dan.
Irenaeus wrote on page 559, "Jeremiah does not merely point out the Antichrist's sudden coming, but he even indicates the tribe from which he will come when he says, 'We will hear the voice of his swift horses from Dan,'" that's Jeremiah 8:16. All right, Irenaeus understood that the Antichrist, who would be this Israelite from the tribe of Dan, would rule for three and a half years and that he would rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.
He said, "Once this Antichrist has devastated everything in this world, he will reign for three years and six months and sit in the temple at Jerusalem. And then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds." Page 560. Hippolytus says this on page 206 of volume 5, "The deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God. Christ is a King, so the Antichrist is also a King. The Savior appeared as a Lamb, so he too in like manner will appear as a Lamb, though within he is really a wolf.
The Savior came into the world as one of the circumcised, and the Antichrist will come in the same manner. The Lord sent apostles among all the nations, and he, the Antichrist, in like manner will send false apostles. The Savior gathered together the sheep that were scattered abroad, and he, in like manner, will bring together a people who are scattered abroad.
The Savior raised up and showed his holy flesh like a temple, and he, the Antichrist, will raise a temple of stone in Jerusalem." Now, like I say, the early Christians are very likely wrong in their guesses of exactly how the Antichrist will appear. And I'm basing that simply on the fact that virtually everybody, or probably literally everybody, was wrong about how the Messiah would appear.
But if they're right, it is very interesting because so many Christians today, professing Christians, would be looking for someone who rebuilt the temple as somebody connected with the Messiah. And so if the early Christians are right and a figure appears who helps to bring together the Israelites, and of course, that's already been happening in our century, the regathering of many Jews back into Israel.
And I can almost guarantee you right now, if some man started building the temple and succeeded in it, there'd be so many professed Bible-believing Christians who would follow that person or be convinced this person was of God, when in fact he might be the Antichrist. So we definitely need to keep alert. Hippolytus likewise believed that the Antichrist would restore the Jews to their kingdom. He says, "Let us look also at his actions.
He will call together all the people to himself out of every country of the dispersion, making them his own as though they were his own children. He will promise to restore their country and reestablish their kingdom and nation in order that he may be worshipped by them as God." Hippolytus believed that the Antichrist would force everyone to worship him and that he would kill those who don't worship him. I mean, this would have been a view, I think, of all the early Christians.
He wrote, "Being full of guile and exalting himself against the servants of God, he desires to afflict them and persecute them out of the world, for they do not give glory to him. He will order censers," these are what you burn incense, "to be set up by everyone, everywhere, so that none of the saints may be able to buy or sell without first sacrificing. For this is what is meant by the mark received upon the right hand.
And the phrase on their forehead indicates that all are crowned and put on a crown of fire, of death, not of life." So see, as they were understanding this, how this spoke to them in their culture, the mark on the hand, they didn't think of something that had to do with currency like people today so often think. One guy wrote me, he said, "I've got it all figured out. 666 equals United States Dollar." Because each of those words in United States Dollar has six letters.
Of course, part of that fallacy is they didn't look at it as 666. That would have made no sense in their thinking. But the other thing, it never even occurred to them to think of this as currency because they said it would be a mark on the hand. You offered incense with your hands. This was something that church in the days of the Apostle John was having to face because they would refuse to offer up incense before an idol or before the emperor that they were put to death and persecuted.
I mean, Revelation starts off saying this is things that are shortly to be revealed and that the churches that are spoken to in Revelation, those were real churches, real events that were happening to them. And a very common practice in that day was to wear crowns or maybe wreaths would be a better expression. I'm sure we've all seen pictures of ancient Greek people with a wreath around their head or maybe a Nero or one of the Roman emperors with a wreath around their head.
But it was very common to wear these wreaths as part of religious devotion to either an emperor or to an idol, a mythological god. And so again, they thought of the mark on the forehead, ah, that would be putting on one of these crowns, one of these wreaths. So again, what that meant to them back there is very different than the kind of thinking that we do today. And yet they believe that Christians shouldn't tremble in fear about all of this, even though many of us will be killed.
Cyprian wrote, "Brother, let none of you be so terrified by the fear of future persecution or the coming of the threatening Antichrist, so as not to be found armed for all things by the evangelical exhortations and precepts, as well as by the heavenly warning. The Antichrist is coming, yet above him comes Christ also." Well, let me sum up what we've talked about. We've discussed what the number of his name, 666, meant to John who wrote that and to his Greek readers.
And I think that's probably the most fascinating part of this whole message. But that's really not the main thing I want you to walk away with after listening to this. It's not focusing on the details of the Antichrist's reign, although it makes for interesting reading and maybe some private speculation. But what I am most concerned about is that all of us are prepared for the Antichrist, even if he doesn't come in our lifetime.
And the way to be prepared isn't to start pulling a bunch of books and spend most of your time studying prophecy. People did that before Jesus came. And here when he came, those very people didn't recognize. As one of the early Christian writers said, "Prophecy is best understood after it has been fulfilled." So don't worry about mapping out all of the details on the prophecy of the beast and the Antichrist.
The ones who recognized the Messiah in Jesus' day were not the experts, not the scribes and rabbis who had been studying the Messianic prophecies all their lives. It was the ones who loved God with all of their heart, soul, and mind. These were the apostles and people like them. So if we truly do, rather, truly love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, then we're going to be in the right place.
I don't mean a fake love for God that we praise him with our lips while not heeding his commandments and loving the world. I'm not talking about that kind of fake love for God. I'm talking about having a true love for God, which means that we do not find his commandments and his teachings to be burdensome. But we find it joyous to serve our Lord Jesus Christ because the Holy Spirit is indwelling in our hearts.
And if that's the type of Christian we are, one who truly loves God without hypocrisy and loves our fellow men, we are going to be in the right place and be doing the right things when the Antichrist does come.