the Revised Number of the Beast

by **dqueue** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:02 pm

<a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=634679">The Independent</a>, a UK news source, reports: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616.<hr></blockquote> Interesting, I thought.

by **tabasco1776** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:11 pm

Actually, some versions of the scripture have said 616 instead of 666 all along, as remarked upon by St. Irenaeus in the 1st century: <a href="http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2003/12/616-other-number-of-beast.html">www.hypotyposeis.org/webl...beast.html</a>

by **RDR** » Sun May 15, 2005 7:08 am

my copy of the Revised (A.D. 1946-52) Standard Edition of the Bible, a "red letter edition" copy with zipper and cross, copyright 1962 by World Publishing, includes this footnote to Revelations 13:18- "other ancient authorities read six hundred sxteen." I'm not sure what this changes, if anything...except for the obvious, it's the whole number 50 less than 666. But it isn't as if it's a brand-new, unheralded discovery in Biblical philology. I've been aware of it for years. It sort of knocks one of the pinons of Aleister Crowley's numerology askew, doesn't it? Weird that someone who renounced Christianity so vehemently placed so much weight on the Book of Revelations as a source text for so many of his magickal writings.

by **RDR** » Sun May 15, 2005 8:26 am

was raised as a member of a congregation that went by the name of the Plymouth Brethren, a numerically minute Protestant sect insisting on its "elect" status as Christians. ( Various sources refer to the "puritanical" stance of the Plymouth Brethren, but they were evidently not abstemious- Crowley's father was a beer brewer. ) <a href="http://mysteria.com/pub/culture/magick/crowley/crowley">mysteria.com/pub/culture/...ey/crowley</a> Curiously, one of the luminaries of the Plymouth Brethren movement was John Nelson Darby <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darby">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darby</a> More on Darby and the Plymouth Brethren <a href="http://www.johndarby.org/">www.johndarby.org/</a> , <a href="http://pages.prodigy.net/sathi/ourhistory.html">pages.prodigy.net/sathi/ourhistory.html</a> John Darby was one of the founders of Dispensationalism, the interpretation the End-Times that has been accepted by the most numerous and high-profile USA Christian "Fundamentalist" congregations- the group and collective polity roughly equivalent to the present-day American Christian Right, Protestant version. From the above link ( which won't allow me to cut-and-paste ): ...Darby visited and preached numerous times in Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand, West Indies, Canada, and the U.S. Amid his extensive teaching tours, he found time to translate the New Teastament into English, French, and German, and he assisted in translating the old Testament into French and German. Most of his papers and articles are gathered into thirty-four volumes in the Collected Works of J.N. Darby, which was edited by his long-time associate and friend, Willaim Kelly. Wow, I didn't know that! Darby was a world traveller, a very select minority in the 19th Century. So was Albert Pike, by the way... To return to the excerpted linked text: ...Darby's Eschatology Acknowledged as the founder of modern Dispensationalist Premillenarianism, Darby is remembered especially for calling the church to expectancy for its rapture at the return of the Lord before Daniel's seventieth week. He interpreted Daniel's seventy weeks based on world history... More links: <a href="http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/cathouse/darby.htm">www.sullivan-county.com/n.../darby.htm</a> <a href="http://www.gospeltruth.net/Antinomianism/antinom-chap3.htm">www.gospeltruth.net/Antin...-chap3.htm</a> etc. <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22john+darby%22+%22plymouth+brethren%22&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt">search.yahoo.com/search?p...fl=0&x=wrt</a> On Dispensationalism: <a href="http://www.hccentral.com/gkeys/darby.html">www.hccentral.com/gkeys/darby.html</a> One of Darby's American disciples was C. I. Scofield <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22john+darby%22+%22plymouth+brethren%22+scofield&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&xargs=0&pstart=1&fr=FP-tab-web-t&b=11">search.yahoo.com/search?p...web-t&b=11</a> Scofield wrote a huge "Scriptural concordance" that presumed to annotate the Bible in accordance with the precepts of Deispensationalism. This work was known as the Scofield Reference Bible. <a href="http://www.hisremnant.org/eby/articles/kingdom/looking/look47.htm">www.hisremnant.org/eby/ar...look47.htm</a> From the above link: ...A man by the name of John Nelson Darby was the leading spirit among the Plymouth Brethren from 1830 onward. Darby was from a prosperous Irish family, was educated as a lawyer, took high honors at Dublin University, then turned aside, to his father's chagrin, to become a minister. Thus Irving and Darby were contemporaries, though associated with different spiritual movements. Another series of meetings were in progress at this time, a group of seeking Christians were meeting in the castle of Lady Powerscourt for the study of Bible prophecy. Many clergymen attended, and quite a few who were Irvingites. The Irvingites came to the meetings obsessed with the ideas of the "Secret Rapture" and the future Antichrist, imbibed from the Jesuit Lacunza's book. J.N. Darby and the other Brethren leaders were invited to these meetings and became participators in them. It was there that he was introduced to the Jesuit teaching of the Secret Rapture and the futurist interpretation of prophecy, as well as the famous book by Rabbi Ben-Ezra, or, actually, Jesuit priest Emmanuel Lacunza! Darby was himself a prolific writer and from that time a constant stream of propaganda came from his pen. His writings on biblical subjects number over 30 volumes of 600 pages each. Darby developed and organized "futurism" into a system of prophetic teaching called "dispensationalism." Darby' s biographers refer to him as "the father of dispensationalism." And the crown jewel in the kingdom of dispensationalism is, of course, the so-called SECRET RAPTURE! The Secret Rapture teaching was introduced into the United States and Canada in the 1860's and 1870's, though there is some indication that it may have been taught as early as the 1840's. Darby himself visited the United States six times. The "new" teaching was spreading. A Congregationalist preacher by the name of C. I. Scofield came under the influence of Darby and the Plymouth Brethren. Scofield became a strong promoter of the teaching that had been promulgated by Darby, whom he considered "the most profound Bible student of modern times." He incorporated this teaching into his SCOFIELD REFERENCE BIBLE. The Scofield Reference Bible was destined to have a tremendous impact upon the beliefs of many, when, three million copies were published in the first 50 years! Through this Bible Scofield shrewdly carried the teaching of the Secret Rapture into the very heart of Evangelicalism. Some ignorant souls look on the "notes" in this Bible as the Word of God itself! I do not doubt for one instant that many who read these lines have been influenced somewhere in their spiritual lives by the "footnotes" in the Scofield Bible! There is one final link in the chain of the development and spread of the rapture theory that should be mentioned in passing. I would draw your attention again to the SOURCE, the ORIGIN of the rapture doctrine and the chain of contact by which it has been brought down to us today. It began as a Roman Catholic invention! The Jesuit priest Ribera's writings influenced the Jesuit priest Lacunza, Lacunza influenced Irving, Irving influenced Darby, Darby influenced Scofield, Scofield and Darby influenced D. L. Moody, and Moody influenced the early PENTECOSTAL MOVEMENT. How? you ask. The Assemblies of God is today by far the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. When the Pentecostal movement began at the turn of the century and the Assemblies of God held their first General Council in 1914 in Hot Springs, Arkansas they were a small movement and didn't have their own Publishing House. They needed Sunday School and study materials for their Churches - so where do you suppose they got it? They bought it from Moody Press and had their own cover stitched on it! So what do you think the Assemblies of God people believed? They believed what Moody Bible Institute taught! This had its impact on Pentecostal theology, because in the early years there were practically NO PREMILLENIALISTS IN THE PENTECOSTAL MOVEMENT! Most of the ministers in those early days came from Presbyterian, Methodist, or other historic denominations - men who, being baptized in the Holy Spirit and leaving their denominations, joined themselves to the Assemblies of God or one of the other emerging Pentecostal denominations. That is how the Pentecostal movement became influenced and saturated with the "Secret Rapture" doctrine - by a direct chain right back to the Roman Catholic Church! And now, my friend - you know the REST OF THE STORY!... More on C. I. Scofield and the history of his church <a href="http://www.scofield.org/visitors/ministry_history.asp">www.scofield.org/visitors...istory.asp</a> From the above link: ...When C. I. Scofield wanted to begin a foreign missions program, his first thought was to begin a mission work in Mexico. He researched the project and discovered that seven different missions were working in Mexico, but no mission work was going on in Central America. As a result, the Central American Mission was born. The first director was Luther Rees, a man who was ordained in the church, and later became one of the interim pastors. Today CAM International is considered one of the finest mission organizations in the world, and it still specializes in ministry to the Spanish-speaking world. CAM recently celebrated 100 years of ministry in Guatemala. Rolando Gonzales, one of our elders, was converted in Guatemala under the ministry of CAM workers there, and he himself has served a long career as a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators -- a mission organization that was started by a CAM missionary named Cameron Townsend... (Another recommended Christian "Dispensationalist skeptic-debunker site is <a href="http://watch.pair.com/">watch.pair.com/</a> . They also stay alert by puncturing everything from the Rev. Moon to the Merovingian hype-o-rama over there.) The historic mission of the Wycliffe Bible Translators has been as missionaries working on-site with two main purposes- to prosyletize Darbyite Dispensationalism all over the world, and to translate their version of Scripture into every known language in the world. They've been at the forefront of working in places like Latin America to translate the Bible into Indian languages, for instance. One "secular byproduct" of this effort is that many of Wycliffe's field translators are considered linguistic authorities in the languages they study. Another has been their end run around Roman Catholicism, which never offered such an "outreach" in terms of missions that worked in indigenous dialects. Another recent "secular" linkage has been the use of the Wycliffe Bible Translators as assets of the CIA. There's a fascinating recent work of investigative journalism by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett called Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon, Nelson Rockefeller, Evangelism, and the Age of Oil, that goes into much historical detail on the history of the Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America. Know what I just found out? Doing the title search, I clicked the (ubiquitous) Amazon.com link found in the results, on the book of that title- "Thy Will Be Done"- and got a completely different book- one on how to make out one's will. <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22thy+will+be+done%22+colby&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt">search.yahoo.com/search?p...fl=0&x=wrt</a> See? I knew that Colby's Thy Will Be Done was out of print, but that's ridiculous. Anyway, I found an accurate reference to the work in question here- <a href="http://www.bestwebbuys.com/Thy_Will_Be_Done-ISBN_0060927232.html?isrc=b-search">www.bestwebbuys.com/Thy_W...c=b-search</a> ( Colby's other well-known book was on the DuPonts, by the way. One version is entitled Beyond The Nylon Curtain. The other, updated version is entitled DuPont Dynasty. Also fwiw, Gerard Colby changed his name in between the publication of the the first and second titles. His original surname is "Zilg." Oh yeah- both of those books is probably out of print, too. I've read all three titles I've mentioned- I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's changed his name yet again, maybe even gone underground. Because all those books are of the sort that lead good American citizens to lie awake at night..blockbusters. And no, there's no Cliff Notes condensed movie version. ) That's probably enough information for the curious to read thoroughly and mull over, for now. Anyway, a parting note on Aleister Crowley- an interesting interpretive observation on his life and career, from some website or another: ...Crowley, perhaps still a Plymouth Brethren at heart though he might have denied it, saw the world as divided into multiple cycles or "aeons" of time: he called these the Aeon of the Mother (ancient paganism) followed by the Aeon of the Father or the Dying God (e.g., Christianity)... <a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~xristos/GoldenDawn/biocrow.htm">home.earthlink.net/~xrist...iocrow.htm</a>

by **RDR** » Sun May 15, 2005 8:50 am

The actual title of the Colby book on the DuPonts is Behind The Nylon Curtain, not "Beyond..." Here's the Amazon listing for the updated version- note that the OOP title goes for a pretty penny <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0818403527/701-3377456-8181939">www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos...56-8181939</a> Incidentally, in one of the books on the DuPonts, there's a really weird photo of one of the 20th century dynasty at his estate in Cuba, surrounded in a circle by his trained pet iguanas. Big bastards, too- around five feet long, they look almost as big as Komodo Dragons. Not that there's anything wrong with that...I'm not sure which book it's in. You'll probably have to find a university library, though, because books on the DuPonts are few and far between. I found out from reading them that the DuPonts deserve to be studied in US High School History class. They INVENTED the military-industrial complex in the USA. Not to go for the simplest explanation, but I think that's the principal reason that they AREN'T often studied in US History. Not even at the collegiate level. Oh, yes. You ought to check into how they ran with that one...

by **Rigorous Intuition** » Sun May 15, 2005 9:21 am

Fascinating stuff. Most Christian fundamentalists don't reflect on how relatively recent their orthodox eschatology is.

by **RDR** » Sun May 15, 2005 9:56 am

who don't realize how recently Dispensationalism got grafted on to Christianity. Most Americans don't have that awareness- not secular people, not Jews, not pagans, not even most moderate Christians who don't share the Fundamentalist obsession with the Book of Revelations. How many people realize that Martin Luther doubted that the Book of Revelations even belonged as a legitimate part of the Biblical canon? After all, the compiled "Bible" that the Christian literalists* insist is the Inerrant Word of God didn't even exist for centuries after Jesus of the Sermons taught his ministry, as recorded in the various original Gospels in Aramaic and Greek. *( a group of folks that includes Watch Unto Prayer, incidentally )

by **RDR** » Sun May 15, 2005 10:04 am

Aleister Crowley built his whole antithesis to Christianity as a Reaction to the lies he learned as "religion." Unless you're the sort of Conspiracy Theorist who imagines that Darby was wittingly promulgating Dispensationalism as a hoax, from the start...if that's true, then conceivably Crowley could be acting as a Change Agent, as part of the grand plot. mutatis muta

by **Seventhsonjr** » Mon May 16, 2005 2:16 pm

and the prophecy works either way Like Nostradamus mistaking an l for an s and transposing the letters kinda in a dyslexic way Hister instead of Hitler, I maintain that prophets and visionaries may SEE, but they may be a liitle fuzzy when they see it. Thus Nostradamus' post- "Hister/Hitler" antiChrist is "Mabush/GWBush" If you start counting letters and add the "Jr." you have a concordance between Nostradamus's Mabus/GWBush and St. John the Divine's revelatory 666/616. Just sayin'... If you believe in propphecy then these predictions ring pretty solid IMHO, whether you like it or believe it or not.

by **Asta** » Mon May 16, 2005 2:48 pm

nt <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)">

by **RDR** » Mon May 16, 2005 5:01 pm

big deal. As "prophecy", it's fizz to fizz, fuzz to fuzz...get that thing outta the refrigerator. Perhaps the most popular opinion of scholarly commentators on the Revelation identify the "Beast" as the historic figure of the Roman emperor Caligula, notwithstanding the post hoc attempt at the number grab by arriviste Aleister Crowley. I think the "preference" for the integer 666 over 616 as Mystic Revelation may be due to the Roman system of using numbers for letters. 666 = DCLXVI I think Crowley and his acolytes maintain an affection for the number 666 because of its properties when found as an "irrational" number, i.e., .666.... The original reference clearly states the number as an integer, but occultism is about shoehorning information to the point where Reality is Whatever you can get away with.

by **Seventhson** » Mon May 16, 2005 8:14 pm

rdr said: Perhaps the most popular opinion of scholarly commentators on the Revelation identify the "Beast" as the historic figure of the Roman emperor Caligula Who for example? I have studied the book of revelations and the prophecies of Jesus, Daniel and others about the end times at some length. Jesus had much to say and refers back to Daniel. But the prophecies in revelations speak of global problems and horrors after the word has spread globally. The "falling" of the "great city" whose burning was visible from far at sea occurred "within one hour" There's more - but I hardly think it applies to Caligula. Got links? I think the Beast is in the hearts of men. So is the comforter.

by **RDR** » Mon May 16, 2005 8:42 pm

I picked up a book of commentary on the Revelation last week and thumbed through it, but I didn't buy it. I'm going by there again tonight...maybe it will still be there. I wasn't interested enough in the topic of interpretations of the Revelation to buy it, but I may change my mind..or I can obtain the author's name and titles, if it's still there. (I referred to "commentators" in the plural because it was plain from the content and references that the opinion was not original with the author.) In the meantime, there's always a search engine.... Incidentally, Hunter S. Thompson once mentioned that the Bob Guccione-produced film Caligula was one of his favorite movies. Maybe someone out there will add that to their pile of Damning Evidence...as for myself, I'll continue to find that mordantly hilarious, for the time being.

by **sunny** » Mon May 16, 2005 10:18 pm

My former church taught that the beast was world gov't- note the many heads- and that the Whore of Babylon was the world empire of false religion, who is "drunk with the blood of holy ones" (Rev.17:5) who "has a kingdom over the kings of the earth (Rev. 18:1<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> Take heart, all you anti-theocrats!: "She has fallen!Babylon the Great has fallen, and she has become a dwelling place of demons and a lurking place of every unclean and hated bird. For because of the anger of her fornication all of the nations have fallen {victim},and the kings of the earth committed fornication with her and the traveling merchants of the earth became rich due to the power of her shameless luxury" But- "Get out of her, my people, if you do not want to share with her in her sins, and if you do not want to receive part of her plagues."(all of preceding from Revelations chap. 1<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> Makes a poetic justice kind of sense to me. As for 666- my church taught that numbers have meaning in the bible- for instance, the # 12 is a judicial number-and the # 7 is a symbol for perfection, as in God himself-therefore, 666 is imperfection, to the third degree, or gross imperfection, ie. evil. And can't find the citation just now, kinda rusty, but I'll try and post it-

by **sunny** » Mon May 16, 2005 10:25 pm

don't know how the smileys got there-it's a conspiracy!-but the chapter and verse I cited were both 18

the Revised Number of the Beast

the Revised Number of the Beast

Re: the Revised Number of the Beast

616...

Coincidentally, Crowley...

correction to book title

Thanks for the thumbnail history of Dispensationalism.

They aren't the only ones...

Ironic, isn't it?

Just Change George Walker Bushjr to George W. Bushjr

Damn, now I gotta change all my tattoos. nt

On "666"

Caligula? Scholarly commentators?

Caligula- the Beast?

Re: Caligula- the Beast?

Re: Caligula- the Beast?

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