The number 666: two thousand years of interpretation

Few numbers have enjoyed a fortune comparable to that of 666. It appears in chapter 13 of the Revelation of John, which describes a beast that forces everyone to bear its mark. The text invites whoever has understanding to calculate the number of the beast and specifies that it is the number of a man, that is, a human name translated into figures. This very invitation to calculate has fed, from the second century to the present, an almost endless series of proposals.

The ancient context and Nero

For modern scholars the starting point is gematria, familiar to Jews and Greeks of the time. The most widely accepted solution is the name Nero Caesar written in Hebrew characters, nrwn qsr, which adds up to exactly 666. The emperor who had persecuted the Christians of Rome after the fire of 64 was a natural candidate, not least because rumours of his return circulated after his death.

Supporting evidence comes from the variant 616, attested in some manuscripts and already known to Irenaeus of Lyon, who considered it a scribal error. If the name is written in the Latin form Nero, without the final n, the Hebrew sum drops to precisely 616. A papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, and datable to the third century, carries this reading and is among the oldest witnesses to the passage.

Irenaeus and the first attempts

Irenaeus, in the fifth book of his work Against Heresies, approaches the problem with caution. He lists some possible Greek solutions with the value 666, such as Euanthas, Lateinos and Teitan, but concludes that it is safer to await the fulfilment of the prophecy than to hazard a name. Lateinos, “the Latin”, nonetheless enjoyed some success as an allusion to the Roman Empire and, later, to the Latin-speaking Church.

Alongside the search for the hidden name, a symbolic reading also spread. Six, which falls short of seven, the number of fullness and completion in biblical tradition, repeated three times would indicate imperfection carried to the extreme, a claim to perfection that fails. This interpretation, which requires no calculation on letters, long coexisted with attempts to identify a specific figure.

Popes, sovereigns and modern polemics

In the age of the Reformation the number became a polemical weapon. Protestant authors applied it to the papacy, and the German theologian Andreas Helwig, in 1612, argued that the title Vicarius Filii Dei, read with Roman numerals, gave 666. Catholic authors replied with similar calculations aimed at the reformers, beginning with Martin Luther, whose name was bent in various ways to obtain the same sum.

Every age found its candidate. In Tolstoy's War and Peace the protagonist Pierre Bezukhov, using an adapted French alphabet, derives 666 from the phrase L'Empereur Napoléon and draws conclusions about his own destiny. The passage of the novel, published in the 1860s, shows how far the calculation had entered the common imagination, even outside the religious sphere.

The history of 666 is ultimately the history of its readers. The text of Revelation spoke to first-century communities in a coded language that contemporaries could understand; later centuries projected onto that number their own fears and their own adversaries. Following these readings means travelling through the history of the Church, of its divisions and of European popular culture.