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Today we will be looking at the mark of the beast. And if you saw the previous commentary video, we mentioned Haller is this link between Nero and the Antichrist. And I even mentioned there at the end how when you look into the history of the number 666, that actually can be translated into the name of Nero. Why is that? Well, we're gonna talk about that a little bit today. And how that is.
And before we even look at that, I was watching this documentary and I actually found it to be quite informative. And it's not really, it's not a Christian documentary. It's a National Geographic documentary featuring Morgan Freeman talking about how various religious groups view God and eschatology and the Antichrist. And here Morgan Freeman's going to have this dialogue with this Orthodox Jewish individual, and he's going to share what Jews are expecting that the coming Messiah. They have this coming Messiah. They don't believe that is Jesus right now yet, but they are expecting the messianic figure. And look at what this individual says.
"Orthodox Jews believe that without this temple, their religious rites are incomplete. So they await the day when their temple is rebuilt." So they're talking about here how they believe that the temple, the third temple, will be rebuilt. Okay. Jews believe that. Many Christians believe that. Keep watch. Is there a Messiah in Judaism? In Judaism, she was invented the Messiah, but it's not the same Messiah that most people think about.
Okay, I guess when Christians think of the Messiah, they think of someone whose divine. Yeah. What we have for the Messiah is a man, a king of this earth, who's going to bring peace among the nations in this world. And your narrator tells me this mortal Messiah has a very specific to-do list according to Jewish tradition. He has three things he's supposed to do. Number one, he's gonna reconstitute the Jewish kingdom for the Jewish state. Number two, he's gonna bring peace with the neighbors. Three, he's gonna rebuild that until the temple.
So you heard it right there. The Jewish people are expecting that their messianic figure, it's going to be a man, a king. They believe that he's going to bring world peace. They believe that he's going to bring a government. And they believe that he is going to rebuild the temple, the third temple. Why is that significant? Because these are the exact same things that the Antichrist is promising to do. The Antichrist will come up to the scene with promises of bringing this utopian government. He's going to come onto the scene as a political kingly leader, and he's going to have something to do with the establishment of a temple. The Antichrist, my friends, is going to claim to be the long-awaited messianic figure of the Jewish people. Wow. And everything that they were expecting their Messiah to do, the Antichrist is going to come and basically fulfill.
Now, the Antichrist, if he tries to establish a Third Temple, it's not going to be the true temple of God. Because we, as the body of Christ, are the temple of God. The true Messiah did establish a temple. You see, every messianic figure must establish a temple. That's why Jesus said that his temple, his house, will be in his people. Okay? And nothing will come against it. And so Jesus established a temple, not a physical building, but a spiritual one within our body. Jesus, the true Messiah, established that. And when the false Messiah comes, it is lacking. He will also try to establish some type of brick and mortar temple. It won't be the true temple of God, but it's something that will be a deception to the world to cause them to believe that he is the true Messiah. So you can clearly see now how this, this Antichrist figure is going to so easily try to convince the world that he is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. I mean, everything that they are expecting, this guy is gonna come and basically do.
Next thing I want to go over is the mark of the beast. The mark of the beast being calculated, the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. It's number is 666. Now, long before years before I even watched this documentary, I'd been examining in my studies of 666. God always had a way of leading me to the ancient understanding of what 666 meant. And by ancient, I mean the first Christians, the earliest Christians. I read the writings of the church fathers. I read the writings of the earliest Christian writings that was circulating at the time. And I read the writings of many different professors, theologians, and and people who had a scholarly view on 666. I wasn't really that interested in all these different modern views of it. I want to go back to what was the general idea of it historically. And I would say over 90% of my findings pointed to 666 happening to do with Nero Caesar. You see, in Hebrew, letters have numbers assigned to them. I know it's a very foreign concept, but that is the case. And when you look at 666 and look at the Hebrew, and how the numbers are, even though it's written in Greek, you see how the number 666 can actually be translated to be Emperor Nero. And this is not foreign knowledge. I mean, this was very commonly understood in this, in the scholarly circles and around the early time of believers.
And I began to research that. And when this documentary by National Geographic came around, I was kind of skeptical. You know, I was kind of skeptical of what exactly they would be telling the world about God and the end times, because I knew that it really wasn't, for me, a Christian perspective. It's a general perspective, covering many different faiths. And so I watched it, and I was actually blown away by this portion of this documentary when it's talking about the beast, because it's actually very accurate in certain ways. So, uh, let's just take a look at this here. Let's take a look at this.
"To meet an expert in early Christianity. She tells me she has compelling evidence that reveals the identity of the beast. Good morning. What exactly do we have here?" "Fragments of the book of Revelation. Tell me about this coding." "Well, there has been a lot of debate about who it refers to. There has also been a strong argument made for 666 referring to Nero." "So how do you make 666 translate to Nero?" "When you apply numerical values to the name Kaiser Narron, and you add up those numbers, you come to 666."
In ancient Greek and Hebrew, every letter had a corresponding number.
"If you add up the letters of the name for Emperor Nero, written in Hebrew, Kaiser Aaron, the total comes to six six six." "But Nero is just one of many names that can add up to six six six." "Kim believes a later copy of the book of Revelation, found in an archaeological dig in Egypt, confirms the beast is Nero." "One of the interesting things about these fragments is that we've got two different numbers. There is a 600, XC, 60, Sigma, a 666. This one over here, we have a P, Yota, Sigma, 616, with a line over the top." "Why is it this might think that this number destroys the possibility that it could be Nero?" "Yes, what's striking about this is that it may help to confirm the identity of Nero, because this would be the number that we would get if we spelled Nero according to the Latin spelling, Nero Caesar, without the N. The letter N represented 50. Number 50. So 666 minus 56, 56, 2006. So we've just subtract and went to come up with 616." "And we have the same guy." "That's right." "I'm so clever."
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You.
It shows how numerical value is added to the Hebrew, the Greek letters. But what she did there was something that I had also found in my studies, and I was happy to see this brought out in this, in this documentary. And that is how when it comes to 666, you actually have a different writing between the Latin versions of the text and the Greek versions of the text. The Greek version of the text normally reads 666. You have the Latin versions that only read 616. Why is that significant? Because not only does 666 translate into Nero Caesar, but also 616 translates into Nero Caesar. So what that means is, even though both versions have different numbers for the mark of the beast, it wanted to make its reader clear that the name, the number of the name for this beast is Nero. Even to the point of using a different number in Latin to hammer the point that it is Nero. Because 666 in Latin would have said a different name, but 616 in Latin gets you Nero. So they want it to hammer the point in the Latin version of it that it's 616 so that you would know this name is Nero. That's huge. Because what it means is that the biblical author John, and those who translated John's writings, wanted others to know that this beast he's referring to here is Nero.
Now, why is that? Why would the early Christians be referring to Nero as the Beast? Well, there are a few different theories for that. This document here has a theory for it. Let's check it out. So we know that the code 666 refers to the Emperor Nero. Why? Emperor Nero was despised for persecuting Christians in his circus. Circus Nero. Yeah. The circus stood here and was a place for chariot races, games, but he also used it then for persecuting Christians. When 64, there was a major fire in Rome. Nero wound up blaming Christians and he executed them in great numbers right here in this circus. Tradition says Nero, he's an executed speeder. He was crucified upside down. So basically, Nero, he was a terrible guy. He executed many Christians. And around the time of Nero, it became common for Christians to refer to Nero in code, and to refer to Rome in code. And you can do your own research, but what you will find is that instead of saying Rome, in lieu of the Christian letters, they would use the word Babylon. Because if they referred to Rome, when these letters would be circulated, the Roman historians, if they had ever read these letters, it could have gotten a lot of Christians killed. So they began to use code for Rome and Nero. They began to use the word beast, the numbers of the beast, to refer to Nero when they were sending the letters to other believers. And they used the word Babylon to refer to Rome when they were sending letters to other believers. And in fact, you will find he does this. He refers to Rome. He says that there's another believer who's in Rome, but instead of saying of Rome, he uses the word Babylon. And in a future video, we will cover that.
So one of the reasons why there's this cult language is really because of this great opposition towards Christians. And the writers of the biblical letter just wanted the early believers to, to have some safety. And so they used this code. Some of them were lit on fire, burning. It explains why they despised him so much. We understand why they would refer to Nero in code in their letters that circulated around the time of Paul. Because Paul lived during the reign of Nero. Peter was around the time of Nero. And so we can understand that. We can totally understand that.
But here's the thing that you may find interesting. John in Revelation, he wrote the book of Revelation around 90 AD. Okay? Around 90 AD. Nero was already dead in 90 AD. So if John wrote Revelation around 90 AD, and Nero was dead, there's no real threat. There's no reason to fear Nero. Why would he still use the name of Nero to refer to the coming Antichrist, the coming beast? Now, you have two schools of thought here. A lot of historians, people who don't really believe that there's gonna be a coming apocalypse, people who don't really believe in the coming Antichrist. A lot of historians will then say, maybe the writer of Revelation wasn't talking about a future Antichrist. Maybe the book of Revelation was just all about Nero. Maybe the Mystery Babylon in Revelation, it was just all about the historical Rome. And so a lot of historians believe that Revelation is not a future book, but a book that's really about the past. That John was just writing about Nero and Rome, not some coming Antichrist.
But if you are a believer in Christ, and you know that the man of lawlessness is gonna come right before the second coming, then you know that the Antichrist, the Beast, is going to not be just something that happened in the past, but it's truly going to be in the future. Does history support this? Well, most scholars who study the writings of biblical literature agree that Revelation was written in 90 AD, or around 90 AD. Let's look at this. So we got around, okay, around 95 AD, we have John here writing Revelation. Around 95 AD. That was the general consensus, right? So here is the thing that you will find amazing. If John was referring to Nero here, why would he, when Nero was already dead? One reason, when you study the first Christians' writings, they studied a lot of the writings that were around the time of the first century. And you even study Christian scholars today. Many contend that John taught that Nero would one day return. Obviously, the Christians hated Nero. He was the Antichrist. He went up to his suicide. They feared that he had the power to come back and rule, which was why it was safer to refer to him in a secret code.
So it's interesting. This is very interesting. And I'm just gonna leave it there because there's a, this gets a little deeper. Okay? It's a lot deeper. And there are some things that we're gonna have to explore in the text. Does the text say anything about Nero in the future? I mean, Nero was dead as dead as that you can get. Okay? The only way Nero could return is if he arose out of the abyss of hell. So we're going to go deep with this. I believe that you will find this episode covering this interesting, to say the least. And I thank you for watching this presentation. And I invite you to look into this for yourself. To do some research on how Nero has ties to the Beast. And when we have the episode we're covering this, and we come together, we can have a discussion. And I look forward to hearing about your findings as well.
But next up is the two witnesses episode. God bless.