The Beast Revelation

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That is a lot more plausible than the assumption that whatever time period the reader of Revelations happens to be in must be end times. After all, during the Bubonic Plague, people alive then must have thought it was end times too and were probably able to draw parallels from Revelations.

I accidentally added an r to the thread title. Somewhat disappointed.

Also, for what that's worth, I've read that the earliest greek sources give the Number of the Beast as 616.

And that's quadruple scary since it's my house number. What could it mean?

Lol, I don't think he's coming back - especially after he got buried under almost nothing but Christian Gnostic responses.

I'd still love to get a sense of where he's at on some of the alternative reads and takes on the bible, unfortunately at this point it's pretty likely that I won't be finding out.

I KNEW IT!

Ana is the ANTICHRIST!

When my history professor read the Book of Revelations out loud in our ancient history course, and a student from Turkey nodded his head and said "sounds like a typical opium dream".

I don't believe in this, or any other prophesy,due to the fact that I am irreligious.

I would also venture to say that it is utter BS, if it wasn't for the fact that there are a great many people who actually believe such a prophesy to be true, and inasmuch, because they believe such to be true will be amenable to ensuring by collective action that such prophesy is made reality by collective action towards the realisation of 'God's Kingdom on Earth'. In short, because they believe such to be 'prophesy', they will actively work towards the fulfillment thereof as a means of fulfilling the greater end of that prophesy. --The end result justifies the means in which the purported end result is achieved.

SIGH, once again people a little research, and less make believe, would go a very long way. As has been pointed out the Beast was a very clear and direct reference to Nero.

So weird how the fundies take what was a encrypted message to other Christians concerning their persecutor, Nero, and apply it to events unfolding today. Why not write some new Apocryptical text only no need to use code because we can pretty much say what we want and people do, only they don't call it revelation, they call it critiquing. Sometimes critiquing can be a revelation.

I'm not a christian, but why include the Book of Revelation at all? It was one person's revelation in the first century. Why give it more credence, that the the many revelations people claimed to over the centuries?

They don't know who wrote it, and it a completely different narrative than early Christianity.

This is a valid criticism of Christianity. It is a bit of a hodgepodge of different works.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 04 Jun 2015, 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think anyone really does. It's claimed to be John the Elder (apostle) but there's very little to verify that attribution.

The author was certainly obsessed with multi headed, multi body-parted monsters.

However the curve ball is a reference to Hades, which comes from Greek mythology.

We have a culture that's been obsessed with sevens, really starting with the era of Ptolemaic astrology where we were aware of seven bodies - the sun, moon, and first five other planets. They're considered present as archetypes in all of the major polytheistic religions (ie. at least seven major deities who are designated as tantamount to that 'planet's attributes in other pantheons) and we still have the days of our seven day week in the west named after them.

It's not a stretch to say whoever wrote it was trying to code a lot of metaphysical suggestions in the narrative they wrote - in a for-mystics-by-mystics manner. Unfortunately it's as if they wrote it a little too open-endedly.


For most of the bible there's no reference to ha satan as the enemy of God, there's no reference to a Lucifer challenging Yahweh and falling with 1/3 of the angels, there's not even much to reference anything like a permanent hell - it varies from suggestions early on that people in these books thought Yahweh ruled the world of the living and that they'd cease to exist when they died to then having something of an underworld concept.

The thing I find really difficult to reconcile between Revelations and the rest of the new testament - most of the new testament is very neoplatonist in its suggestions, ie. pantheistic/panentheistic. It's not until Revelations that a heavy handed dose of Zoroastrian/Manichean dualism gets served.

Maybe because this Revelation was against Nero and he was brutal toward the Christians so they wanted to include this disguised rant against him and they hoped God would judge him for persecuting them. When you think in terms of Nero, makes sense why they would want to keep their "Revelation." If you were an early Christian living in Rome, your opinion of Nero would be he was wicked.

Nero accused the Christians of setting fires and his penalty was to throw them in the Coliseum with the lions eating them alive.

Coming from a mainline Protestant, Lutheran tradition, the take on Revelations I was taught is that it's for the most part a recounting of events in the 1st century, when persecution of the early church had been current events. The bizarre imagery in the book owes much to the apocryphal style of writing that was used in Persia, in order to hide a message of a persecuted sect that would otherwise be considered seditious by the Roman authorities. The Beast, and 666, are in fact references to the Roman Emperor Nero, who had persecuted the early church. And like the Beast, there had been rumors that Nero was still alive after his death, as mentioned by Tacitus. So, do I consider Revelations to be prophecy? In a word: no. In fact, the fathers of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin, personally believed Revelations should never have been canonized.

But your specific answers seem to be more based on your politics than on Scripture. It is highly improbable that controversial figures such as these will gain the power attributed to the Beast (though I will not rule it out). You seem to have had a theory as to who or what the Beast might be, and then run with it, without stopping to check with scripture (sorry for my blunt language). And I thought it was generally known that Dragon was Satan, and the first Beast the Antichrist, Satan's ultimate human servant, and the other Beast the False Prophet, whose precise identities are the subject of contention. There is actually precedent for a single beast representing more than a single human - in Daniel successive empires are represented by beasts, and sometimes horns represent specific kings. The seven heads and ten horns are specifically stated I believe, to be distinct figures. Whoever the Beast will eventually end up being will probably surprise everybody, and the important thing is to remain faithful and obedient to Christ, and vigilant for the threat of false teachers and prophets, and even false messiahs, the last of which will be the Beast. No one may know the day or hour, but we should all live in readiness.

The interpretation you objected to may have disagreed with yours, but that does not make its adherent lukewarm; it just means that your specific interpretation of the prophecy is not universally accepted among your sisters and brethren in Christ. Sorry if I came across as a bit harsh, and of course it is possible that your interpretation may be correct, in which case I will owe you an apology.