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Video Description
Everyone knows 666 is the number of the beast; almost nobody knows it is a name. This video from the Conscious Radical channel decodes the most famous number in the Book of Revelation and finds a specific Roman emperor, not a future prophecy.
In Hebrew letters, Nero Caesar adds up to exactly 666, and the oldest surviving copy of Revelation gives 616 instead because the Latin form of his name drops a letter. The same emperor, two numbers, one cipher. The video follows that thread into what else the buried texts were really doing, and once the pattern is seen it is hard to unsee.
Full Video Transcript
Are we living in apocalyptic times? So when I say the word apocalypse what does it make you think of?
Does it make you think about the end of the world, the end of days, a world changing event that means
it’s all over for us? Historically it originates from the ancient Greek word apocalypsis which
literally translates to a lifting of the veil or uncovering and as such its meaning is closer to
a revelation of hidden truths rather than a cataclysmic event that leads to widespread
destruction the last book of the bible is called the book of revelation and it’s also sometimes
referred to as the apocalypse or the revelation to john it’s the final book of the new testament
and serves as the concluding text of the christian bible but rather than determining the end i think
it’s closer to meaning unveiling i also wonder whether those who wrote these texts didn’t mean
them to be read as prophecy of the future but instead we’re observing their own lives and
describing that environment in coded language and what if that can also help us to understand
the world that we live in today as recurring watchers of my channel will know by now i enjoy
examining ancient texts and scriptures to see how they can be viewed through
various lenses of cosmology of myth of society politics psychology and science
this is never an attempt to undo anything that you believe in or
undermine anyone’s religious beliefs I am NOT here to exchange one set of
beliefs for another I like to explore to be curious and see things from different
angles and I really would encourage you to do the same but please always feel free to take or leave
what I say because that choice is always yours. Often these texts are seen as prophetic with
hidden codes and bloodlines and we see this echoed in many popular films such as The Omen
and The Da Vinci Code but it really propels my imagination to think that those who wrote down
these texts often years after the event were somehow able to see the future. Don’t get me
wrong I totally understand the desire to read something that gives you hope or helps you make
sense and navigate this world but what if prophecy is the wrong word? What if they weren’t predicting
anything but were doing something a bit more ordinary but still incredibly dangerous for their
times? Perhaps they were observing the environment and watching what was happening around them and
instead of writing it down plainly because that would have got them killed they wrote it down in
code so when you think of the book of revelation what number comes to mind it’s usually the number
of the beast six six six now what’s important to consider is that in the ancient world the
languages of hebrew and greek didn’t have separate numbers the way that we do the letters were the
numbers aleph is one bet is two alpha is one beta is two this means that every letter has a value so
every word and every name add up to a total the ancient greeks and hebrews calculated word values
for several practical cultural and spiritual reasons the greeks called it isopsephi the hebrews
called it gematria so let’s look at this in the context of the book of revelation which reads as
follows this calls for wisdom let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast
for it is the number of a man and his number is six six six most biblical scholars and historians
dates the book of revelation to around 90 to 95 a.d during the reign of the roman emperor domitian
however a significant number of scholars and theologians date it as earlier to the mid-60s
a.d during the reign of emperor nero this change of date matters if revelation goes back to the
60s the Nero is the ruling emperor and the writers of Revelation are describing him in
code. If you translate the Greek title Nero Caesar into Hebrew script the values of the
letters would add up to exactly 666. However for some of you incredibly studious people
out there you’ll also know that in some of the oldest surviving copies of
Revelation it doesn’t say 666 at all it says 616 papyrus 115 is a third century
fragment from oxyrhynchus in Egypt and it’s the oldest surviving copy we have
of this part of Revelation and although it was dug up over a century ago it was
only deciphered and published in 1999 and when scholars finally read it, it gave the number
as 616, not the usual 666. 616 is also present in other important early copies like the 5th
century Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. Interestingly, if you transliterate the Latin form of his name,
Nero Caesar into Hebrew letters the final N which is worth 50 is dropped. With a bit of maths when
we subtract 50 from 666 we arrive at 616 and for centuries people have assumed that that was a
mistake but it wasn’t. Early Christian copyists in Latin speaking regions are likely to have adjusted
the number from 666 to 616 to ensure that their local readers could understand the political code
and this allowed the text to remain relevant to audiences who knew the emperor by his latin name
rather than his greek one so you can see that rather than someone guessing in the future
they’re actually hiding a tyrant’s name in code so that the people could read it but the emperor’s
soldiers couldn’t and with that knowledge what could the rest of the text mean and refer to
what else have they written down in a language that had kept them safe what else did they want
or need to be hidden so hiding a name inside a number is one kind of secret but hiding whole
books is quite another and this is where the buried books of nagamadi come in because a lot
of these texts never made it into the bible and we know exactly when they were cut and by whom
in the year 367 the bishop of alexandria athanasius sent his annual festival letters to
announce the date of easter his 39th letter is monumental in church history because it contains
the earliest complete listing of the 27 books of the new testament that match the modern biblical
canon the letter sets out the books that he wants included but in addition gives reasons for why
the other books shouldn’t be athanasius attacks a set of forbidden books star charts and astrology
he says the people who wrote them have mastered nothing but a clever lie and in doing so they’ve
led the ignorant and the trusting away from the true faith he says he’s writing because he’s
afraid his worry is that the ordinary believers will be talked into reading the apocryphal books
by cunning men fooled because those books carry names close to the real ones so he’s trying to set
the record straight for the good of the church borrowing his framing from luke athanasius says
he’s going to lay out the approved list himself because others have been mixing the apocryphal
books in with genuine scripture he names the books the church accepts as divine and so that
anyone who’s been misled can see who’s led them astray and anyone who stayed true can feel
reassured however it appears that someone may have disobeyed this instruction near a town in egypt
called nagamadi someone took a jar packed with the forbidden books and buried it in the sand
and that’s where they stayed for 1600 years finally being unearthed by a farmer in 1945.
so what was in the jar that frightened the newly formed church so much i have already covered this
in some of my earlier videos and i will place a link down below but in summary the gnostics
looked at the god of the old testament the one who enacts floods who demands obedience and created
an oppressive prison and they thought that’s not the true god instead that’s a lesser power
who has built this world and who runs it on fear and they called him the demiurge they also said
that the real source god the divine whatever word you want to use is already inside you and you can
access that yourself without a priest or a bishop now when athanasius wrote the festival letter he
was trying to create an orthodox church there were hundreds of different christian teachings
so it would have made sense to try to create some order however the church was also becoming a
system and a very lucrative one at that and although believers weren’t required at that
time to pay mandatory tithes many made voluntary donations and sometimes state subsidies funded the
churches while church maintenance was largely voluntary critics accused athanasius of imposing
a forced tribute of linen on his people to fund his diocese for the first 300 years of the church
funding came entirely from voluntary free will offerings rather than a rigid 10 tax however
during this era the church underwent a dramatic financial transformation evolving from a persecuted
grassroots movement into one of the wealthiest institutions and largest landowners in the roman
empire historians note that this rapid accumulation of wealth fundamentally altered the social
structure of the mediterranean world because in the ancient world wealth meant land not coins
constantine started handing the church enormous estates across europe across north africa and
the middle east and in 321 a.d he passed a law allowing the church to inherit property through
people’s wills wealthy romans who were keen to buy a good afterlife or stay on the right side
of the new christian emperors began leaving the church their farms their vineyards and their
estates whereas the clergy paid nothing no personal taxes no civic duties and the church’s
land was mostly exempt from the heavy property taxes that were crushing ordinary romans so while
everyone else was being taxed heavily the church piled up land and harvests and its wealth pulled
away from every secular landowner around it the state itself paid for the grandeur the roman
treasury funded huge lavish basilicas and gold silver marble and precious stones poured into
the churches from rome to jerusalem to constantinople even the everyday tools of worship
the cups the lamps the altars were routinely made of solid gold and silver and as the empire’s own
machinery began to fail the bishops stepped into the gap in big trade cities like alexandria where
athanasius himself was bishop the church came to control huge slices of the grain trade the
shipping routes and the charity funds that the city relied on therefore a god that you could
access yourself would have been no use at all to this new church there would be nothing to gatekeep
no frightened population that needed priests to save them so these texts were placed in a jar and
buried in the desert and i wonder if they were willing to edit and cull books what else would
they do why not start editing the words themselves so i opened with the word apocalypse which as we
know means something similar to unveiling or uncovering but somehow this word was flipped
to mean catastrophe and the end of the world so what other words have been altered one of my
personal favorites is heretic we use it to describe a dangerous person who doesn’t follow
the church faith it’s from a greek word heresis and all it ever meant was a choice a person who
chose for themselves what about the voice in your head the one that we would now call our inner
voice well the greeks had a word for that too demonium and it means a guiding spirit socrates
described this and it was first documented by his students plato and xenophon this internal acoustic
signal acted as a moral guide and it only intervened to warn him against specific wrong
decisions but it never commanded him about what he needed to do to socrates this inner voice was
a gift from somewhere higher a divine sign even though he was the founding father of reason
so to the greeks a daemon wasn’t evil at all it was a guide it was a go-between
so how did it become a thing that a priest cast out from you well that happened across 800 years
and it wasn’t an accident but it did start with translation when jewish scholars turned their
scriptures into greek they needed a word for the false gods and desert spirits of other nations
and the word they settled on was damon by the time the gospels were written damon only meant an
unclean spirit for jesus to drive out and all the good in between spirits were called angels but
everything else was thrown in with satan then augustine argued that every last one of these
spirits including the kind that guided socrates is a liar wearing a helpful face out to trick
you away from god therefore when the word came into the english language it already meant
something evil so centuries later a few scholars tried to rescue the old spelling of damon to bring
it back to the guidance spirit it used to be but the damage had already been done what about the
word sin so that comes from a greek word hamartia and it started out as a word used in archery it
meant to miss but then it stopped meaning a bad shot and started meaning a bad soul and authority
so when we hear that word now we picture the police the courts the governments
someone with the power to make you do as you’re told but it grows out of the
latin author the author the one who originates
the thing and brings it into being authority first
meant the power to create and it was
accompanied by respect it had nothing to do with force or
obedience or law every single one of these words has
shifted from something neutral and human into something fearful that needs to be
managed by an external authority when you strip this autonomy away you’re left
with frightened obedient divided crowds that need someone to guide them doesn’t
this sound like modern politics to you and I think this is why this matters now
it matters because it’s the same system that runs today it may have started with
god but then it became a system that was useful that could run nations it became political parties
and now it is an algorithm on your phone that has learned what scares you and feeds that to you
every day so were the gnostics naming a similar power and system and did they write it down in
a way that made sense to them when they describe the demiurge a false authority that runs on fear
are they describing the same system that we have today we’ve handed over our
autonomy and our judgment to other because we’re told that they will keep
us safe don’t step out of line don’t think differently and whatever you do do
not trust the person standing right next to you frightened people become
suspicious they don’t talk to each other and compare notes and as a result they
will always remain divided there will always be an enemy we need to be
protected from and they are the only ones who can do it. But there is hope. In every tradition
there is a thread that repeats underneath all of the fear. What I find wondrous is that the way
out of this system was also written into the traditions that we use to keep us afraid. So if
you were to take a walk in nature you’ll often find that the remedy for a toxic plant grows
naturally right alongside it. And the world has a way of offering this too. The control and the cure
side by side. The Quran says we were made into different peoples and tribes for a single reason
so that we could come to know one another. The Torah circles back to the stranger. Look after
the stranger because you were strangers once yourselves. And there’s a word in southern Africa
Ubuntu. That means a person only becomes a person through other people. These teachings from every
tradition written down by people who’ve never met, don’t share a language, gave a very simple
message. Go and get to know each other. As I said I’m not here to exchange one set of beliefs for
another. Instead I would ask that you think and choose for yourself. But here is one thought I
would like to leave you with the next time something calls itself sacred or
patriotic or simply true and in the same breath doesn’t want you to ask questions
take a moment to pause and question what you’re really looking at because we have
seen the pattern and system before so perhaps we are in apocalyptic times and
And it’s a time where the truth finally reveals itself.
Source: The Conscious Radical