Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: curtain@ucscf.ucsc.edu (Adam D. Katz) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Numerology? Message-ID: Date: 18 Apr 91 07:20:10 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz Lines: 22 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I have been reading through this newsgroup, and most of it makes sense to me. The only thing that I am really confused about is the numerology. Someone added up the number is Caesar Nero's name and came up with 666. This supposedly proved that Caesar Nero was satan. Do people really believe in this? If you look hard enough, you can prove anything you want using the bible. And some people are certainly looking hard enough. Counting the number of words in a passage seems awefully silly to me. I am sure that if I did enough number manipulations, I could show that our moderator's number is 666, and therefore, here is satan. -Adam [In this case there's pretty good reasons to think that the author of Rev. meant something of that sort. First, numerology is something that we know was actually used in that period for that kind of literature. Second, the text talks about the number of the name and then says that it is the number of a man. It's really pretty explicit. Scholars have a couple of different guesses as to who might have been meant, but I don't think there's any serious doubt that something of the kind was intended. That doesn't mean you have to accept all applications of numerology to the Bible, but in this particular case I think it's pretty clear. --clh]