The Number 666 Is the Hebrew Gematria for "Nero Caesar"

A companion essay to my new book Nero: The Emperor Rome Couldn't Forgive.

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The beast with the number

There is a line in the Book of Revelation, chapter 13, verse 18, that every reader of the New Testament eventually runs into:

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

For most of the two thousand years between John of Patmos writing that sentence and the present day, Christian readers have treated 666 as a riddle to be solved, a prophecy to be decoded, or a warning about some future figure. It has been attached, at various points, to the pope, to Napoleon, to Stalin, to Hitler, to Henry Kissinger, to social security numbers, to barcodes, and to Bill Gates. Every generation produces its own Antichrist candidate, and 666 is the number they all end up wearing.

It was originally about Nero.

This is not a controversial claim among biblical scholars. It has been the academic consensus since the nineteenth century. It is the most likely reading preserved even in the text itself — there is a Greek manuscript variant of Revelation 13:18 that reads 616 instead of 666, and the 616 variant also resolves to Nero, which is a remarkable coincidence unless the verse was originally about Nero all along.

Here is how the math works.

Hebrew letters double as numbers. Each letter has a numerical value — aleph is 1, bet is 2, gimel is 3, and so on. The technique of adding up the numerical values of the letters in a word or name to produce a single number is called gematria, and it was a standard feature of Jewish religious and mystical thought in the first century.

The name "Nero Caesar," written in Hebrew letters as NRWN QSR:

• N (nun) = 50
• R (resh) = 200
• W (vav) = 6
• N (nun) = 50
• Q (qoph) = 100
• S (samekh) = 60
• R (resh) = 200

Total: 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 = 666.

The 616 variant is what you get if you drop the final nun — that is, if you write the name as "Nero Caesar" in its shorter Latin-based transliteration, NRW QSR, without the terminal n. Greek manuscripts preserved both forms because different scribal traditions worked from different underlying transliterations. They were both always pointing at the same man.

John of Patmos was writing, most scholars think, in the 90s CE, about twenty-five years after Nero's death. He was writing in Greek, in a literary form — apocalyptic vision — that cloaked political commentary in symbolic code because open political commentary about the Roman Empire was suicidally dangerous. When he wanted to name the emperor who had launched the first Roman persecution of Christians, and who had come to represent, in Christian memory, the archetype of the persecuting tyrant, he could not simply write "Nero." He wrote a number. His audience — first-century Greek-speaking Jewish-Christian readers — knew how to read it.

The original Antichrist was Nero.

Why this book

The fact that 666 is originally a Nero code is not new. It is in every competent scholarly commentary on Revelation. What is less well known is the rest of the story — what Nero actually did to the Christians, how that persecution became a two-thousand-year legend, and what the historical man underneath the legend was actually like.

That is the book I have just written. Nero: The Emperor Rome Couldn't Forgive is a narrative biography of the Roman emperor Nero (37-68 CE), written in the tradition of Mary Beard, Tom Holland, and Adrian Goldsworthy. It tells the whole story — the boy in the palace, the mother who engineered his reign, the five good years, the matricide, the fire, the persecution, the Golden House, the Greek tour, the suicide on a roadside at thirty, and then the afterlife.

And the afterlife is the strange part.

Nero died in June 68 CE. His body was burned, the ashes placed in his family tomb. But for almost thirty years afterwards, impostors claiming to be the returned Nero kept appearing in the eastern provinces, each one drawing a real following. The first appeared in 69 CE, the year Nero died. The second appeared around 80 CE. The third appeared around 88-89 CE and nearly caused a war with Parthia.

People did not believe he was dead. Or rather, many people in the eastern empire did not want to believe he was dead. His popularity in the Greek-speaking east, where he had been perceived not as a tyrant but as a cultured philhellene who had formally freed Greece from taxation, was real, widespread, and lasting. The false Neros were plausible because the real Nero had been loved.

The Christian tradition that turned Nero into the Antichrist was, in part, a response to this eastern Nero-devotion. The Nero redivivus legend — Nero returning from the dead — was already circulating in pagan form when Christian writers picked it up and rerouted it. In their telling, the returning Nero would not be the beneficent artist-emperor beloved of his provincial subjects. He would be the beast. He would be the persecutor come back to finish what he started.

This is the work the number 666 was doing in Revelation. It was coding a political claim — that the Roman empire's most famous persecutor was the template for all subsequent persecutors, that the end of history would bring him back in the person of whatever emperor or power most resembled him. It was not, originally, about some future Antichrist. It was about Nero, and the way that name had already entered Christian memory as the archetype of imperial cruelty.

What the real Nero did

The persecution of the Christians happened in Rome, in the late summer and autumn of 64 CE, in the weeks after the Great Fire. The fire had destroyed ten of Rome's fourteen districts. The rebuilding was going to be enormous. The political pressure on Nero, who had been at Antium when the fire started, was severe. The rumor in the streets was that he had started the fire himself to clear space for his palace-building ambitions — a rumor that was almost certainly false, as I argue in the book at some length, but that was politically inconvenient.

Nero needed a scapegoat. He chose the Christians.

Who were the Christians in Rome in 64 CE? An obscure Jewish sect, mostly Greek-speaking, numbering probably in the low hundreds, with no political influence and no powerful patrons. They had been in Rome for perhaps twenty or thirty years, kept under loose surveillance as a potentially disruptive religious movement but otherwise ignored. Most Romans had never heard of them. Most educated Romans could not have distinguished them from mainstream Jews — the distinction itself was, in 64 CE, still being worked out.

Tacitus, writing fifty years later, gives the best account of what happened:

To abolish this rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost cruelty, a class of men hated for their abominations, whom the crowd called Christians.

The tortures Tacitus describes are specific and horrifying. Crucifixion. Being sewn into animal skins and torn apart by dogs. Being set alight in Nero's garden as human torches during a night festival. These were theatrical executions, designed to be seen. The venue was the emperor's own park, the Horti Neronis, which happened to lie across the Tiber on the Vatican hill — the same hill where, some decades later, Christians would begin to venerate the supposed burial place of Peter, who by tradition was executed in this persecution and buried on the spot.

Tacitus, who was not remotely sympathetic to the Christians, adds an unusual detail. The tortures were so extreme that even the Roman crowd began to feel sympathy for the victims. There arose, in Tacitus's phrase, miseratio — pity. The Romans who had watched crucifixions and amphitheater executions for generations found the Neronian persecution of the Christians to be beyond what they could stomach. They began to suspect that the emperor was doing this not from justice but from spectacle and political convenience. The persecution, in other words, failed. It did not clear Nero's name. It actually hurt him politically, because it was too cruel, too public, and too obviously designed for show.

This is an important detail for understanding the afterlife. The Christians who survived the persecution — and most of them did; the community in Rome was small but it was not extinguished — remembered it in specific and traumatic detail. The torture methods entered the earliest Christian martyrologies. The names of the martyrs, including by tradition Peter, became foundational to the Roman church's sense of its own history. And the image of the emperor as persecutor — beast-like, theatrical, cruel for the sake of cruelty — fused with the surviving Jewish apocalyptic tradition of imperial beasts.

When John of Patmos sat down to write Revelation, in the 90s, the image was already formed. He gave it a number.

What we lose when we lose the original

Most contemporary Christian reading of Revelation 13 has forgotten the original Nero reference. The 666 riddle has been reattached to so many different figures over the centuries that it now functions more as a general-purpose warning against tyranny than as a specific historical reference. This is not, in itself, a bad thing. A text that outgrows its original context is a text that has done what successful religious texts do.

But something is lost when we lose the original. What is lost is the specificity of the historical encounter — the memory that the first Christian encounter with imperial power was not abstract, was not generalized, was not theoretical, but was in fact a specific set of people being tortured and killed by a specific emperor in a specific summer to cover a specific piece of political inconvenience. The beast of Revelation 13 is not an abstraction. It is a man who liked to perform, who built himself a golden house, who murdered his own mother, and who, when he needed a scapegoat for a fire, chose an obscure religious minority and had them burned in his garden.

That man is the subject of my book.

He was not, I argue, a monster in any simple sense. He was a young man broken by an impossible job, a dysfunctional family, and the hostile authorship of his own memory. He was also a murderer. Both things are true. The difficulty of holding them together is what makes him interesting.

One of the things I wanted the book to do — and whether it succeeds is a question for readers — is to let the number 666 recover its original meaning. Not to diminish its Christian significance but to ground that significance in what actually happened. The number is a weapon. It was forged in a specific moment of violence. The man it originally named was a real person with a face on a coin. He killed his mother. He built a palace the size of a small city. He competed in the Olympic Games as a performer. He died on a roadside at thirty.

To know Nero is to know the original of the archetype.

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To read the full story, including the matricide at Baiae, the Great Fire, the first Christian persecution, the Golden House, the Greek tour, the suicide, and the two-thousand-year afterlife — find Nero: The Emperor Rome Couldn't Forgive on Kindle.