A History of the End of the World

The single most famous and provocative clue to the identity of the Beast of Revelation has always been the alphanumeric code that is expressed in the number 666: “Here is wisdom,” explains John. “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.”⁸⁶ The key to the code, as we have seen, is the numerical value of the letters in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets. By rendering the letters in a name as a series of numbers, it is possible to come up with “the number of a man”—that is, the numerical value of the letters in his name.

Nero, the first-century Roman emperor who has been depicted as a monster in Jewish, Christian, and pagan sources alike, has always been a favorite candidate because the numerical value of the Hebrew letters that spell “Nero Caesar” is, in fact, 666. The fact that Nero died an apparent suicide in the year 68 has never discouraged some readers of Revelation from regarding him as the Antichrist who is yet to come. John, after all, writes that the Beast “was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit,” which has been interpreted to mean that Nero lived, died, and will be raised from the dead to reign again in the end-times.⁸⁷ And, in fact, the notion of a resurrected Nero explains an otherwise deeply enigmatic line in Revelation about the seven-headed beast from the sea.

“One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound,” writes John, “but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder.”⁸⁸

John, who borrows freely from pagan sources, may have been inspired by a tale that was told about Nero in ancient Rome. According to a street rumor that was later elevated to the stature of a myth, Nero did not actually die by a self-inflicted knife wound during the tumult of a general uprising at the end of his reign; rather, the wounded emperor sought refuge with the Parthians, an enemy of ancient Rome, and would be miraculously sustained in life until the day when he would return to reign over Rome again. The tale was turned into a sacred prophecy of resurrection and return in one of the Sibylline Oracles.

“At the last time, there shall come from the ends of the earth a matricide,” the Sibyl predicts, identifying Nero by reference to the belief that he murdered his own mother. “He shall gain all power, and that for which he perished he shall seize once again.”⁸⁹

So John may have repurposed the pagan myth of Nero redivivus—the “returned Nero”—as a vision of the end-times. But Nero is hardly the only historical figure who has been written into the pages of Revelation by its imaginative and enterprising readers. Indeed, the cast of characters in Revelation has been made to play an astounding range of roles, and each generation has churned up new candidates for the title of the Antichrist. The Beast of Revelation, as it turns out, is a man for all seasons.

Even as Augustine was advocating for a spiritual reading of Revelation, for example, some of his fellow clerics were scaring the wits out of their congregants by conjuring up the monsters and malefactors who stalk its pages and placing them in the here and now. Martin of Tours (316–397)—a visionary who believed that he had once seen the Devil with his own eyes—was convinced that the “beast” of Revelation was alive and well somewhere in the world, the flesh-and-blood spawn of the Devil himself, sired in the womb of an unwitting woman and destined to “assume power as soon as he reached the proper age.”⁹⁰ One of Martin’s disciples, a man called Sulpicius, spread the same chilling message after Martin himself was dead and gone. Indeed, he anticipates the harum-scarum plotline of The Omen by a millennium and a half.

“Now, this is the eighth year since we heard these words from his lips,” writes Sulpicius in a work that first appeared at the beginning of the fifth century. “You may guess, then, how soon those things which we fear in the future are about to happen.”⁹¹

Signs of the end-times were seen everywhere by those who were looking for them in the fifth century. The barbarians at the gates of Rome, many of whom were baptized Christians, were seen as the armies of Satan whose arrival signaled the Second Coming: “Behold, from Adam all the years have passed,” declared one Christian sermonizer when Alaric and the Visigoths sacked the imperial capital in 410, “and now comes the day of judgment!”⁹² Earthquakes in Palestine and a solar eclipse that was recorded on July 19, 418, were seen as fulfillments of the prophecies of Revelation: “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood.”⁹³

Indeed, there were even more extravagant examples of the “ridiculous fancies” that Augustine so coolly disdained. Caught up in the apocalyptic panic—or, more likely, preying on those who were—one young man in Spain advertised himself as the resurrected John the Baptist and another man in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire posed as Elijah, thus invoking the passage in Revelation that predicts the coming of the two “witnesses” who would be the precursors of Christ. And a Christian chronicler of the same era argued that the numerical value of “Genseric,” the name of the Vandal king who had placed himself on the throne of Carthage in North Africa, was the dreaded and demonic 666.

The Roman empire may have been in its decline and fall during the tumultuous years of the fifth century—but the world manifestly did not end, and the prophecies of Revelation remained unfulfilled. Still, the readers of Revelation continued to look for signs and wonders in the world around them. After the armies of Islam charged out of the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, for example, the prophet Muhammad emerged as a compelling candidate for the Antichrist. One Spanish visionary, for example, calculated that Muhammad died in the year 666 on the Christian calendar—a fact that he confidently cited as proof that the founding prophet of Islam was the “beast” of Revelation whose death augured the imminent end of the world.

Once it began, of course, the restless and relentless search for a fleshand-blood Antichrist never ended, and precisely because the world itself never ended. Nero was an attractive candidate for the title of Antichrist among the readers and hearers of Revelation who recalled the first persecution of Christians in Rome, but Muhammad was a more credible choice for someone living in the early Middle Ages. During the Crusades, Saladin was seen as the Antichrist, and when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire was the Antichrist of the hour. By the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church regarded each other as the Antichrist. At any given point between late antiquity and our own times, the usual suspects in the search for the Antichrist have reflected the anxieties of the age.

“Pin-the-tail-on-the-Antichrist” has always been a popular pastime among some readers of Revelation. But perhaps even more energy and enterprise have been invested in the effort to calculate exactly when the world will end by studying the mystical numbers that are embedded in the text of Revelation. Jesus specifically forbids any such speculation—and Augustine admonishes all good Christians who are inclined to count the years until doomsday to “relax your fingers, and give them a little rest”—but the plain words of the Gospels and the church fathers have never deterred the mystical number-crunchers.⁹⁴

Like so much else in the apocalyptic tradition, the numbers game begins in the book of Daniel, where the prophet is granted a vision of the final ordeal of Israel: “It shall be for a time, times, and a half,” says one of his celestial mentors, “and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.”⁹⁵ By extrapolating from other and rather less obscure passages of Daniel—the prophet, as we have seen, refers to a period of 1,290 days or 1,335 days as the countdown clock to final salvation, a period roughly equal to three and a half years—some early readers of the book of Daniel decided that a “time” is a year, and “times” is two years. Thus, “a time, times, and a half” is understood to mean three and a half years.

Precisely the same period of time is invoked almost obsessively the book of Revelation. The woman clothed with the sun, for example, flees to the desert to escape the red dragon—and, according to John, she will stay there “a time, and times, and half a time.” Elsewhere in Revelation, John specifies that her sojourn will last 1,260 days. He predicts that the Gentiles will trample the holy city of Jerusalem for forty-two months, and the two witnesses will prophesy for 1,260 days. And John later predicts that the “beast from the sea” will reign over earth for forty-two months.⁹⁶ All of these periods are equal to three and a half years if we calculate on the basis of a thirty-day month. And, not coincidentally, three and one half is exactly half of John’s favorite number, the divine number seven.

According to a certain conventional wisdom that came to be embraced by apocalyptic date-setters, John means to reveal that the end of the world will come exactly three and a half years after the appearance of the Antichrist. A North African bishop called Evodius of Uzala, for example, assured his congregation in 412 that Satan himself will reign over the world as the Antichrist for exactly three and a half years before Jesus Christ returns to earth in triumph, all as predicted in the book of Revelation. The same three-and-a-half-year period was invoked