I previously thought that, in my blog post on Anti-Vaccinationism, written about 6 months ago, I had said all I felt compelled to say about anti-vaxxer movements. With the recent FDA approval of some COVID vaccines, I had hoped that the protests of many who remained vaccine hesitant had been addressed and we would see wider vaccination rates. Instead, we see goalposts moved and refusals doubled down on, and we find renewed opposition to vaccination mandates on the grounds of individual and religious liberty. On one hand, considering the long history of organized protest to compulsory vaccination, which I discussed in depth in my April blog post, I am not that surprised at the resistance to vaccine mandates, although in most cases organizations and governments are not even currently discussing the enforcement of compulsory vaccination and are instead offering the alternative of weekly testing to accommodate vaccine holdouts, making most of their rhetoric and bluster effectively moot. I suppose what I do find surprising is the outrage and shock at the mere idea the government might consider the coercion of safeguards to protect the public against this deadly virus and the suggestion that it amounts to some kind of unconstitutional medical tyranny. This viewpoint, which is popular right now (I have even seen it espoused by some otherwise rational and educated individuals who work in academia) demonstrates an ignorance of American history and a basic misunderstanding of the ideals of liberty on which our country was founded. The coercion of precautions against infectious disease and infringements on individual liberties for the sake of community safety can be traced all the way back to the first quarantine laws in Massachusetts colony, 1647, leading in the 18th century to the empowerment of the government to forcibly remove sick individuals from their homes in order to isolate them and mitigate the harm they did to others. Anyone who has served in our Armed Forces and received so many jabs they don’t even know what they’re all for will tell you that compulsory inoculation has long been practiced by our government, and this goes all the way back to the Continental Army and General George Washington. Indeed, Washington was at first resistant to instituting a smallpox inoculation mandate, but his own soldiers convinced him that they had more to fear from the disease than they did from their enemy’s swords. After the advent of the vaccine and the first vaccine mandate law was passed in the U.S. in 1809, opposition to compulsory smallpox vaccination entered the courts, as I have written about previously. The final word on the constitutionality of vaccine mandates came in 1905, in the Supreme Court case Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, in which a Cambridge City mandate was challenged. The Supreme Court upheld the law, finding that our individual liberty does not extend to putting others at risk. Since then, when the issue has come up again, specifically in cases regarding vaccine mandates for children in schools, courts have consistently looked back at Jacobsen v. Massachusetts and considered the matter settled. Thus, the idea that governments, or organizations, instituting a vaccine mandate is somehow illegal, or even an overreach, is simply false. For those who might protest that it’s not a matter of the letter of the law but rather the spirit, and that the Framers of the Constitution would never have countenanced such a disregard of individual freedoms, let us look to the wording of the Constitution’s preamble, in which the Framers wrote explicitly that their intention in formalizing our constitutional rights was not to make individual rights sacrosanct but rather to “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare.” And American history in particular has also shown that the best way to promote general welfare during an epidemic, the best defense against an infectious disease, is robust vaccination, and that mandatory vaccination laws work. Comparing smallpox infection rates in states with and without vaccine mandates between 1919 and 1928 reveals that states without vaccine mandates saw as many as 20 times more cases. However, what I find really complicates the issue is the notion of religious dissent to vaccination mandates. If a religious doctrine truly holds that the faithful must not be vaccinated, then there is little left to argue, except the validity of that doctrine and the reasoning behind it, which is a losing game, especially when the most prevalent religious objection to vaccination relies on a creative interpretation of an ancient prophecy about the end of the world.

I am writing this post as one final attempt to use historical insight in order to refute the logic of vaccine critics. Specifically, I want to address the claims that getting the vaccine, or requiring proof of vaccination, somehow fulfills the prophecies of John the Revelator about the so-called Mark of the Beast, and the argument that this interpretation of a few verses in Revelation constitute grounds for the religious exemption of Evangelicals, who comprise about a quarter of the U.S. population. Before we can really address this notion, though, we need some foundation of understanding. In case any listener is unfamiliar, the verses of Revelation in question are in Chapter 13—already an unlucky number. In it, the author describes a vision of a beast rising out of the sea with numerous heads and horns with crowns. This beast is described like a chimera, with elements of different animals, and is described as having great power and authority, and is said to miraculously survive a deadly wound. Now don’t be mistaken. This is just the first beast in Revelation 13. The next beast described by the revelator also rises to the same heights of power, and furthermore performs wonders and forces the world to worship the first beast, executing any who refuse. Verses 16 through 18 are of especial interest here: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 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.” These verses mark the beginning of the legend. Understandably, the beasts of the vision are interpreted in terms of power structures. The beast with multiple heads and crowns, one of whose heads survives a killing blow, has traditionally been interpreted in broader terms as a nation or empire or religion, while the second beast who forces worship of the first and institutes the Mark, is usually seen as a specific world leader. Not all interpretations of these verses look to the future. Many have looked to the past, to world powers and figures at the time it was written. We will get to that. What’s important to understand now is that Evangelicals take a Futurist view of prophecy, believing it to be a blueprint of the end times. In their view the second beast is typically the Antichrist, and the Mark is a milestone that they are always on the lookout to identify. Anything that might be clocked as the Beast’s Mark helps them to characterize their own times as the End Times, and importantly, allows them to demonize any political leaders or cultural trends they want to resist.

A woodcut by Albrecht Dürer depicting the Beast of Revelation. Public Domain.

The current iteration of the Mark of the Beast legend—the conspiracy theory that the vaccine itself or vaccine documentation are really the forced mark that will make of any otherwise faithful Christian a damned heretic, effectively erasing their name from the Book of Life and denying them their eternal reward—actually involves the unlikely figure of Bill Gates. That’s right, a software developer whose career has taken him from working on computers in a garage to his philanthropy efforts on the world stage, Bill Gates is currently viewed by many as the Beast, or at least as the man behind the Beast’s Mark. It seems to have begun when Gates, a proponent of vaccination in the developing world, suggested that by helping children survive into adulthood, vaccines could help slow population growth because with fewer fears for their children’s survival, families may end up having fewer total children. The misunderstanding and purposeful misuse of this statement turned into the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was intentionally thinning populations using vaccines that kill. The conspiracy theory intersected with the Mark of the Beast legend when a digital identity initiative called ID2020 announced in 2019 that it was joining forces with a vaccine alliance with which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partners in order to spearhead a digital identity program in developing nations. This was misinterpreted as an announcement that Bill Gates was putting microchips into people under the guise of vaccine injections. From there, it was only a skip and a jump to identifying Gates’s vaccine initiatives with the Mark of the Beast. Fears that vaccines might be the Mark of the Beast were, after all, not exactly new. Some early resisters of the smallpox vaccine saw the mark it left on the arms of the vaccinated and also cried Mark of the Beast.

The notion of an implanted microchip being the Mark of the Beast was also not new. It does seem, after all, the most logical and modern way to explain why this mark would be necessary for buying and selling, as in the imaginations of the public, it would be like an identification and a credit card that you’d never misplace. The makers of the VeriChip, a silicon microchip promoted in the early 2000s as a medical identification device or as a tracking solution such as we use on dogs, can certainly attest to the difficulty of convincing the public that their product was not the Mark of the Beast; it was one of the principal obstacles they struggled with in launching their product and probably the reason why it didn’t really take off. Never mind the fact that such microchips are subcutaneous, injected under the skin rather than into muscle tissue, and need a much larger gauge needle than is used in vaccinations, and require programming for each individual subject, which obviously isn’t happening before each jab of a vaccine dose. The pieces all seemed to fit, and the more conspiracy theorists looked, the more pieces they seemed to find. For example, in 2019, Microsoft applied for a patent for a system that rewards the fulfillment of tasks verified by the sensing of physical movement with cryptocurrency—a patent for something that sounds like an exercise app on a smartwatch, but which was erroneously claimed to be a patent for an injectable microchip… something that has certainly already been patented, since the VeriChip has been around for two decades. The really unfortunate thing is that the proposed patent was numbered W02020060606, taken by conspiracy theorists as the Number of the Beast, and thus confirmation of their theories. And how was this is all tied to the COVID vaccine in particular? Bill Gates did not develop COVID vaccines, despite what many a conspiracy theorist might tell you. Rather, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took part in a pandemic simulation in 2019, called Event 201, in which a thought experiment was discussed as to what the response might look like if, for example, a novel coronavirus crossed species to infect humans. This event has been presented like it was a shadowy Illuminati meeting, when it was in fact a well-publicized and widely attended event, and not the first of its kind, since virologists have feared such a virus emerging for a long time. So rather than a vast conspiracy in plain sight, this appears to be a series of rather unfortunate coincidences that has now resulted in a massive and baseless conspiracy theory responsible for many avoidable deaths.

An implantable RFID chip. Image by Amaal Graffstra, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0) — An implantable RFID chip. Image by Amaal Graffstra, licensed under Creative Commons **(CC BY-SA 2.0)**

Before fears about injectable microchips were the fears about RFID, or radio-frequency identification technology generally. Christian apocalypticists have been raising the alarm about these so-called spychips being the Mark of the Beast since they first started being implemented in cattle tagging and, in the early 2000s, when major retailers began installing EPC, or Electronic Product Codes, on most merchandise in order to track inventory and product information online. In fact, anxieties about injectable RFID chips today seem rather pointless, since most of us already carry a credit card with an RFID chip in it. It’s kind of like worrying about corporations using smartphones to record your conversations when they don’t really need to because they mine far more actionable data just by monitoring browsing and social media habits. These fears about the RFID-enabled EPC tags echo even earlier fears about UPC or barcodes potentially being the Mark of the Beast. When UPCs were widely adopted, many Evangelicals were certain that what would come next would be barcode tattoos on the forehead or the right hand, thus fulfilling the prophecy. And credit cards also didn’t need a chip in them for Evangelical Christians to fear that they were the Mark of the Beast. Indeed, it seemed anything with a number might be considered the dreaded Mark. Bank routing numbers have 9 digits, which is 6 upside down. Your full zip code, too, is nine digits. Uh-oh. Well what is one to do, if you’re a God-fearing Christian and want no part of this forced worship of the beast? Clearly you must take your money out of the banks. And you must get yourself and your family off the grid. There were many Evangelicals in the late 1970s and 80s who did indeed feel that the only way to be a true Christian was to go full outlaw mountain man. This had been widely encouraged by the bestselling book The Late Great Planet Earth, which predicted a specific end times scenario, most likely occurring before the end of the 1980s. One such Christian American influenced by this apocalyptic culture was Randy Weaver, who believed that credit cards and the computer systems that networked them were the Mark of the Beast. In order to resist what he saw as Revelation come true, he moved his family to a cabin in remote Idaho, and began to associate with the only other well-armed group of professed Christians resisting the government and living off the grid out there, the Aryan Nations. To illustrate the danger of such apocalyptic thought, things did not turn out well for the Weaver family. When the ATF failed in their plan to use a firearm charge to coerce Weaver into informing on the white supremacists’ activities, the result was an infamous shootout and standoff at Ruby Ridge, the Weavers’ home, during which a Deputy U.S. Marshall and Randy’s son and wife were killed.

It's important to note here that a lot of these interpretations of the Mark of the Beast inherently rely on metaphor. If it’s not an actual barcode tattooed on you, than it’s not really a literal interpretation of a visible mark on the hand or head. An injected microchip, one might argue, could maybe be noticed as a bump; and others have pointed to a verse in Revelation about those with the Mark being afflicted with a sore to suggest that a subcutaneous chip might result in some kind of dermal ulceration, but this too takes liberties with the scripture, which is clearly referring to the sore and the Mark as separate things. Purchasing RFID tagged products, having credit card debt on record, opening a bank account or just living on the grid, these interpretations clearly have nothing to do with a literal mark on the right hand and head, and certainly neither does receiving a vaccine or having a vaccination record. This freedom from literal interpretation characterizes many of the explanations of this prophecy throughout history. It has long been associated with non-conformity and resistance to cultural norms as well. In fact, Pentecostal critics of World War One believed that nationalism was the Mark of the Beast, using the idea to support their political views. During the Reformation, this meant interpreting the visions of John the Revelator so as to see Roman Catholicism and the Papacy everywhere: signified in the heads and crowned horns of the first beast; represented by Babylon the Great, the corrupt city of the Antichrist; and embodied in the figure of the Whore of Babylon. In the 17th century, using some creative calculations, various biblical scholars suggested that the year in which the Antichrist would fall would be 1666, a year whose number further explained the Number of the Beast. This became a common fear, dreaded by many European Protestants during the decades preceding the so-called Year of the Beast, and for those in London, who suffered a plague and a devastating fire that year, it seemed that their interpretation of the prophecy had been confirmed. This notion of the infamous riddle that was the Number of the Beast would be echoed 333 years later, when worries about computers and Y2K led many, once again, to fear that the year 1999 would somehow fulfill the terrible prophecy of the Number of the Beast. Revelation is clear that the Mark of the Beast is one and the same as the Number of the Beast, and it is never satisfactorily explained by these interpretations how or why a calendar date might be received on the right hand or the forehead, even metaphorically.

Anonymous oil painting of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Public Domain.

Revelation further states explicitly that, rather than a date, the Mark is “the number of a man,” and more specifically “the number of his name,” which is why the bulk of the scholarly interpretations of the text treat it as a kind of cryptogram, a code that, once solved, will reveal the literal name of the beast, the identity of the Antichrist. Some of suggested, for example, that it was simply a matter of the number of characters in a name, thus it could be claimed that the number of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name was 666 because each name contained six letters. Others have looked to Roman numerals, which of course correspond well with English letters. Typically, though, those who have tried to decrypt the Number of the Beast in earnest make their attempts using gematria, an arcane Kabbalistic method of interpreting scriptures in which each Hebrew character corresponds to a specific number. There is a real historical case to be made that the 666 cryptogram does refer to gematria. It was certainly in use in that part of the world and was known to be used for calculating the number of a name, as we see in an Assyrian inscription from the 8th century BCE that King Sargon II built a certain wall to a certain measurement “to correspond with the numerical value of his name.” Gematria is originally used with the Hebrew alphabet, but that hasn’t stopped some theorists from applying the numbers 1-26 to the English alphabet and applying that alphanumeric code to find out the identity of the Antichrist. During World War One, again, Penetecostal writers used this English version of gematria to suggest that the Kaiser was the Antichrist because his name and titles, William von Hohenzollern, King of Prussia, Emperor of all Germany, converted quite nicely to the number 666. At the advent of the World Wide Web, anxious Christians used gematria to suggest that using the Internet was taking the Mark of the Beast, for right there at the beginning of every URL was www, which corresponded to the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Among ancient scholars, like Irenaeus and Andreas of Caesarea, using gematria to solve the 666 cryptogram led to the listing of random names, like Evanthas, Lateinos, and Teitan, not the names of specific figures, but names maybe to be on the lookout for, since their number was equivalent to the Number of the Beast. The problem was that there were and are far too many variations in method. First, if you don’t like the numerical value you get using gematria, you can always massage the numbers. One method of gematria involves integral reduction: say you get the number 231 from a name. By adding its integers—two, three, and one—together, you can reduce it to the number 6. This is the suppleness of such numerology. Beyond that, there is the problem of transliteration, as each interpreter might make a different decision regarding which Hebrew letter corresponds to whatever language’s letters they are using, since gematria requires that a word or name be converted to its Hebrew equivalent before its numbers can be determined. This was a problem going all the way back to ancient scholars who wrestled with the 666 cryptogram, many of them writing in Greek. Hebrew, a Semitic language, does not lend itself to simple transliteration with European languages, since its phonemes, or distinct sounds, and its orthography, or spelling system, are so different, providing the translator with a lot of choices and making this anything but an exact science. This leads to the rational question of whether the author, John the Revelator, himself writing in Greek, actually intended his readers to perform such an esoteric decryption.

So then, who was John the Revelator, also called John the Theologian and John the Divine, author of the Book of Revelation? Christian tradition would have us believe he was one and the same as the author of the Gospel of John, but this is not exactly a precise identification since the identity of that gospel’s author is also widely disputed, which I spoke about in my episode entitled, The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John. What the Book of Revelation tells us is that the author wrote it while on the island of Patmos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Thus the author’s other appellation, John of Patmos. Many biblical scholars place its composition between 81 and 96 CE, during the reign of Roman Emperor Domitian, suggesting that whoever this John was, he went to Patmos seeking refuge during Domitian’s legendary persecution of Christians. However, other scholars have suggested that there is little contemporary source support to actually confirm the truth of Domitian’s supposed persecution of Christians, which were only first mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea hundreds of years later. An alternative dating, based on the writings of Irenaeus, whose Against Heresies, written about 180 CE, is one of the earliest exegeses, or critical interpretations, of the scripture, is that it was written during the time of Nero, who reigned as Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 CE. With this dating in mind, we must consider the possibility that John of Patmos was not at all referring cryptically to some far flung future events and figures in his Revelation but was instead speaking figuratively about contemporary events. This would be to take a so-called Preterist view of Revelation. In this view, Babylon the Great is Imperial Rome, and the Beast, the number of whose name is 666, was Nero. Indeed, according to the gematria calculations of preterists who espouse this view, the name Nero, transliterated from Greek to Hebrew, yields numbers that do indeed add up to 666. But more than that, one problem that has plagued many an interpretation is the fact that some early versions of Revelation actually have a different Number of the Beast, identifying 616 as the “number of his name.” Funny enough, though, Nero Caesar, transliterated not from Greek but from Latin into Hebrew, yields the gematria result 616, thus explaining the deviation in some versions of Revelation. And more than just the fitting of his name with the Number of the Beast, Nero and Rome can be made to fit other descriptions of the beast. The first beast, with many heads and crowns, might be seen as Rome, and the mortal wounding of one of the beast’s heads may refer to the assassination of Julius Caesar, which the Beast survived in that the empire survived, and the making of the world to worship the Beast may refer to Roman deification of their Emperors, starting posthumously with the cult of divus Iulius, making a god out of Julius Caesar. Or maybe after all the Number of the Beast refers specifically to the first beast, not the second (which is not exactly clear in the scripture) and the head of the beast who survives his mortal wound and is to be worshipped is a reference to Nero, for there was a legend after Nero’s suicide called Nero redivivus that said Nero did not really die or that he would soon return.

John of Patmos, depicted by by Hieronymus Bosch, 1505. Public Domain.

The Preterist view, in my mind, best explains the strange visions described in Revelation as well as the cryptogram Number of the Beast, and I encourage listeners to look into it further, as it is far more intricate than I can do justice in outline here. Still I am left with certain questions, such as the specific meaning of the statement that the Mark of the Beast would be received on the hand or forehead. This, I think, is the perennial problem with prophetic texts like these. One might compare them to, for example, the poetry of Nostradamus. Works of prophecy are so chock full of evocative but abstract and surreal imagery that they can be twisted to apply to whatever you want. So, purely as a thought experiment, let’s say I wanted to turn the political tables on Evangelicals and started suggesting that the prophecies of Revelation clearly point to figures or movements on the Right. Obviously the head of the beast that recovers from a mortal wound might refer to Donald Trump, who came down with COVID during his reelection campaign but recovered, or perhaps it could refer to his defeat in the election and the insistence by Qanon that he will return to office. If Trump were the Beast, then what is his Mark? Perhaps the alt-right hand gesture we sometimes hear about, or perhaps his MAGA hats, which place his symbol on his followers’ foreheads. And the flexibility of gematria allows us to turn his name into the Number of the Beast. Using a simple online gematria calculator, I get the value of 159 for Donald, a name with six digits. If I apply the integral reduction method, adding 1, 5, and 9, that six-letter name’s value reduces to 15, and one and five add up to, you guessed it, another six. Likewise, Trump yields the number 726, whose digits add to 15, which can again be reduced to six. I think you get the idea. Do I believe that Trump’s political career was predicted by John of Patmos thousands of years ago. No. If anything, this is just evidence that all claims about the Mark of the Beast are preposterous, especially considering all the many times they have been wrong—which is every time so far—and furthermore, it just goes to show that interpretations of prophecy should not be taken so seriously, especially if they are cynically used as a specious argument for religious exemption from a life-saving public health initiative like vaccines.

False Prophecy: The Mark of the Beast - 666

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