The Credit Card Number of the Beast

The Credit Card Number of the Beast April 26, 2015

Richard Haynes shared yet another way that one can find 666 in an everyday object. He begins with this:

Roman-300x247greek-300x249 bab-300x249

And then combines them to get this:

VISA 666 combined = VISA 666

I wonder whether the person who came up with this is willing to bear the stigma of being wrong. Calling the letter “stigma” is an anachronism, reflecting the use of the character in much later times to represent the combination of sigma and tau together. The character known as digamma, representing a final sigma, evolved through a range of forms and so didn’t look like an “s” until significantly later than the time when the Book of Revelation was composed. Even so, suggesting that the author of Revelation had in mind credit cards (making the imaginative stretch that the Babylonian 6 looks even remotely like an “A” – I think the person suggesting got VIS and then said “Eh, close enough”) rather than what 666 would have meant to an ancient reader turns Revelation into a mean prank on its recipients.

Finding the number of the beast in credit cards, like finding 666 in UPC barcodes, is a passtime of people who don’t understand the Book of Revelation. And like the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy popular in the same circles, it seems that no matter how many times the details of their claims are shown to be wrong, it just leads to changing the details, and not to changing their approach to the Bible at a more fundamental level.

 


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