The Anti-Christ

The fundamental view of Revelations is that the Anti-Christ has yet to appear on this planet. This presumption sure has made for a lot of great books and movies. However, many scholars believe the Anti-Christ has already come and gone… it being Nero. I watched a wonderful show about the Bible the other night and it spoke about the belief that Nero was the Anti-Christ.

First, who was Nero? He was the step-son of the Emperor. His mother convinced the Emperor to name Nero successor instead of the Emperor’s own biological son. When this was done, they killed the Emperor, leaving Nero in power. Nero’s mother believed that his new power was equally her’s. He disagreed and had her killed.

Later, Nero wanted to build a grand, massive palace in downtown Rome. The problem? A lot of rich Romans had homes there. The answer? Start a fire and blame the Christians. So, a fire broke out in the middle of Rome and Nero blamed the young Christian movement. This act began an era of Christian persecution rarely matched in history.

Nero then built a massive, indulgent palace with gold encrusted into the stone, and precious stones used throughout the architecture. He built a man-made lake that was gigantic and his self indulgence was so massive that everyone in Rome hated him. Eventually, Nero took his own life and the Romans immediately tore down his palace. They drained the lake and built the Coliseum on it’s location, using the aqua ducts that once fed the man-made lake to feed the Coliseum so that mock naval battles could be displayed.

As mentioned everyone hated and feared Nero. In order to speak cryptically, there was a process, the name of which escapes me, where you would take the original Greek, convert it to Hebrew and convert that to numbers. Using this process Nero converts to 666. The defining moment for scholars in Nero’s assignment as the Anti-Christ is that in an ancient parchment of Revelations, they found the number of the Anti-Christ to be 616, not 666. Why does this solidify Nero as the Anti-Christ? Because one of the ways to spell Nero’s name was Neron (like Pete and Peter), and if you take Neron, convert the Greek to Hebrew and convert the Hebrew to numbers, you get 616.

That’s a pretty compelling argument. So, if Nero is the Anti-Christ then what about the second coming of Jesus? Well, as far as I can tell, scholars haven't found any evidence of that :)