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Revelation 13:11-13
New Catholic Bible
Revelation 13:11-13
New Catholic Bible
11 A Beast Rises from the Earth.[a] Then I saw another beast, this one rising up out of the earth. It had two horns like those of a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. 12 It wielded all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it forced the earth and all its inhabitants to worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. 13 It performed great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all.
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- Revelation 13:11 The beast comes probably from Asia, because it was the East that gave rise to so many religious currents of thought that promoted emperor worship. The time has come when pressures are brought to bear and people are seduced. This picture fits in very well with the reign of Domitian, who banished Christians from the empire for refusing to practice emperor worship, the new sign of civic submission. The majority of believers resist, despite pressures and seductions of every kind.
The number of the beast has always been a snare for those who seek, by way of abstruse calculations, to identify the Antichrist with some figure of their own time. The number probably conceals the name of some personage known to readers of that time; the letters of the Greek alphabet and those of the Hebrew alphabet also stood for numbers, as is still the case with the Roman alphabet to some extent. Using gematria, a procedure for interpreting numbers, it was certainly possible to discern in the number 666 the words “Emperor Nero” in Hebrew. If we read “616” instead of “666,” as some manuscripts do, it could be “Emperor Nero” in Greek.
