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Comment by inflatableDodo | Hacker News Reader

I like the random numerology, really adds weight to the argument:

>We’ve reported that a squadron of 66 bombers were launched on August 6th (666) to bomb the municipality of Imabari, even though Imabari. had been bombed already, twice.

>This bombing squadron may well have fire-bombed Hiroshima instead, as Hiroshima was not far away.

According to early surviving versions of Revelations, the number of the beast is actually 616 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080110172555/http://news.natio... - however this revelation doesn't appear to have filtered through to the conspiratoraly minded as of yet.

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666 is Gematria numerology applied to Nero’s name in Greek, 616 is what you get with the Latin spelling, it’s more of a confirmation than a contradiction

Given Nero was Roman, his name will presumably be from the Latin. If the Greek version of the spelling differs, then 666 surely must be in error.

Unless they meant that the number of the beast is Nero's name when you attempt to write it in Greek, though that seems something of a stretch, even for numerology afficionados.

Here’s a source that gets into it, the numerology is calculated out of Hebrew transliteration so there’s some creativity involved in both cases, but while Nero would write his name in Latin, the writers of the New Testament used Greek

> It only is when the words are transliterated from Greek into Hebrew and then calculated that the numeration adds up to 666 (nrwn qsr, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200). Even so, this is an alternate spelling, a letter being transliterated in "Neron" (nrwn instead of nrw) but not in "Caesar" (qsr instead of qysr)

> If the Latin (rather than the Greek) spelling "Nero Caesar" is transliterated into Hebrew (nrw qsr), the final "n" in Neron being omitted (and its corresponding value of 50), the name computes as 616, which is the number indicated in the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gla...

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