"Well, most Bible scholars say that the beast has already been here," Tuck said. "They say that 666 refers to the Roman Emperor Nero."

I did a double take. "It points to a specific person? I always thought it was just a vague symbol. How do they know it's Nero? When did he die, anyway?"

Tuck answered, "He died in 68 A.D., right around the time the Book of Revelation was written. And there are many reasons they think it was him." I loved how Tuck was so full of facts, and I awaited some more.

"The beast came out of the sea and had seven heads. Rome lies on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and it was called the city of seven hills. The circumstances of Nero's death appear to be described in Revelation 13:10, dying by the sword while destined for captivity. His contemporary Apollonius of Tyana actually called him a beast. But the biggest clue that points to Nero comes from the number 666."

Tuck then explained how 666 tied back to Nero. "Back then, when the oppressed Jews and Christians wanted to speak negatively of a powerful person without the Roman authorities knowing, they'd encode his name using the Hebrew numerology of gematria, which assigns numeric values to the letters. The Greek spelling of Nero's name is Neron Kaisar, which is nrvn qsr in Hebrew. Encoding these letters in gematria, we get 200, 60, 100, 50, 6, 200, and 50, the sum of which is 666. When the Bible invites people with understanding to count the number of the beast, the number of a man, which is 666, it's saying to use gematria to decode 666 as Nero."

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