John himself provides us with a clue to the identity of the beast; ” If anyone is clever enough he may interpret the number of the beast; it is the number of a man, the number 666’* (Rev 13:18).
By far the most usual interpretation of the conundrum is that the figure stands for the sum of the letters in Hebrew of the name ’Neron Caesar’. U n d o u b t e d l y there have been countless other explanations, and perhaps the interpretation is late in coming, but Robinson quotes the very interesting parallel from Suetonius,
’’Count the numerical values Of the letters in Nero’s name. And in ’murdered his own mother’,
You will find that their sum is the same.
48 —
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This suggests that Rev 13:18 is the Christian version of the same game. Robinson also quotes from Philostratus, Life of Apollonius where Nero is described as a beast,
We agree with Robinson that the beast is Nero, but Revelation is written at a time when "the beast, who once was and now is not, is at the same time the eighth." In other words, Nero is dead, and there is a reference to Ifero redivivus. Although Rev 13:14 might be interpreted as just a snatching back from the threshhold of death, we cannot say the same of Rev 17:11; "who once was and now is not" implies the death of the beast.
Charles traces stages of development in the myth about Nero.=^^ It began with a rumour that Nero was not dead but in hiding. We know from Tacitus that this began within months of his d e a t h , T h e n it was believed that Nero had fled to the Parthians, and that he would return to Rome at the head of a Parthian army. (In 80 A.D. an impostor was accepted by the Parthians. In 88 A.D. another impostor almost persuaded the Parthians that he was Nero.) The last phase of the myth was the fusion of the Nero myth with those of Antichrist and Beliar in the belief that Nero would rise from the dead as a Satanic power. It is only this last stage that can properly be called the Nero redivivus
myth, and this is the stage referred to in Rev 13 and Rev 17.
Now Charles contends that this phase belongs to the last decade of the first c e n t u r y , a n d he maintains that the fusion of the Nero and
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Antichrist myths could not have taken place before the first half of Domitian’s reign when the last Neronic pretender appeared in 86 A.D.^so
Robinson, however, would not see these stages as dependent on the passage of time, but on the pattern of credulity. He believes that Christians could have envisaged Nero emerging from the abyss very soon after his death, just as Herod believed that Jesus might be John the Baptist risen from the dead. In John the Baptist’s case, however, there was no popular belief that he had not died.
One feels that Charles has the stronger case. The belief that Nero was still alive and the expectation that he would return from the East were especially strong in Asia Minor, It seems more likely that a
Nero redivivus myth would emerge after the widespread belief that he was alive had waned,
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Emperor worship had started in the reign of Augustus who was worshipped in at least seven cities of Asia during his life-time. Robinson cites that Caligula was threatening to have his image imposed upon the temple in Jerusalem in 40 A.D, though this was averted by his death, and that a statue of Nero was set up for worship in Rome In 55 A.D, .
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But what Robinson does not make clear is that in Revelation there is mention not just of a decree to worship the emperor, but the
enforcement of emperor worship under penalty of death <i?ev20:4).
Now the first hard evidence of emperor worship being commanded under penalty of death is not until the reign of T r a j a n , a l t h o u g h we agree with Robinson that Pliny was probably using a stock test of
loyalty. How long it had been a stock test of loyalty is impossible to say with certainty. It seems more likely, however, to have originated under Domitian than under Nero, because it is in Domitian’s reign that as far as we know for the first time new municipalities had to swear by the genius of the emperor^®^ and that a soldier in Egypt took an oath by the "genius sacratissimi imperatoris Domitiani"