More 666 stuff

Previously I published a posting on the not usually mentioned fact that the Gospel of Mark has 666 verses as long as one deducts Mark 16:9-14 as all the better commentaries seem to tell us to do.

If you google ‘mark “verse count” 666 gospel’ my posting is the first two of the returns, and in fact is the only return to even discuss the issue. This does somewhat surprise me. I stumbled on the factoid whilst reading something or other on the Q hypothesis, where it said something like ‘of the 666 verses of Mark, X are found in Matthew and Y in Luke’, and I noted the 666. I already had the King James text in Excel, and so I added a column to count the verses. And lo and behold it checked out. How come nobody else had noted this?

Last month I added the following (with a reference to my blog posting) to the Wikipedia page, ‘Number of the Beast’:

The Gospel of Mark in the King James Bible has 678 verses, but of course the KJB has Mark as including 16:9-14, which are not in the best early Greek manuscripts, and scholarly consensus says that these twelve verses should not be included. Therefore 678 – 12 = 666.

The verse count of Mark is 666 !!!

Austin Ferrar, a theologian who did not use Gematria, describes the first six chapters of the Gospel of Mark as the ‘little gospel’ in that they foreshadow the entire Gospel. The verse count of the first six chapters is 248. Now 247 (in Gemetria one is allowed ±1) is the value of θηριον (therion=beast, as per Revelation 13:11), while 666, the full gospel, is the value of το μεγα θηριον (to mega therion = the great beast).

It survived there almost a week before some editor person removed it with the comment that ‘original research’ does not belong in Wikipedia !!!

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Also removed at the same time was the equally interesting fact:

666 is also the year of Islam’s founding, using the Julian calendar, which was in effect at the time Revelation was written. The Gregorian date of Islam’s founding (621 AD) is equivalent to year 666 in the Julian calendar, since we must add 45 years to a Gregorian date to convert it to the equivalent Julian date, i.e., 621 + 45 = 666.

Is this true?

• The Romans did start using the Calendar that we call ‘Julian’ in 45 BCE or 709 AUC, although they would not understand either of these counters. The calendar was actually devised by the Egyptian astronomer Sosgenes (on whom there is no Wiki page, nor any other web page), but named for the boss, as was the Napoleonic Code.
• 1 Muharram year 1 in Hijra, the Islamic Calendar, occurred on what the Christian Julian Calendar designates as 16 July 622. 622 Anno Domini (as Common Era used to be called) is 1375 AUC.
• 1375 AUC – 709 = 666
• 622 + 45 = 667. However there is no year Zero (0) in the Christian Calendar, so we deduct 1, and therefore get 666.

So the Wikipedia entry was essentially right, but needed to be better stated.

How do flukey numbers like this come to happen? We can of course say that it is one of Azathoth’s little jokes. Could the joke be Muhammad’s or that of one of his close associates’ who knew that the Julian count was around 666 and pushed for that date as the start as opposed to other candidates?

Whilst we are identifying weird coincidences, let us look at the word ‘hijra’ which means a journey in Arabic. In India the same homophone is used for the Indian transgendered tradition.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).