I would encourage everyone to take a closer look at the rest of Walid’s arguments for his assertion that Islam is the antichrist. It does not at all hinge on this single translation issue.

In fact, when taking into account all of the other prophetic clues and what we know of historical and modern-day Islam, it corroborates the idea that this small piece of Revelation was mistranslated.

Imagine this. John writes down the symbol he sees being worn on the heads/arms of the followers of the beast. Suppose it is arabic script for “bismillah”. Nobody alive at the time would know what it was. So, it is reasonable to assume that, in the first copies of John’s original, there would be some confusion about what those arabic symbols were, no? And one might expect that the scribe would assume it was written in error, or attempt to re-cast those symbols as characters from the familiar Greek alphabet. Reasonable, no? (Earlier in the thread, someone mentioned errors from someone typecasting Hebrew into Greek)

Two crossed swords is easily interpreted as Chi. I expect that it would be copied as Chi without a second thought.

The arabic script for “allah” would resemble sigma. That mutation error would occur relatively easily too, I expect.

However, the last (or first, depending) character, bism-, would not be so easily mistaken for any known Greek character.

The Codex Sinaiticus, as I see here in front of me, shows the word form of six-hundred sixty, followed by a strange character that very much resembles bism-. The problem with believing that this last character is a “stigma” is that the Sinaiticus predates the evolution of “stigma” as a Greek character. Obviously, the scribe believed the first character of the symbol was a number, hence why it is spelled out literally as “six hundred”. Then they include a sigma. However, the last character appears to be an attempt at reproducing a non-Greek symbol. It does not appear anywhere else in Sinaiticus, as far as I can tell, and certainly not within the same page as the verse Rev 13:18. It resembles a simple, non-calligraphic “bism-”.

It stands to reason that a small bit of arabic script, recorded by John to the best of his ability, injected in the middle of John’s Revelation would not last more than a few iterations of copying. Translating in Greek, the last character (or first), “bism-”, would take the longest to meld into Greek typeset in terms of copying iterations.

Now, the Codex Vaticanus was originally complete, but Heb 9:14 through Revelation was lost and then later supplemented with a minuscule version. But this minuscule supplement originates much later than Codex Sinaiticus, and yet the same stigma-like, “bism-”-like symbol appears in the original Sinaiticus. But neither “stigma” nor “bism-” existed at the time of Sinaiticus.

Then there’s the plethora of other Biblical prophesies that point toward Islam as being the antichrist. One of my favorites is the tale of the great harlot who sits on many waters (Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf) and all the nations get drunk on her wine (Oil). Sounds like Saudi Arabia to me. And in fact, a few verses later, sure enough, its identified as Babylon, mother of harlots.

Rev 15:2……the beast and his image and the number of his name…..
Rev 13:17….given the mark, the name of the beast or the number of his name.

The beast and image have a number?

Everywhere else in the NT (Strong’s), arithmos (number) is always, always in reference to people. Even in Revelations. Yet!, only in chapter 13 does it have reference to an actual literal number? Rev 15:2 uses the same language phrasing as Rev 13. In 15:2 we see the “number” takes the name/title (creed) of the beast and image (a man). In other words, John sees a people who take the creed of a man. The beast and image are also the title/creed. Know the creed and you have the mark.

So:
Rev 13:18….count the people of the creed, for the people are that of a (certain) man; and his people are…..666??

Can’t be: barcode, man’s number, Regan (Pres. was his title), etc

Interject: count the people of “Allah is great”, they are of Mohammad’s, saying “no god but Allah & Moh is his…

This is the problem with those that deny the connection between the antichrist and Islam. They take one point they have an argument against and beat is to death. They ignore the rest such as:

So in summary we conclude this section with a final review of the many startling similarities that exist between the biblical narrative of the last-days and the Islamic narrative of the same period.

· Bible: The Antichrist is an unparalleled political, military and religious leader that will that emerge in the last-days.

· Islam: The Mahdi is an unparalleled political, military and religious leader that will emerge in the last-days.

· Bible: the False Prophet is a secondary prominent figure that will emerge in the last-days who will support the Antichrist.

· Islam: the Muslim Jesus is a secondary prominent figure that will emerge in the last-days to support the Mahdi.

In other videos and books, Shoebat explains his view further. He talks about greek word definitions. For example – while the definition for Psephizo is “count”, it is also “reckon”. Arithmos is defined as “a fixed and definite number, an indefinite number, a multitude”. And finally, Anthropos “a human being, whether male or female generically, to include all human individuals, people”. So he felt that the verse could read “Let him who has understanding reckon the multitude of the beast, for the multitude is that of a man/people”

Regarding the 666/symbol/number issue…. he felt that when John was in his vision, he “saw” the symbols/letters – whatever they were – and just wrote them down as he “saw” them. So, even if the arabic language in question had not been invented at that time, it wouldn’t matter – he recorded what he saw even if he didn’t understand it. It goes without saying that most of what he saw had not been invented at that time!

I agree about the “1″ in the mark of the beast. Mention of this number even makes me uncomfortable. It is nice to know that God is outside of the world’s “dark secrets” and slavery to sin.
I thought your talk at the special dinner was great. I also liked the risotto.

Sir wallace do you think walid’s overall take on islamic antichrist is baseless? He maybe wrong in this 666 but how about the rest of what he is saying about this system.

Islam neither denies “the Father” (the God that Jesus worshipped) nor Jesus Christ, although it does deny that Jesus is “the eternally begotten God the Son”, something that Jesus himself never claimed to be anyway. And if denying Jesus’ deity makes a religion “false”, then the religion of Jesus was also false since Jesus clearly stated, “The Father is greater than I” and “No one is good except God alone.” Does this make Jesus “the anti-Christ” too??

Okay. Shalom.

Thanks for posting, but please read the blog rules and don’t post one right after another. Next time we will have to delete them.

Also, understand that this is a very old post and, as a general rule, will not have much engagement from the author (as it is impossible).