A comment arrives from Joel Richardson, author of Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah (endorsed by Robert Spencer) and co-author of WorldNetDaily’s new book Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out (which I on blogged here). Richardson is unhappy with my debunking of his associate Walid Shoebat’s claim that Greek number “666″ in the Book of Revelation is actually the author’s attempt to write “In the name of Allah” in Arabic.
Shoebat claims that he realised this after consulting ancient codices, in particular the Codex Vaticanus. One point I made was that Codex Vaticanus does not contain the Book of Revelation (although it wasn’t my main point, and I did allow that Shoebat may perhaps have seen some other ancient manuscript, such as one that is doing the rounds online). Richardson blows his raspberry:
I went to the personal blog of the author of this article and saw that the image that he has posted of himself shows him sitting in a pub sipping a pint of beer. I fear that he may have been sipping a bit too much before writing this article.
The Codex Vaticanus does indeed contain the Book or Revelation, it is simply a later supplementation to the earlier manuscripts. A tiny bit of research could have produced this fact. The actual image of the portion of the Book of revelation that is part of the Codex Vaticanus is below. Scroll to the third column to the right and the top line, marked 18 (Revelation 13:18) contains the image that Walid used:
www.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA%2003/GA03_150b.jpg
Images of the entire Codex may be viewed here:
www.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA%2003/
Which could have been found if Mr. Bartholomew had gone here instead of sipping beer:
www.csntm.org/Manuscripts.aspx
Next time, you may wish to step outside of the usual Wikipedia sourcing for your articles Richard.
Actually, I researched this using various sources, such as The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1995):
Codex Vaticanus, a fourth century manuscript of the Greek Bible…All NT Scripture after Heb 9:14 is missing.
Other scholarly sources concur (Google Books is useful here). The older Catholic Encyclopedia gives some further background:
In modern times (fifteenth-sixteenth century) the missing folios were added to the codex, in order, as Tregelles conjectures, to prepare it for use in the Vatican Library.
Presumably this is the origin of the “later supplementation” that Richardson thinks in some way makes Shoebat’s case stronger; a supplement added 1,000 years later in Italy that in no way can be seen as part of the original codex. But there’s worse: the jpeg in fact shows a page from the 1868 Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecus Codex Vaticanus. This is a facsimile of the ancient text, but with a clearly typeset version of Revelation tacked on at the end. Here’s how the start of Revelation appears in the fifteenth-century manuscript compared with how it appears in the 1868 edition:
Incidentally, this “minuscule” way of writing Greek developed in the Seventh Century, and there are no examples prior to 835; the ancient Codex Vaticanus was written in an “uncial” form that looks more like block capitals (see Bruce Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography, Oxford University Press 1991, and also this website).
So, Richardson is telling us that Shoebat used a nineteenth-century typeset edition of Revelation to draw the paleographic conclusion that a fourth-century Greek manuscript of the book (which doesn’t exist anyway) meant to show Arabic letters!
Let’s make this as simple as possible: if you read Revelation 13, it is obvious that the phrase for “666″ appears where you would expect to see a number. The wider religious context here is numerology, which Shoebat rejects simply because he finds numerology objectionable. Early Christian tradition and manuscript evidence from long before Codex Vaticanus was written also both point to a number, either “666″ or “616″. A fifteenth-century “supplementation” in a different script has no evidential value whatsoever, let alone a nineteenth-century typeset version!
Perhaps Richardson could do with a drink…
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[...] Joel Richardson Shows Off his Ignorance [...]
From Auden to Freud: “Existentialists declare/That everywhere there is despair/Yet keep on writing.”
From Sister Aimee to Oral Roberts to Grant Jeffries to Franklin Graham, humble servants and profits, peddling the precious blood of G-d.
the only other place the Scriptures refer to the number 666 is the amount of gold Solomon received annually. I have oft wondered then if the Revelation reference is to do with the love of money referred to in 2 Tim 3:2, evident in society today. The root of all evil is a great lead-in to a world domination created by loans designed to cripple and the pursuit of greater share value despite their rise on the backs of arms sales. We have been taught well, to not care about any other generation, or people group, as long as we benefit. The love of money. How right they were…
Richard,
Hmmm… I am ignorant for highlighting your error? Not sure how that works, but I see that I did strike a nerve. I hate it when those perennially ignorant fundys make me look bad. But in all fairness Richard, turnabout is fair play after all, is it not? You tried to overplay a largely irrelevant oversight on Walid’s image sourcing (it is irrelevant it his larger point because the image he used is precisely like the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Majority text or any other ancient Greek Mss) Thank you for catching this by the way. But now I have exposed a similar miss on your part and you are on the rampage. You should be thanking me.
But ultimately you are still missing the larger point. The simple Greek word for 666 as it is found in the majority of Greek Manuscripts bears a striking similarly to the words Bismallah followed by two crossed swords. Walid is simply asking the question if the variations in some of the more ancient texts (616, 665, 666 etc.) may be due to the idea that perhaps this infamous 666 was never intended to be an actual number, but was simply an image that John the Apostle noted and which essentially confounded later Greek scribes. The Book of Revelation is about the End of this age, and who will argue that the creed of Islam looks as if it may dominate much of the world before this thing wraps up. It is certainly an interesting question that Walid poses in light of the striking similarities. For your fundy mocking pleasure, I’ve made the effort to post the images here: (enjoy)
http://makofthebeast.blogspot.com/
By the way Richard, as a aside, rather than jousting with Christians, why don’t you show some guts and begin standing up for the freedoms that are being challenged and corroding daily by the real authoritarian ideology in the earth today? Why do I not see you publicly renouncing the doctrine of death for Apostasy that is practiced throughout the Islamic world and endorsed by Orthodox Muslims? Why do you not speak up against CAIR and the UN Human Rights Council’s efforts to limit free speech globally? Why do you not highlight the Gambians President’s promise to behead every homosexual in his country? Why do you not rage against the practice of taking child brides in Yemen and Saudi or against the honor killings taking place even here in the US? Its easy to fight against Christians who are largely pacifists. We may have some offensive opinions, but we don’t wish to chop off your head or put you in jail because you stayed up too late at the pub. As a parent and someone deeply concerned about human rights and civil liberties, let me tell you that it is easy to criticise Christians, but it isn’t so easy to stand against the real freedom-choking ideology of our age. I suspect that if we could sit down and have a beer (only one for me), we might be able to agree on a few things, but unfortunately from my angle, too many like yourself are too blinded by their tunnel vision hatred of all Christians and Conservatives to see the threat to secular democracy that is looming on the horizon which threatens both of our ways of life.
In any case, bless you, Joel
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Joel, you make a lot of very good points I must say.