Have you seen this video which has been shared over 80,000 times on Facebook? It features the starbucks cup guy yelling at us like an unfair caricature of an evangelical pastor in an NCIS episode about an apocalyptic cult. (Can I even blame non-Christians for thinking we evangelicals are a bunch of mouth-breathing dupes? They’re largely right.) I have formal training in several Semitic languages and Biblical Greek, and it’s obvious to me that Josh can’t read a word of Arabic or Greek. He’s parroting Walid Shoebat’s old spiel without having a clue what he’s talking about. (But it’s for Jesus, so I guess that’s ok.)Why this theory stinks (scroll down beneath the explosion picture if you want the short version):
1) Josh’s symbols were made up and monkeyed with to make them appear similar:
In the video, Josh tells us the upper image says, “in the name of Allah” and that this "matches up--parallels perfectly" with the Greek for 666.
In the video, Josh tells us the upper image says, “in the name of Allah” and that this "matches up--parallels perfectly" with the Greek for 666.
The first line of the Quran begins with the phrase “in the name of Allah.” This is what it actually looks like in Arabic, as taken from Quran.com's digital text of Al Fatiha:
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| the insect anti-Christ |
2) Did anyone bother to read Revelation?
The second standing banana peel for Josh’s theory is the text of Revelation itself. Revelation is concerned with the actual number here, not the shapes of the letters. The author tells us point-blank that the meaning of the symbol is to be "calculated"ψηφισάτω within gematria, not the shape of the handwriting.
The final nail in the coffin
3) Josh's manuscript is from the 15th century, and the original Greek script of Revelation looked different than the script Josh shows us:
Let’s flog this dead horse further. The Greek letters he shows are taken from Codex Vaticanus, a book composed in 350 AD. Its venerable ancientness is meant to impress you, as if Shoebat was led by Gandalf into the Minis Tirith library by flickering candle light and decoded the symbols on the back of a dollar bill to open a secret room. From the dust of forgotten centuries he exhumed this esoteric volume of early Christianity. Peering over his glasses he sagely eyes the symbols which whisper of a forgotten prophecy which is about to plunge him and Nicholas Cage in a high-speed car chase. Truth is Vaticanus didn’t originally contain Revelation. This text Josh is showing us was tacked on by a scribe in the 15th century. It is written in miniscule. A font that didn’t exist in the first century. It’s in a different paleographic style than the original autograph of Revelation could have contained or any other early manuscript does. That squiggly letter Xi would have been more angular.
Here it in the same verse in Codex Sinaiticus (Sinaiticus writes out the number rather than abbreviating it). Sinaiticus was composed around the same time as Vaticanus. Notice the Greek letter Xi doesn’t look much like what Josh needs it to.
The third letter sigma especially took a different form that looks identical to a ‘C’ (you can see it in the manuscript above); it looks nothing like what Josh needs it to. (If one of you suggest that maybe this is a crescent moon, I’m gunna bean you.) Here is the same abbreviation in Papyrus 47:
Here is our oldest text of Revelation 13:18 (Papyrus 115). It actually says the number of the beast is 616, but I don’t want to get into all that right now. The point is that last letter sigma in this older manuscript also does not look like the idiomatic Vaticanus sigma but takes the form of a 'C.' (That straight line above the number is a marker of abbreviation in Greek, by the way.)
If you want a bird’s eye view, here’s a paleography chart to show Josh’s entire theory is dependent on a single idiomatic manuscript he pulled out of the 15th century for no reason:
I’m sorry my ranting about crusty things like manuscripts and first century paleography makes me sound like old man Wilson yelling at the kids to get off his lawn and probably isn’t as thrilling as Josh’s youtube video with a graphic of flaming 6’s. (‘Merca!) Please love me. I can make textual criticism cool. I can be cool. Here’s a picture of an explosion if it will hold over your attention span for one more paragraph, America:
For the TLDR crowd:
The author of Revelation tells us point-blank that the number “calculates” the meaning, not one shape in the middle of the number. 2) The Arabic image Feuerstein found on the internet was totally made up, flipped and inverted arbitrarily with some random swords thrown in for the express purpose of looking good—it could qualify for a circus contortionist act. 3) It’s easy to make things in Arabic look like a sideways Greek letter Xi because it’s a cursive script. And 4) the Greek only looks sorta like this made-up Arabic image if you are raping a 15th century text written in a different style than the autograph of Revelation.
-B
The author of Revelation tells us point-blank that the number “calculates” the meaning, not one shape in the middle of the number. 2) The Arabic image Feuerstein found on the internet was totally made up, flipped and inverted arbitrarily with some random swords thrown in for the express purpose of looking good—it could qualify for a circus contortionist act. 3) It’s easy to make things in Arabic look like a sideways Greek letter Xi because it’s a cursive script. And 4) the Greek only looks sorta like this made-up Arabic image if you are raping a 15th century text written in a different style than the autograph of Revelation.
-B