The Number of Jesus’ Name

Everyone knows the number of the beast is 666. But what’s the number of Jesus’ name?

In this eye-opening episode, Jimmy Akin explains ancient gematria, calculates that Jesus’ Greek name (Iesous) adds up to a stunning 888, and shows how early Christians—from the Letter of Barnabas to the Sibylline Oracles and Irenaeus—recognized this powerful contrast. He unpacks the deep symbolism of 8 as new creation and resurrection, and reveals why the number of the beast may have been inspired by Jesus Himself.

One more way Jesus wins!

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Coming Up

Everyone knows that the number of the beast from Revelation is 666.

And it’s widely recognized that it’s the number of a man’s name.

But have you ever wondered . . . what’s the number of Jesus’ name?

The answer may surprise you.

Let’s get into it!

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Howdy, folks!

We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

 

What Is Gematria?

In the ancient world, there was a practice known as Gematria that let you add up the letters in a word—such as a person’s name—and get an overall, total number.

This was possible because many ancient writing systems didn’t have separate symbols for numbers.

Today, we have our ABCs and 123s, but in the ancient world, they often only had their ABCs.

Of course, there were spoken words for numbers—equivalents of the English words one, two, three, and so on.

But there were no separate written symbols for numbers.

So what did they do when they needed to write a number down?

Well, they often just used letters from their alphabet.

That’s why Roman numerals are also letters of the Roman alphabet:

• I = 1
• V = 5
• X = 10
• L = 50
• C = 100
• D = 500
• M = 1000

But not every letter in the Roman alphabet has a numerical value. Only certain ones.

This was different in other languages that also used variants on the Phoenician alphabet, and yes, the Latin alphabet is based on the earlier, Phoenician alphabet.

The ancient Phoenicians were mighty sailing men, their skippers brave and sure, so they ran a maritime empire. They sailed all over the Mediterranean Sea, and their alphabet went everywhere.

One of the places it went was Greece, where it became the Greek alphabet.

And, believe it or not, the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabet used by Jews are also based on the Phoenician alphabet.

In these three languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—every letter of the alphabet also has a numerical value. In other words, their ABCs are there 123s.

And the systems tended to work the same way:

• The first nine letters of the alphabet had the values 1-9
• The next nine letters had the values 10 through 90
• And then the final letters of the alphabet started counting 100, 200, 300, and so forth until they ran out of letters

So if you wanted to sneakily refer to Nero Caesar, you could spell his name nun-resh-waw-nun qopf-samekh-resh.

And when you add them up you get 666.

Or—if you spell his name a little differently and leave out the second nun of Nero you get 616.

And—sure enough—we have manuscripts of the book of Revelation that give the number of the beast both as 666 and as 616.

That shows scribes in the early Church were catching the reference to Nero, and that’s one of the clues that links the beast to the line of first century Roman emperors.

There’s more to say about the number of the beast, but we’ll cover that another time.

 

The Number of Jesus?

Well, figuring out who the number of the beast refers to naturally makes people wonder what the number of Jesus’ name would be.

What number it will turn out to be will depend on how you spell it and what language you do the gematria in, but in Greek it turns out to be something very interesting.

In Greek, the number system worked the same way it did with the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabet. The first nine letters were 1-9, the next nine letters were 10-90, and the remaining letters started counting by hundreds.

If you’re watching the video version of the podcast, we’ll have a table of this so you can see the letters and their values, and you’ll notice that it has a few extra letters most people today aren’t familiar with—namely, Digamma, Koppa, and Sampi.

However, these letters eventually dropped out of the Greek alphabet, taking their numerical values with them.

Fortunately, none of these letters occur in the name of Jesus, so they don’t affect our calculation.

So what number do you get if you add up the letters in Jesus?

In Greek, the name is spelled Iota-Eta-Sigma-Omicron-Upsilon-Sigma, and it’s pronounced YAY-soos.

Back when I taught New Testament Greek, I always had to stress this for my students because, based on the English pronunciation, they always began mispronouncing it as yay-ZEUS.

But that’s wrong. The idea of pronouncing an intervocalic S—that is, an S that occurs between two vowels—as a Z is an English thing. It’s not a thing in other languages.

So when you see an S—or Sigma—in the middle of Jesus’ name, you pronounce it as an S: YAY-soos, not YAY-zeus.

And to make that memorable, we might joke that Yay, Zeus might be something a worshipper of the Greek god Zeus might say. Y’know, Yay, Zeus! Attaboy, big guy! Way to strike those people with thunderbolts! Yay, Zeuuuuuus!

So, let’s keep it straight that our Lord’s name is YAY-soos.

And now that we’ve got that sorted out, we can plug in the numbers for Jesus’ name:

• Iota is 10
• Eta is 8
• Sigma is 200
• Omicron is 70
• Upsilon is 400
• And Sigma is 200

So what do we get when we add them all up?

Drum roll please.

You get 888.

So how about that? The number of the beast is 666 and the number of Jesus is 888!

 

What Did Early Christians Think?

Now, if we are struck by that coincidence, you can bet your bottom dollar that the early Christians were.

If they were warned that the number of the beast is 666, they’d immediately wonder what the number of Jesus is an realize that—if you spell it in Greek—it’s 888.

You don’t even need to know that the number of the beast refers to Nero. All you need to know is that it’s 666, and the fact Jesus’ name turns out to be 888 will immediately strike you as significant.

So did Revelation’s number of the beast lead to the recognition of Jesus’ number?

Actually, I suspect it was the other way around.

Ancients often saw mystical significance in numbers, and as soon as you started having documents written in Greek that contained the name of Jesus—a highly mystical figure—some Christians were bound to notice that it adds up to 888.

And this number itself would have significance, because 8 is one more than 7.

In the Old Testament, 7 is a number signifying completeness—like the 7 days in the Hebrew week.

Well, Christ wasn’t raised on the Sabbath—the seventh day of the week. He was raised the day after that, on what you could consider the 8th day.

Christians thus began to regard Sunday as the day of God’s new creation, signified by Jesus’ resurrection as the beginning of that new creation.

So just like Genesis says the original creation began on the first day of the week, now God was beginning his new creation a week later, on the eighth day.

And when it turns out that Jesus’ name adds up to 888, wow! That’s going to be significant for early Christians.

You might think that triple-7 or 777 would be a number representing completion, but triple-8 or 888 is going to represent something even greater.

God made the world in 7 days—the original week of creation—so 777 could be seen as the completion of the old world, the old creation.

And 888 stands for the beginning of the new world, the new creation in Christ.

So what number would you use if you wanted to have a pale imitation of Christ? Something that claimed to be like Christ but fell woefully short?

Well, 6 is a number that falls short of the completion of 7—and the greater reality of 8—so 6 would be a logical choice.

So the number of an antichrist-like figure could well be 666.

Someone—either John or someone before him—then recognized that if you spell Nero Caesar the right way in Hebrew and Aramaic, you get 666.

I thus suspect that it was the number of Christ’s name—which would have been obvious to anyone who read Greek—was actually the inspiration for the number of the beast.

Only since you had to switch from the Greek alphabet to the Hebrew-Aramaic one and then guess who it refers to, John says:

Revelation 13:18

This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.

Seeing that Jesus’ name added up to 888 was obvious to anyone who read Greek, but you needed extra wisdom to figure out the number of the beast.

Then—after Revelation came out—someone noticed that you could also spell Nero Caesar another way that was more natural in Latin, and they sought to correct the manuscript to 616.

 

The Letter of Barnabas

Many ancient people were fascinated by gematria, and it plays a greater role in ancient literature than many modern people suspect.

But we know that people were thinking about Jesus’ name and its numerical value.

One such individual was the author of the Letter of Barnabas.

The letter of Barnabas was possibly written in the first century, and its author was clearly thinking about the numerical value of Jesus.

At the time, the name Jesus was frequently abbreviated to just its first two letters—Iota and Eta.

This was part of a system they had at the time known as the Nomina Sacra, which is Latin for = the Sacred Names, which were introduced in the late first or early second century.

What you’d do—if you were writing a Greek manuscript—is take a sacred name, abbreviate it to just two letters, and usually draw a line over it to tell the reader it was a sacred name.

Over time, there came to be various nomina sacra, but some of the most important were the words for Jesus, Christ, Lord, and God.

• Jesus, or Iésous in Greek, was abbreviated Iota-Eta
• Christ, or Christos in Greek, was abbreviated Chi-Sigma
• Lord, or Kurios in Greek, was abbreviated Kappa-Sigma
• And God, or Theos in Greek, was abbreviated Theta-Sigma

Well, the letter of Barnabas contains a passage that gives a symbolic meaning to something in Genesis.

Genesis 14:14 states:

Genesis 14:14

When Abram heard that his kinsman [Lot] had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, 318 of them, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

The number 318 attracted the attention of the author of the letter of Barnabas, and he sought to give it a symbolic meaning. He wrote

Letter of Barnabas 9:7-8

Abraham, who first instituted circumcision, looked forward in the spirit to Jesus when he circumcised, having received the teaching of the three letters. For it says: “And Abraham circumcised ten and eight and three hundred men of his household.” What, then, is the knowledge that was given to him? Observe that it mentions the “ten and eight” first, and then after an interval the “three hundred.” As for the “ten and eight,” the Iota is ten and the Eta is eight; thus you have “Jesus.” And because the cross, which is shaped like the Tau, was destined to convey grace, it mentions also the “three hundred.” So he reveals Jesus in the two letters, and the cross in the other one.

In the Hebrew text of Genesis, the number 318 is presented in order of increasing numerical value: 8 + 10 + 300 = 318.

But in the Greek Septuagint of the Old Testament, the order is different. It’s 10 + 8 +300 = 318.

The author of Barnabas then interprets the first two numbers—10 and 8—as the letters Iota and Eta, the first two letters and nomen sacrum of the name Jesus.

He then interprets the remaining number—300—as the Greek letter Tau, which looks like a cross and was frequently used as a symbol of the Cross in early Christianity.

This doesn’t show that the author of Barnabas added up the full name of Jesus as 888, but it does show that he was thinking about the numerical values of Jesus’ name.

And if he thought about the values of the first two letters of his name, it’s basically certain that he also thought about what the whole name would add up to.

He just didn’t mention that because it didn’t relate to his interpretation of Genesis 14:14.

 

The Sibylline Oracles

Another early work that reflected on this was the Sibylline Oracles. This was a set of books attributed to the Sibyls, who were a group of legendary pagan prophetesses.

Nevertheless, the Sibylline Oracles contain many prophecies of Jewish and Christian things, and the Sibyls were respected in Christian circles.

The attitude was what did it matter if someone was a pagan prophetess, as long as God was working through her and had her prophecy about Christ?

The 13th century Latin hymn Dies Irae or = The Day of Wrath, which has often been used in Catholic requiem Masses begins with the line:

Dies Irae

The day of wrath, that day,
will dissolve the world in ashes:
(this is) the testimony of David along with the Sibyl.

Or, more poetically:

The Day of Wrath

Day of wrath and doom impending!
David’s word with Sibyl’s blending,
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!

Oo! That always gives me chills.

And if you go to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and look up at the ceiling, among the figures you will see are five of the Sibyls that Michaelangelo painted there. He depicts them alongside the Old Testament prophets pointing to Christ.

Despite the fact that the Sibyls were supposed to be pagan prophetesses, scholars have actually concluded that the Judeo-Christian prophecies in the Sibylline Oracles were—in fact—written by Jews and Christians to spread their ideas in the broader culture.

The first book of the Sibylline Oracles was supposed to be written by the Chaldean Sibyl, and she was sometimes identified as Noah’s daughter-in-law.

In a passage of book 1 that was probably written in the early second century—say, around A.D. 110, she prophesies the coming of Christ in the following terms:

Sibylline Oracles 1.324–326

Then indeed the son of the great God will come,
incarnate, likened to mortal men on earth,
bearing four vowels, and the consonants in him are two.

The four vowels and two consonants are the letters of the name Jesus in Greek.

• The vowels are Iota, Eta, Omicron, and Upsilon
• And the consonants are the two Sigmas

The Chaldean Sibyl then states:

Sibylline Oracles 1.327-329

I will state explicitly the entire number for you.
For eight units, and equal number of tens in addition to these,
and eight hundreds will reveal the name

So this is the entire number of the name that the Sibyl just indicated by the four vowels and two consonants.

There are 8 units, and an equal number of tens, so 8 tens, and then 8 hundreds, so the total number is 888. 8 + 80 + 800 = 888

So here we see a Greek speaking Christian commenting at the beginning of the second century on how the name Jesus adds up to 888.

 

Irenaeus of Lyons

And we see the same thing later in the second century.

Another early Christian who was thinking about the numbers in Jesus’ name was the early Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons, who wrote his book Against Heresies around A.D. 180—in the late second century.

In the first book of Against Heresies, he responds to a heretic name Marcus, who founded a Valentinian Gnostic sect known as the Marcosians, perhaps in the mid 2nd century, perhaps around A.D. 150.

Marcus was very definitely thinking about the numerical value of Jesus’ name, because Irenaeus writes:

Against Heresies 1:15:2

Jesus, [Marcus] asserts, has the following ineffable origin. The second Tetrad [or set of four] came forth as a daughter from the Mother of all things, that is, from the first Tetrad, thus the first Ogdoad [or set of eight] resulted. From this proceeded the Decad [or set of ten]. In this way a Decad and an Ogdoad were made. The Decad, then, having been added to the Ogdoad and multiplied by ten produced the number eighty. The number eighty, in turn, multiplied by ten begot the number eight hundred. As a result, the entire number of the letters, having proceeded from the Ogdoad to the Decad, is eight plus eighty plus eight hundred. For the name of Jesus, according to the number to which the letters correspond, is eight hundred and eighty-eight.

So here—in the late second century—not only was Irenaeus commenting that the number of Jesus’ name was 888, the heretic Marcus had also recognized this fact earlier.

 

Conclusion

All of this can seem a little strange to us, since we have a separate set of written numbers and don’t use our alphabet for this purpose.

But it would have been very obvious to Greek readers what Jesus’ name added up to.

The situation is a little bit like one of those illusions where you look at a drawing one way and it appears to be a duck and you look at it another way and it appears to be a rabbit.

Once you see that, you can shift your perspective back and forth and look at it either as a duck or as a rabbit.

Well—for people whose letters doubled as numbers—you could do the same thing with words.

So for Greek readers, you could either look down at the page and see the letters Iota-Eta-Sigma-Omicron-Upsilon-Sigma or you could look down and see the numbers 10, 8, 200, 70, 400, 200. And you could shift your perspective back and forth so that you saw either the letters or the numbers of Jesus’ name.

It thus would have been blindingly obvious to first century Christians who read Greek that Jesus’ name added up to 888, and that obviousness is why I think it likely that it was the number of Jesus that came first in the Christian imagination and then inspired the number of Jesus’ enemy, the beast in Revelation.

Just one more way that Jesus wins.

We’ve covered a number of interesting concepts in this video. Did you know about the nomina sacra, the Sibylline Oracles, or the number of Jesus’ name? Let me know in the comments.

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