One cannot bring Revelation to the epistles, but the epistles must be brought to Revelation.
So what of the Mark of the Beast? 666?
The following videos were just recently brought to my attention. The fella speaking is an Eastern Orthodox theologian. He was also part of Jordan Peterson's roundtable discussion on Exodus. Each video is about thirty minutes long.
In the first video he describes how the church fathers interpreted it, and why. It is said that it was the number of a man. What does that mean? He says that antichrist, and the Mark are basically descriptive of a system that has come to perfection, humanly speaking, in opposition to God.
John Calvin agrees that antichrist is not one man. In his commentary on 2 Thessalonians says that the man of sin that rises to power after the great apostasy is a "kingdom."
Paul, however, does not speak of one individual, but of a kingdom, that was to be taken possession of by Satan, that he might set up a seat of abomination in the midst of God’s temple —
In the second video, he describes how that system might look using a speech the CEO of Apple gave not long ago. One thing he is NOT saying: He is NOT saying that Apple is the antichrist and their platform the mark of the Beast. He's only drawing a picture with them.
He does allude briefly to numerology, but, again, only as examples of how numbers and their relationships were viewed.
