Not a mistranslation, exactly. It depends on whether you rendered Nero's name from Latin or Greek. In Greek, Nero's name was written "Neron". The letter 'n' had a gematria value of 50, so when transliterated into Hebrew, the extra 'n' would have made the calculated value either '616' or '666' depending on what source language the name came from.
It might not be a mistranslation but if you wanna construct a "haha people are dumb" narrative or drop a "well akschually" it can be construed as one which is sufficient for that purpose.
The above statement applies to a hell of a lot of things, not just the whole 666 was/wasn't a mistranslation factoid. Comments like the top level one are what platforms incentivize when they "keep score" of discourse like many/most do.
Even funnier is that 666 is a positive/holy number in Judaism.
It represents the creation of the physical world: The 6 directions, (cardinal directions plus up and down), and the 6 days of creation, and repeating a number represents strengthening it, i.e. it represents perfecting the physical world.
It's also the Gematria (numerical value) of a prayer requesting divine mercy.
I don’t think it’s a mistranslation, the manuscripts themselves differ.
Regardless of which is ‘correct,’ it’s likely an error in the retelling or copying.
> Papyrus 115 (which is the oldest preserved manuscript of the Revelation as of 2017), as well as other ancient sources like Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, give the number of the beast as χιϛ or χιϲ, transliterable in Arabic numerals as 616 (χιϛ), not 666.
The popular theory is that it referred to Emperor Nero. The author was basically telling you, "I'm making an allegory right now. Wink wink, nudge nudge."
I have also heard the suggestion that 666 is an obvious number to pick if you use Roman numerals, being every letter (less than M) once in descending order: DCLXVI. (But why exclude M?)
(Trivia: what is the biggest number that is an English word when written as a Roman numeral?)
1) There's a long history of it. Gematria was a Jewish technique, then carried over to the early Christian community. There may have been reasons to keep it up as a matter of course, but as you said, with Nero it probably didn't matter: the dude knew everyone hated him. Not just Christians.
2) The purpose of Revelations was meant to comfort the current Christian community at the time by prophesying a future calamity with many parallels to the current calamity. The end of the world brings great destruction, yes, but there is vindication at the end of it all, and hence hope for the community.
One thing to keep in mind about the nature of the "anti-Christ" is that it is the opposite of Christ in all ways. Christ was expected to come back at the end of days. So, too, then, was the anti-Christ. If the anti-Christ has never been seen before then "coming back" doesn't quite make sense, but it does make sense if the anti-Christ refers to Nero: he was a complete bastard in his first life, and he's so evil that he will come back at the end of days to persecute Christendom again.
