The number 666 appears as 616 in some early manuscripts

The variant

The number of the beast in Revelation 13:18 is 666 in most Greek manuscripts and in every standard English translation. The Greek of the verse in modern critical editions reads:

ὁ ἀριθμὸς αὐτοῦ ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ

“his number is six hundred and sixty-six”

A significant minority of manuscripts read 616 instead:

ὁ ἀριθμὸς αὐτοῦ ἑξακόσιοι δέκα ἕξ

“his number is six hundred and sixteen”

In ancient Greek manuscripts, the numbers were typically written as letters (using the Greek alphabetic numeral system) rather than spelled out, which means the variant is a difference of one letter (the digit value):

• 666 — written as χξϛ (chi-xi-stigma): 600 + 60 + 6
• 616 — written as χιϛ (chi-iota-stigma): 600 + 10 + 6

The single-letter difference between the two numerical sequences (ξ “60” vs ι “10”) is exactly the kind of small variant that can arise in manuscript copying.

The manuscript evidence

The 616 variant is attested in three principal witnesses:

Papyrus 115 (P115)

The earliest extant manuscript witness to Revelation 13:18 is Papyrus 115 (P115, also designated as P. Oxy. 4499). It is a third-century papyrus discovered among the Oxyrhynchus papyri and was published in 1999. The manuscript reads 616.

P115 is one of the most important early witnesses to the text of Revelation. Its publication in 1999 reopened the scholarly discussion of the textual situation — until P115 was published, the 616 reading had been known but seen as a marginal variant. P115’s status as the earliest substantial witness to the verse changed the picture: now the earliest manuscript reads 616.

Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C)

A fifth-century Greek manuscript, Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (designated C in textual criticism), also reads 616. This is one of the major uncial codices of the Greek New Testament — a palimpsest in which the original biblical text was scraped off and overwritten with works of Ephraem the Syrian in the twelfth century, but the underlying biblical text has been recovered.

Irenaeus’s testimony

The early church father Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–c. 202 AD), in his major work Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses, c. 180 AD), explicitly addresses the variant. In Book 5, chapter 30:

Irenaeus notes that some manuscripts available to him read 616 instead of 666, attributes this reading to manuscript error, and argues for 666 as the correct reading.

Irenaeus is significant because he is writing roughly a century after Revelation was composed. He is testifying not only to the existence of the 616 variant by his time but to the fact that the variant was already in circulation in the manuscripts available to second-century Christians. The variant is not a late corruption; it was present early.

The Nero Caesar gematria

In ancient Hebrew and Greek, letters serve as numerals. The practice of summing the numerical values of the letters in a name or word — gematria in Hebrew, isopsephy in Greek — was a recognised exegetical and rhetorical practice in Second Temple Judaism and in the early church.

The Hebrew transliteration of “Nero Caesar” — נרון קסר (neron qesar) — sums to 666:

Without the final nun (the form נרו קסר, nero qesar), the same name sums to 616:

So both manuscript readings — 666 and 616 — point to the same person (Nero Caesar) under different transliterations of the name. The 666 reading uses the longer Hebrew transliteration of the Latin form (Nero Caesar with the -on suffix and final nun); the 616 reading uses the shorter Hebrew form (Nero Caesar without the -on).

This solution to the gematria problem was first proposed in 1837 by the German theologian Ferdinand Benary and has since become widely accepted in critical New Testament scholarship. The 616 manuscript variant is one of the strongest external supports for the Nero identification, since both numbers are accounted for by the same proposed referent.

What modern translations do

Modern English translations universally print 666 in the main text. The 616 variant is typically noted in a footnote in critical-edition translations (NRSV, ESV, NET) and in some study Bibles. The KJV, BSB, NIV, and most popular translations print 666 without footnoting the variant.

The Nestle-Aland 28th edition (NA28) and the United Bible Societies 5th edition (UBS5) — the two principal critical Greek New Testaments used by scholars — print 666 in the main text and note the 616 variant in their critical apparatus.

For the broader treatment of Revelation 13 in context, see our passage entry on Revelation 13.

Why this matters

The 616 variant is one of the genuinely surprising textual variants in the New Testament — known to Irenaeus, attested in early papyrus and codex evidence, and integrally connected to the most plausible scholarly identification of the beast (Nero Caesar). Most readers encountering the number 666 on a coffee cup, in a film, or in apocalyptic discussion have no idea that some early manuscripts read 616 instead.

The variant does not destabilise the text — modern critical editions print 666 with confidence — but it complicates the assumption that the text has always read uniformly.