“Ah,” but you say, “John told me for
sure that he was talking about the Pope. Don’t you know that the number 666 is
referring to the Pope? Therefore, now we have proof that he was talking about
the Roman Catholic Church.” I would guess at this point that probably
forty-five per cent or more of the Missionary IP Books of all the missionaries
in front of me have somewhere in their IP Book either under “A” for apostacy or
“P” for Pope or “C” for Catholic or something like this, a page; and on the
page would be listed three words, but in vertical shape—VICARIVS FILII DEI, the
“vicar of God.” By counting the letters, you’ll see that the V equals 5, the I
equals one, the C equals 100, and an A happens to equal 0, (so we’ll have to
let that go), and R—we’ll have to let that go—etc. Then continuing with a D
which equals 500, an L equals 50, and sure enough, when we total it all up,
excluding those letters that don’t count everything—lo, and behold, it equals
666.
Well, there it is. You see, one
title of the Pope is the “Vicar of God,” or the representative of God. Take
that title and put in into its Latin form, count the number of the man’s name
and you’ve got the Pope. But the Seventh-day Adventist used that to show their
vehemence against the Roman Catholic Church, which is how they started their
Church; and it has since been picked up by all who have ever felt an
intolerance concerning the so-called Mother Church; therefore, traditionally it
has been used even by our missionaries.
I would like to submit that there
are better interpretations for “666” than the Pope; in fact, I’d like to submit
that anything bad or evil has been interpreted to be the number “666.” Someone
didn’t like Stalin, and so I have it runs out here that Stalin equals 666,
counting his name in Russian. The first cure of syphilis by Dr. Erlick was
coded 666. When the Biblical scholars of the day saw what ridiculous arguments
the Seventh-day Adventists were using, taking their theology to make history,
which is a dangerous thing, they thought they would have some fun so they took
the official name of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the German language,
coded if and out it came, 666. But some said, “Well, you don’t have a man’s
name; you don’t have a person’s name,” so they took the name of Helen Harmon
White, who was the founder of the Seventh-day Adventists Church and coded her
name. It comes out to be 666. I have Hitler, 666; Stalin, 666; the Pope, 666.
You see, here’s the point. John is talking about evil, he’s talking about
evilness, and he’s pinpointing the evil in his own present time, which is, and
I said it was just as clear as could be, the Emperor of Rome. He was doing all
the persecution. IF we had the time I’d like to talk about 666 being the
numerical equivalent of the name of the Emperor of Rome, transliterated from
the Greek into Hebrew. John is talking about the Emperor of Rome. He certainly
is not talking about the Roman Catholic Church. (Reed C. Durham, Jr., “The
Great and Abominable Church,” Salt Lake Institute of Religion, February 18,
1966], pp. 5-6)