Oxyrhynchus is bearing strange fruit already. A fourth century fragment of the Book of Revelation adds yet more historical weight to mistranslation: the Beast's number is really chi, iota, stigma... 616.

The Nonist has a small round-up. Further explanations of Gematria can be found on the site above or in excellent detail at Laputan Logic, which also makes the interesting observation of Gematria as a basic hash function.

I've long been interested in language and communication as operative forces. It is with awe I chase down ramifications of this information. The Number of the Beast is a basic datum modern Christian fundamentalists of all varieties build their operations on. This single number has led to social movements, philosophies, counter-religions and modified systems of counting and assignment.

And it's the wrong number.

If a single small mistake in translation can change so much over history, what of the mistakes which are not simply numerical? What of entire passages of Christ's words which have been misconstrued and misused? What of the original intentions of those scrolls' multiple authors, kinked and twisted through the filtering and coloring transforms of time and tongues?

Is the ability of humanity to operate on unverified and ambiguous data at the root of our dominance? It may be, but doesn't seem to scale well past the structure of hunter-gatherer societies.