The bizarre and often grotesque imagery of the book of Revelation haunts like a specter over the past two thousand years of Christian history. To the average reader, some of its most memorable images are also its most mysterious. The number 666 and the phrase “mark of the beast” have embedded themselves in pop culture, even though most people don’t know what they mean, and even experts often struggle to understand what the author of Revelation — a Jewish prophet known simply by the name “John” — was trying to communicate through these symbols.

For many, the ambiguity is part of the appeal. Christians have spent centuries debating the meaning of John’s visions and the warnings they contain about the future. Paranoia about the Mark of the Beast and the number 666 has become a permanent fixture of modern evangelical Christianity. Thanks to modern scholarship, however, we know that the Book of Revelation was just one example of a wider body of apocalyptic literature. Much of the imagery and symbolism in Revelation — including the seven-headed dragon, the beasts from the land and the sea, and various hidden references to the Roman emperor Nero — does not, in fact, originate with John and the sacred visions he claims to have experienced, because we find the same myths and motifs in other less well-known Jewish and pagan texts.

John may claim to have been shown these things in divine visions, but the data shows otherwise. John’s real skill was not that of a seer, but that of a writer who was able to mix and match bits of Jewish and Greco-Roman mythology to promote his own political and theological viewpoints. In this article, I examine some of the most famous elements of Revelation to see what they mean and where John really got them from. I also look at the ancient conspiracy theories about Nero’s death and expectations of his future return — a social phenomenon that explains some of the stranger passages in Revelation associated with the Antichrist.