The secret meaning behind the devil's number 666

It’s a code for his real name.

We've all heard about the infamous number 666, which is rather cryptically referred to as the "number of the beast" in the New Testament, and has more recently become known as the number of the Antichrist. But what is it about this simple, symmetrical number that's been giving everyone the heebie jeebies for the past 2,000 years? It's just a number, right? Or is it...?

As the boys from Numberphile explain, 666 doesn't really have any remarkable mathematical properties, but if you look back into its history, it reveals something pretty incredible about the way the Bible was originally written. Turns out, what you see in the The Book of Revelation where the writer refers to 666 in an apocalyptic vision isn't entirely what you get.

Put simply, 666 is being used as a code, and not a particularly subtle one, if you were alive and literate at the time of the New Testament. 

This text was originally written in ancient Greek, where numbers are written as letters, as they are in Hebrew - the other main language of the original Biblical texts. For small numbers, the first letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma, represent 1, 2, and 3. Then like in Roman numerals, when you want to form big numbers like 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, they're represented by their own special combination of letters.