This note is interpretation, not translation, and the readings marked as Jon’s are his. It follows one thread through chapters 12 to 18: whose name is insulted, who stands behind the animal, whose name is carried, and what is bought and sold. Where a claim is not found anywhere in scripture it carries a red flag, with the nearest texts beside it. A flag means the text does not say it, not that it is wrong.
The word first. What this translation renders insult at 13:6 and 16:9 is blasphēmeō, and it is the ordinary word for slander: slander no one (Titus 3:2), as we are slandered (Romans 3:8). At 2:9 the noun is rendered slander. Diabolos, the Slanderer, comes from another root and names the same act; Paul uses it of human slanderers too (1 Timothy 3:11; Titus 2:3). So when the animal opens its mouth against the name, it is doing the Slanderer’s own work.
Five verses. The name of God is the object of that verb in exactly five verses of these writings, and two of them are in this book.
Romans 2:24. To the one who calls himself a Jew and rests on the law: you who preach not to steal, do you steal? … For the name of God is insulted among the nations because of you, as it is written. What is written is Isaiah 52:5 in the Greek; the Hebrew says only all day long my name is despised, and the thought Paul wants is Ezekiel’s, they profaned My holy name among the nations they went to (36:20).
1 Timothy 6:1.Let those who are slaves under a yoke count their own masters deserving of all honour, so that the name of God and the teaching are not insulted.
James 2:7.You dishonoured the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and drag you into the courts? Is it not they who insult the good name that was called over you? “Called over you” is the old phrase for belonging: all the peoples of the earth will see that the name of the LORD is called over you (Deuteronomy 28:10).
Revelation 13:6. The animal opened its mouth in insults against God — insulting His name and His dwelling, that is, those living in the sky. Its heads already carry names that were an insult to God (13:1), and at 17:3 it is covered with them.
Revelation 16:9.People were scorched with great heat, and they insulted the name of God, who has authority over these plagues — and they did not change their minds and give Him glory. It happens twice more in that chapter without the word name (16:11, 16:21).
What divides them. In the three letters the insult falls on the name because of the people who carry it: their own breaking of the law in Romans, their conduct in 1 Timothy, and in James straight after the assembly has itself dishonoured the poor. In Revelation nobody’s conduct gives cause. The animal insults the name because it is the name, and the scorched insult it in place of changing their minds. At 13:6 the insult reaches past the name to the people: His dwelling is those living in the sky.
Why Paul says it to slaves. 1 Timothy 6:1–2 gives two reasons, one in each verse. The first faces outward. People judge God and His teaching by how those who carry His name behave, so a believing slave serves with honour, so that the name and the teaching are not insulted. Paul tells Titus the same twice in one chapter: wives are to live so that the word of God is not insulted (2:5), and slaves are to adorn the teaching of God our Saviour in everything (2:10). Peter says it of every believer: keep your conduct among the nations good, so that … they may see your good works and glorify God (1 Peter 2:12). The second faces inward. A slave whose master has become a believer is not to respect him less for being a brother, but to serve him all the more, because he is a believer and beloved (6:2). Being brothers raises the standard; it does not cancel it.
The words around it.Deserving of all honour is axios with timē, and those two stand together in only two other verses, both in this book: You deserve, our Lord and God, to receive the glory and the honour (4:11), and the slaughtered Lamb deserves to receive … honour (5:12). Paul’s word for master here is despotēs. It is the word the souls under the altar use for God — How long, Master, holy and true (6:10) — and Peter’s for the One false teachers deny: denying the Master who bought them (2 Peter 2:1). This book says who was bought (5:9; 14:3–4). And the chapter of 1 Timothy that tells slaves to honour masters ends by naming the Master of them all: the King of those who reign and Lord of those who rule (6:15), the title this book writes as a name on His robe and thigh (19:16). Between the two, the chapter turns to anyone who teaches otherwise (6:3), to men who suppose godliness is a means of gain (6:5), and to the love of money as a root of all evils (6:10).
Not an endorsement of slavery — Jon’s reading. Paul is not condoning slavery here. It was the setting the assemblies lived in, and he was telling believers how to carry the name inside it.
What the text gives for that. The same letter names andrapodistai, men who steal people and sell them, among what opposes the sound teaching (1:10), which is the law’s capital crime (Exodus 21:16). Paul tells slaves to take freedom if they can, and then without any ambiguity: you were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men (1 Corinthians 7:21–23). He puts masters under a Master: give your slaves what is just and equal, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven (Colossians 4:1; Ephesians 6:9). He writes there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28), and he sends a runaway back no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother (Philemon 16). And this book puts the trade on Babylon’s cargo list, ending with bodies, and human lives (18:13). No verse tells believers to abolish slavery; that it was a setting they had to work within is the reading’s explanation. The yoke at 6:1 is literal slavery, not the yoke of the law (Acts 15:10; Galatians 5:1), and should not be read across.
The line Peter draws.If you are insulted for the name of the Anointed, you are blessed … but let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief … if as a Christian, let him glorify God in this name (1 Peter 4:14–16). His verb is a different one, oneidizō. What these writings ask of the people who carry the name is that when it is insulted, it is never because of them.
Who the dragon, the Slanderer and the Accuser are. One figure under four names, and the book gives the list twice: the great dragon … the ancient snake, the one called the Slanderer and the Accuser (12:9), and again at 20:2.
The dragon is the old picture of the sea monster: God will bring His sword on the dragon, the fleeing snake (Isaiah 27:1), and the dragons’ heads are broken on the water (Psalm 74:13–14, marked at 12:3). Ezekiel gives the title to a king: Pharaoh is the great dragon lying in the middle of his rivers, who says, My river is mine, and I made it (29:3), ton drakonta ton megan in the Greek, the same words as 12:9. The dragon there is a creature claiming to be the maker.
The ancient snake is the one from Eden (Genesis 3, marked at 12:17), and ancient means from the beginning: he was a murderer from the beginning … when he speaks a lie he speaks from his own, because he is a liar and the father of it (John 8:44); the Slanderer has been sinning from the beginning (1 John 3:8). In the Greek of Genesis the snake is already counted among the animals: the most cunning of all the wild animals on the earth (3:1). The word is thēria, the word this book uses for the animal.
The Slanderer and the Accuser are one name in two languages.Satanas is the Hebrew satan; diabolos is how the Greek translation renders it (Job 1:6; Zechariah 3:1; 1 Chronicles 21:1). The book gives both, as it gives Abaddon and Apollyon, in Hebrew and in Greek (9:11).
He works in both directions. To people he slanders God. His first words in Eden put a motive on God: God knows that on the day you eat … you will be like gods (Genesis 3:5). Before God he accuses people: does Job fear God for nothing? (Job 1:9) — dōrean in the Greek, the charge that devotion is paid for; he stands at Joshua’s right hand to accuse him, and is answered the LORD rebuke you while Joshua is given clean clothes (Zechariah 3:1–5); and he is the accuser of our brothers, who accused them in front of our God day and night (12:10).
The animal carries his work on. Thrown down, the Slanderer comes in great fury (12:12). The dragon gave it its power and its throne and great authority (13:2), and they bowed to the dragon, because it had given its authority to the animal (13:4). The animal then insults those living in the sky (13:6), the people told to rejoice at 12:12; the verb for living there, skēnoō, occurs with the sky only in those two verses. Then it makes war on God’s people (13:7). This is what Jesus refused: the Slanderer offers Him all this authority if He will bow before me, and He answers you shall bow to the Lord your God, and serve Him only (Luke 4:6–8). What He refused, the animal accepted.
And a second animal runs the stamp. It has two horns like a lamb, and it spoke like a dragon (13:11). It makes the earth bow to the first (13:12) and puts the stamp on everyone (13:16), and the book calls it the false prophet (16:13; 19:20). It looks like the Lamb and talks like the dragon, and the one who enforces the market is a prophet.
How he is beaten.By the blood of the Lamb and by the message they testified to (12:11). And Paul: who will bring a charge against God’s chosen? God is the one who justifies (Romans 8:33).
The stamp is bowing to the creature — Jon’s reading. The stamp of the animal is worship of the animal: the creature in place of the Creator.
What the text gives. The stamp never comes without the bowing. The book names them together five times (14:9, 14:11, 16:2, 19:20, 20:4), and the stamp is the animal’s name (13:17). The warning against it comes straight after the call to bow to the Creator: bow to the one who made the sky and the earth and the sea and the springs of water (14:7), and then if anyone bows to the animal and its image and receives a stamp (14:9). Paul says it in one sentence: they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of man and birds and four-footed animals, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:23, 25). Eikōn, image, is this book’s word for the animal’s image, in eight verses. And charagma, the stamp, occurs outside this book once: we ought not to think the divine is like gold or silver or stone, an engraving of human art (Acts 17:29). There the word names an idol.
The seal is unseen, and the stamp may be too — Jon’s reading. God’s seal on His people is not ink, and the stamp of the animal may be an allegiance in the same way, entered into rather than worn.
What the text gives. Believers were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Ephesians 1:13; also 4:30), and God sealed us and gave the Spirit as a pledge in our hearts (2 Corinthians 1:22), the verb of 7:3. God’s seal even has an inscription: the Lord knows those who are His, and let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from wrongdoing (2 Timothy 2:19). The hand and the forehead are where the law said to bind God’s words (Deuteronomy 6:8, marked at 14:9): what you do, and what you think.
Red flag That the stamp is an agreement entered into for trade. No verse says it. The nearest are 13:16–17, Deuteronomy 6:8, Ephesians 1:13 and Acts 17:29. Against it, the stamp is never mentioned without the bowing, so an agreement could only be the stamp if it is worship and allegiance; and at 9:4 the locusts can tell who does not have God’s seal, so whatever it is, it can be known.
666 is Nero — Jon’s reading. The number is Nero’s, and he is what bowing to the animal meant for the first readers: an emperor bowed to as a god, who slandered God’s people by blaming the fire of Rome on them.
Red flag That the number is Nero’s. The book hands the reader a method and declines to give the name: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the animal, because it is a human being’s number (13:18). The grey note there records the Nero solution as a proposal.
The arithmetic. Written in Hebrew letters, Nero Caesar is nrwn qsr, and the letters add to 666: 50 + 200 + 6 + 50, and 100 + 60 + 200. The Latin spelling, without the final n, gives 616, and 616 is what some early copies read — Papyrus 115 and Codex Ephraemi — and a reading Irenaeus knew. The spelling nrwn qsr is attested in an Aramaic document from Wadi Murabba’at dated to Nero’s own reign. And this book reads names in Hebrew twice, at 9:11 and 16:16, so counting a name in Hebrew letters has a precedent inside it.
His names. In Acts the governor calls the emperor of the day, who was Nero, ho Sebastos (25:21, 25), the Greek of Augustus, built on the root of sebasma, an object of worship (2 Thessalonians 2:4), and of esebasthēsan, they worshipped (Romans 1:25). He calls him the lord (25:26). Outside scripture, Nero’s coins call him DIVI F, son of the divine — Claudius had been declared a god — and PONTIF MAX, chief priest of Rome’s state religion. Jon reads these as the names that were an insult to God on the animal’s heads (13:1).
Whom he bowed to, and who bowed to him. Suetonius says Nero despised every cult but one, the Syrian Goddess, and then defiled her image too; and that he took a little statue of a girl, given him by an unknown commoner as a charm against plots, and worshipped it as the highest god with three sacrifices a day (Nero 56). The man worshipped as a god was bowing to an image, which is Romans 1:23 almost exactly. And in 66 the king of Armenia came to Rome to be crowned and said to him: Master … I am your slave, and I have come to you, my god, to worship you as I do Mithras (Cassius Dio 63.5). The book’s phrase is the kings of the earth (17:2; 18:3).
The slander. After the fire of 64, Tacitus says, the rumour that Nero had ordered it would not die. To get rid of it, Nero subdidit reos — he put others forward as the guilty — and punished with the most refined tortures those the crowd called Christians. They were convicted not so much of arson as of hatred of the human race; some were sewn into the skins of wild animals and torn by dogs, and others were burned as lights at night (Annals 15.44). That is a false charge laid on God’s people, which is the Slanderer’s work in the plainest sense, and it is what the text says the animal does: it makes war on God’s people (13:7).
The wound.One of its heads as if slaughtered to death, and its death-wound was healed (13:3); wounded by the sword and came back to life (13:14); was, and is not, and is about to come up (17:8). Nero died by a blade, by his own hand, in 68, and a rumour that he was alive and would return ran for years afterwards.
Where this stops.Arithmos anthrōpou may simply mean a human number, ordinary reckoning, as metron anthrōpou at 21:17 is a human measure, which is also a messenger’s. The Greek letters of Nerōn Kaisar do not give 666; the reading needs the Hebrew spelling. Irenaeus says the vision was seen near the end of Domitian’s reign, about 95; if so, Nero is the pattern, or the one expected back (17:8, 17:11), not the emperor reigning when John wrote, and the text dates itself nowhere. Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, the coins, the papyri and Murabba’at are all outside scripture. And the readings stand apart: the stamp as bowing to the creature rests on the text throughout; 666 as Nero rests on arithmetic and history.
Who does the buying.Nobody can buy or sell unless they have the stamp (13:17). The verb to buy, agorazō, is in six verses of this book, and they divide cleanly. The Lamb buys people for God with His blood (5:9; 14:3–4). Jesus offers to sell, to a city that thinks it needs nothing: I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire (3:18), on Isaiah’s terms, without silver and without price (55:1). The animal controls the market (13:17); to sell occurs in the book only there. And at the end no one buys their cargo any more (18:11). The one economy is entered with a name on the hand or forehead. The other has already been paid for.
The coin. The book names Rome’s coin at the third seal, a denarius (6:6). Jesus asked for that coin and asked whose image is this, and whose inscription? (Matthew 22:20), and then: give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. The word is eikōn, the word for the animal’s image, and man was made kat’ eikona theou, in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). The coin goes back to the one whose image is on it. A person goes back to the One whose image is on them.
The selling of the gift is the spiritual prostitution — Jon’s reading. What is bought and sold under the stamp is religion done as business: the gift of God sold, or something other than the gospel taught for gain. It is not the paying of those who proclaim the gospel. Jon agrees that those who are being saved should support them, and his stipulation is that what they proclaim is the gospel, which scripture and this book declare plainly, and that the gift itself stays free, because Jesus has paid for it in full. Church business of the other kind is what he would expect to find under the stamp.
What the text gives. Babylon’s trade and her prostitution stand in one verse: the kings of the earth committed sexual unfaithfulness with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich (18:3), and the last item on her cargo is human lives (18:13). Peter says false teachers in greed will make merchandise of you (2 Peter 2:3), and emporeuomai is the root of this book’s merchants. Jesus: do not make My Father’s house a house of trade (John 2:16). Paul: we are not, like so many, peddlers of the word of God (2 Corinthians 2:17), against those teaching what they should not, for shameful gain (Titus 1:11). Micah: her priests teach for a price, her prophets divine for silver, and yet they lean on the LORD (3:11). And the hire is the prostitute’s mark in the law and the prophets (Deuteronomy 23:18; Hosea 9:1; Ezekiel 16:34; Isaiah 23:17–18), which the Pergamum note sets out.
Paying those who proclaim the good news, and what must stay free. Jesus sends the workers out with axios ho ergatēs tou misthou autou, “the worker is worth his pay” (Luke 10:7; Matthew 10:10). Paul: the Lord ordered those who proclaim the good news to live from the good news (1 Corinthians 9:14); let the one being taught the word share in all good things with the one teaching (Galatians 6:6); and the elders who work at the word and at teaching are worth double honor, because the worker is worth his pay (1 Timothy 5:17–18). So the paying is commanded, and it comes from the ones being taught. What is proclaimed is the good news, and scripture says what that is: that the Anointed died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4), and in this book good news that lasts into the ages (14:6), with the Lamb’s blood as the price of those he bought for God … from every tribe and language and people and nation (5:9). The gift is free because it is paid for. You received freely, give freely (Matthew 10:8); the one who wishes, let him take the water of life freely (Revelation 22:17; 21:6); we are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in the Anointed (Romans 3:24); by grace you have been saved through trust, and this is not from you, it is God’s gift, not from works (Ephesians 2:8–9). And it is paid in full: Tetelestai, “it is finished” (John 19:30); by one offering he has perfected for all time those who are being made holy (Hebrews 10:14); not with silver or gold … but with the precious blood of the Anointed (1 Peter 1:18–19). So the line is where the text puts it: Simon thought to acquire the gift of God with money, and Peter says your silver go with you to destruction (Acts 8:20).
Red flag That the stamp’s market is the prostitute’s trade. Chapter 13 never uses the prostitution word, and the prostitute and the animal are different figures; the animal’s horns turn on her in the end (17:16). Joining them is the reading’s step. And being paid is not prostitution in itself: those who proclaim the good news should live from the good news (1 Corinthians 9:14), as the paragraph above sets out. The line the scriptures draw is selling the gift (Acts 8:20), teaching for gain (Titus 1:11) and making merchandise of people (2 Peter 2:3).
Where Jon looks for it — Jon’s reading. Nero was in Rome, and Jon looks for the business there. This is his current strongest theory, and the one that ties everything else in this note together. He is not saying it is all written in scripture. It is where the evidence seems to him to lead, and he holds it as a theory, open to correction.
The city is Rome. The text gives two marks. The seven heads are seven mountains where the woman sits (17:9), and the woman you saw is the great city that holds a kingdom over the kings of the earth (17:18). When this was written, one city was known everywhere by its seven hills and ruled the kings of the earth, and it was Rome. Its own poets called it the city of seven hills — septem colles in Horace, seven citadels inside one wall in Virgil — a festival, the Septimontium, celebrated them, and coins struck under Vespasian show the goddess Roma seated on seven hills (the blue note at 17:9). That is not a reading. Any first reader would have heard it at once, and the verse opens by saying a key is being given: this calls for a mind with wisdom (17:9).
Red flag That the city of the seven hills is a present institution. The book names the city by its hills and its rule over kings; it names no church and gives no date. Jon reads the Rome of the seven hills as still standing in the office that sits there now. That step is history laid on top of the text, as the note at the fourth seal is, and it does not replace the first-century reading.
The spirit behind it — Jon’s reading. The prostitute is the spirit behind the papacy, not the pope himself. The office is what that spirit works through now; the people in it, and under it, are not the enemy.
What the text gives for that.Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). Daniel is told of the prince of the kingdom of Persia who withstood the messenger, and of the prince of Greece coming after him, with Michael fighting them (Daniel 10:13, 20): spiritual princes behind earthly kingdoms. The spirit of the antichrist … is already in the world (1 John 4:3), and the mystery of lawlessness is already at work (2 Thessalonians 2:7). Her own name begins with that word: mystery, Babylon the great (17:5), and I will tell you the mystery of the woman (17:7). When she falls she is shown for what she housed: a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit (18:2). The text decodes her as the great city (17:18); a city is the visible thing, and what lives in it is the spirit. Read that way, one spirit runs from Babel to Babylon to Rome and on, which is how the same woman can stand across the centuries, and how the call come out of her can be aimed again, as Paul aims it (2 Corinthians 6:17).
The stamp, and who enforces it — Jon’s reading. The pope could not enforce the stamp himself, and the text does not give the job to the woman. It gives it to the false prophet, who looks like the Lamb, speaks for the dragon, and uses the animal’s authority to make everyone take it (13:11–12, 16; see the note on the False Prophet). Why God allows the deception at all — Paul’s reason, and Ahab’s four hundred prophets — is set out there too. The Vatican bank is not the stamp now: it is a closed economy, limited to those who belong to or serve the Church, and nobody is forced to bank with it or shut out of trade for not doing so. What Jon watches is whether, once the animal is given authority over the world Rome ruled — the whole inhabited world of 3:10 is the word Luke uses for the Roman empire (Luke 2:1) — the one bank tied to that seat could become the only bank, as the woman’s institutions are carried by the animal for a time.
Red flag That the Vatican bank could become the only bank under the stamp. No verse names a bank. The stamp carries the name of the animal, not the city’s (13:17); the woman rides the animal (17:3, 7) and is then hated and burned by it (17:16). This is something Jon watches, not something the text says.
Where the money came from. The modern Vatican’s money starts with a treaty. In 1929 the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini’s government made Vatican City a sovereign state, and its financial convention paid the Holy See 750 million lire in cash and a further one billion lire in Italian government bonds paying five per cent, as compensation for the lost Papal States. Thirteen years later the bank was founded to hold the Church’s money.
Two years later. In June 1931 the same pope wrote Non abbiamo bisogno, in Italian rather than Latin so that Italians would read it, after the regime moved to absorb Catholic youth groups into its own. He condemned the state’s claim to form the whole person as a pagan worship of the State. Within two months he signed the September accords: Catholic Action was kept to religious work under the bishops, out of politics and out of trade unions, and no one who had belonged to a party hostile to the regime could be chosen to lead it. The money had been taken in 1929; the terms were accepted in 1931. Jon reads the second as following from the first. The record shows the sequence, not the motive.
One claim on the whole person objecting to another — Jon’s reading. Pius XI’s complaint was that the Fascist state claimed to form the whole person, mind and all. The Church makes a similar claim on the mind: its profession of faith asks religious submission of will and intellect even to teaching it has not defined. So in 1931 one institution claiming the whole person was objecting to another doing the same.
And against the statehood itself. Scripture’s sharpest word is here. My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would be fighting (John 18:36). The kings of the nations lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you (Luke 22:25–26). A church that takes territory, sovereignty and ambassadors is doing what Jesus declined to do.
On ‘teachings of demons’. Paul names what they are in the next breath: forbidding marriage, and commanding abstinence from foods (1 Timothy 4:1–3). So the phrase is aimed at those two, and that is where this note applies it, below. The statehood and the claim on the mind are answered by John 18:36, Acts 17:11 and Galatians 1:8 instead.
What can be checked: the Vatican bank. The Institute for the Works of Religion was founded in 1942. In 2024 it held €5.7 billion for just over twelve thousand clients belonging to or serving the Catholic Church; nobody without that relationship can open an account. Its statute asks no profession of faith; it exists to hold goods intended for works of religion or charity. That year it paid a dividend of €13.8 million to the pope, for religious and charitable works.
Its record. When Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in 1982, about $1.3 billion had gone to shell companies owned by the Vatican bank, and Ambrosiano’s chairman, Roberto Calvi, was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London. In 1984 the Vatican bank paid $224 million to the creditors, stating that it did so solely because of moral considerations and admitting no legal liability; in 1987 Milan magistrates issued arrest warrants for its president, Archbishop Marcinkus, and two of its officials. In 2010 Italian prosecutors froze €23 million in one of its accounts in a money-laundering inquiry. In 2013 a Vatican accountant, Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, was arrested over a plan to bring €20 million in cash from Switzerland; he was later acquitted of the smuggling charge. In 2021 the bank’s former president, Angelo Caloia, was convicted by the Vatican’s own court of embezzling about $62 million through property sales between 2001 and 2006. Until the reforms of 2013 it kept anonymous numbered accounts and published no accounts of its own.
Jon’s position on that record. He cannot say whether the same crimes are still happening today. The reforms since 2013 are real, and the record after them is thinner. But what is still kept from view — who the clients are, and how much each office of the Curia receives — is already wrong for a church to keep. Paul, carrying a gift for the poor, took a companion chosen by the assemblies, taking care that no one should blame us over this generous gift we are handling, for we aim at what is right not only before the Lord but also before people (2 Corinthians 8:19–21), and we have renounced the hidden things of shame (4:2). And some of the doctrine is still wrong, and that can be said for sure.
Which doctrine, and why. Paul names forbidding to marry among the teachings of deceiving spirits (1 Timothy 4:1–3). Catholic law: Clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are bound to celibacy (canon 277 §1); Those in sacred orders invalidly attempt marriage (canon 1087); and those bound by a public perpetual vow of chastity in a religious institute invalidly attempt marriage (canon 1088). Trent put an anathema on anyone who says such a marriage is valid, or that those who find they do not have the gift may marry (Session 24, canon 9). Against that: Peter, whom Catholic teaching counts as the first pope, was married — three Gospels record Jesus healing his mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14; Mark 1:30; Luke 4:38), and Paul says he took his wife with him on his travels (1 Corinthians 9:5); an overseer is to be the husband of one wife (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6); if you marry, you have not sinned (1 Corinthians 7:28), and it is better to marry than to burn (7:9). Paul names abstaining from foods in the same sentence, and Catholic law sets them: abstinence from meat … is to be observed on all Fridays, with abstinence and fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday (canon 1251); Colossians says of rules like do not handle, do not taste that they are according to the commands and teachings of men and of no value against the indulgence of the flesh (2:20–23). And the profession of faith required for office in the Church (canon 833) ends with religious submission of will and intellect, and the law requires the same of every Catholic: a religious submission of the intellect and will must be given to a doctrine which the Supreme Pontiff or the college of bishops declares concerning faith or morals when they exercise the authentic magisterium, even if they do not intend to proclaim it by definitive act (canon 752); where the Bereans examined the scriptures daily, whether these things were so — testing an apostle (Acts 17:11) — and Paul says that even if we, or a messenger from heaven, preach another good news, it is not to be received (Galatians 1:8). Indulgences are no longer sold, but the doctrine stands: the law defines it: An indulgence is the remission before God of temporal punishment for sins whose guilt is already forgiven, which a properly disposed member of the Christian faithful gains under certain and defined conditions by the assistance of the Church which as minister of redemption dispenses and applies authoritatively the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints (canon 992); and for the Jubilee of 2025 a plenary indulgence was granted from the treasury of the Church, applicable also to the souls in purgatory. Against it: by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being made holy (Hebrews 10:14), and there is now no condemnation for those in the Anointed Jesus (Romans 8:1).
The other side, stated properly. The Catholic answer, from its own law, is that marriage is not forbidden, since the matrimonial covenant … has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized (canon 1055 §1); that It is absolutely forbidden to force anyone in any way or for any reason to receive orders (canon 1026), so celibacy binds only those who choose to enter; that Jesus spoke of those who give up marriage for the kingdom with let the one who can accept it, accept it (Matthew 19:12), and Paul wished others were as he was (1 Corinthians 7:7); that the enrolled widows had a pledge they could break (1 Timothy 5:11–12); that abstinence is a discipline, not a claim that God’s creation is unclean, and a believer may abstain to the Lord (Romans 14:6); and that Paul told one assembly to hold to the traditions you were taught, whether by word or by our letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15) — against which Jesus charged making void the word of God by your tradition (Mark 7:13). The disagreement is whether a vow the Church then enforces by law is forbidding. Paul’s word fits a rule laid on someone. That is where Jon stands.
Jon’s answer to that. The defence rests on an office the scriptures do not create. This book says all of God’s people are already priests: He made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father (1:6); You made them a kingdom and priests to our God (5:10); they will be priests of God and of the Anointed (20:6). Peter calls all his readers a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9). Hiereus, priest, is never the title of a Christian minister anywhere in these writings; in this book it is only ever all of them. The offices the scriptures do create are elder, overseer and servant, and each is given to a married man: Titus is told to appoint elders in every town, each the husband of one wife (Titus 1:5–6), and the same is said of overseers and of servants (1 Timothy 3:2, 12). And the priest who offers for sins does it once: every priest stands day after day offering the same sacrifices, but this one, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down (Hebrews 10:11–12). Paul asks, do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as the rest of the apostles do, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas? (1 Corinthians 9:5). He calls it a right, exousia, and names Peter. Paul himself was unmarried (7:8), and he calls that a gift given to some — each has his own gift from God (7:7) — of which he says I have no command of the Lord (7:25) and I say this for your own good, not to throw a noose on you (7:35). Jesus said the same of giving up marriage: not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given (Matthew 19:11). A gift given to some cannot be made the price of serving. So to say marriage is only withheld from an office no one has to enter is to build a separate priesthood the text does not have, and then lay on it a rule the text names as deceiving (1 Timothy 4:1–3). It is more deception, not less. Catholic law makes the separation in its own words: By divine institution, some of the Christian faithful are marked with an indelible character and constituted as sacred ministers by the sacrament of holy orders (canon 1008). That distinction — some of the faithful, marked apart from the rest — is what this answer denies.
First Timothy 4, clause by clause. The reading of each clause of that passage — the Spirit speaking, the faith, the teachings of demons, the hypocrisy, the seared conscience, marriage and the abuse, food, and the priesthood of every believer — is its own note, The Faith, or the Teachings of Demons, at 2:20.
Another theory, which Jon does not hold: Turkey. Some readers look for the animal or its prophet in the ruler of modern Turkey. The seven assemblies were in what is now Turkey, and Pergamum, where the throne of the accuser is (2:13), is the town of Bergama there today. Jon does not hold it, and gives his reasons. Paul’s first mark of the teachings of demons is forbidding to marry (1 Timothy 4:3), and Islam forbids no one to marry. Its doctrine is wrong, and on the gravest point: it denies that Jesus was crucified and that God has a Son (Qur’an 4:157; 112:3), against whoever denies the Son does not have the Father (1 John 2:23). It carries Islam’s law, sharia, and limits on other faiths — the Orthodox seminary at Halki has been closed by the Turkish state since 1971 — though Turkey’s own constitution is secular and its courts do not apply sharia. But its denial is made in the open, not under Jesus’ name. What Jon sees as worse is a teaching that carries His name while contradicting Him: false prophets … in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15), false apostles … disguising themselves as apostles of the Anointed (2 Corinthians 11:13). That is the shape of horns like a lamb with the voice of a dragon (13:11). Jon does not read the animal or its prophet as a living ruler at all. He reads them as principalities and powers working through people, as with the spirit behind the papacy above, so that a ruler can be used by such a power without being it.
No hate toward Muslims — Jon’s position. Saying a doctrine is wrong is not hostility toward the people who were taught it. Muslims are saved the same way as everyone else under the new covenant: by grace, through trust in the Anointed, and there is no other way in for anyone. There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, rich toward all who call on him; for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:12–13, quoting Joel 2:32). Peter said it in the house of a Roman officer: God does not show partiality, and everyone who trusts in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name (Acts 10:34, 43). By grace you have been saved through trust, and this is not from yourselves (Ephesians 2:8). And the crowd in front of the throne comes out of every nation and tribe and people and language (7:9).
Red flag That the animal or its prophet is a ruler living now, in Turkey or anywhere, or that they are principalities and powers working through people. The book names no one. For a ruler: Daniel 7:17 calls the beasts four kings, the heads of the animal are seven kings (17:9–10), and the number is arithmos anthrōpou, a human’s number (13:18). For a power behind a ruler, the nearest texts are the dragon giving the animal his power and his throne and great authority (13:2), the princes behind Persia and Greece (Daniel 10:13, 20) and Ephesians 6:12. Which of the two the book means is not stated, and the second is Jon’s reading.
What this note does not claim. That the text names Nero, or any present institution; it points to Rome by its hills and stops there, and the readings that go further are Jon’s and are flagged. That the Vatican bank is doing today what its record shows it did. That the pope himself is the woman. And it brings no charge against Catholic people, or against Muslims: as the note at 5:10 says, anyone who trusts the good news of Christ is saved on the same terms as anyone else, Catholics and Muslims included, and the call at 18:4 is addressed to God’s people inside her, which is the opposite of a charge against them.
How sure I am — Jon. I am not fully confident of the readings flagged above. They are my best explanation of what I have studied here. If I learn otherwise, I will take them down, and my email is on the About page of this site if you want to show me.