MTV AND THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST: MTV.com has the best popular article I've seen so far on the variant reading 616 for Revelation's number of the beast in an Oxyrhynchus manuscript ("666 Not So Evil? '616' Revelation Might Bedevil Metalheads"). Teri vanHorn reports correctly that (1) the reading is not new (2) the variants are based on gematria of slightly different spellings of "Nero" (actually "Nero Caesar") in Hebrew letters; and (3) the variant 616 isn't necessarily the original reading. And she gets the title "Revelation" right too. There's also a fun fact I didn't know: the word for the fear of 666 is "hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia." And, not surprisingly, there's also a lot of information on the use of 666 in popular culture, especially heavy-metal music.