Gwynedd,
You weren't posting that passage right in front of
me. You & I must have been posting simultaneously, since your message wasn't there when I was typing. You were replying to the person who said that "the antichrist" would arise out of Islam.
But no, Nero didn't have 7 heads. Rome (of which the Imperator was considered the personification) was built on 7 hills.
The Book of Revelation is of the literary genre known as an Apocaplypse: a highly stylized form of polemic, characterized by (among other things) some rather transparent allegorical symbolism. Nero of the 7-hilled city, who suffered a grevious head wound but then recovered, who set up an image of himself in the Jerusalem Temple, upon whose death the
Nero redivivus legend arose, and whose name when coded by Hebrew gematria has a number of 666, who was a persecutor of the church, was clearly the individual whom John was allegorizing in the character of the Beast.
Unless it's Pat Robertson
oh, and p.s. seriously - the guy I was referring to as being mentally ill is the guy referred to in the Original Post - the one who's claiming to be Jesus, or possessed by Jesus, or whatever he's claiming.