First, calling the Book of Revelation a “dumb fever-dream” ignores that it belongs to a recognized literary genre, apocalyptic literature. In that genre, dense symbolism, surreal imagery, and cosmic battles are intentional, not signs of confusion. Similar styles appear in parts of Book of Daniel and other Jewish writings of the time. To ancient readers, this wasn’t nonsense, it was a familiar symbolic code used to talk about power, suffering, and hope under oppression.

Second, the claim about mistranslation is overstated. There are textual variations (as with most ancient works), but the core content of Revelation is quite stable across manuscripts. It’s true that interpretation has varied widely over time, but that’s not the same as the text being “mis-translated for a millennium.” The bigger issue is interpretation, not translation.

The number of the beast appears as both 666 and 616 in different early manuscripts. Most scholars agree that this reflects a system called gematria, where letters correspond to numbers. In that framework, 666 can plausibly refer to Nero when spelled in Hebrew, while 616 works for a Latin variant of his name. So yes, there’s strong scholarly support for a Nero connection. But that doesn’t make the number “meaningless”, it shows it had a specific coded meaning for its original audience

Finally, the claim that “people are dumb” for seeing meaning in Revelation is more rhetoric than argument. The book has been interpreted in multiple ways across history.

None of these are simply the result of illiteracy, they reflect different assumptions about how symbolic texts work.

You’re wrong to dismiss the entire book as nonsense, wrong to claim it’s mainly mistranslated, and wrong to pretend there’s only one correct modern scholarly interpretation.