op
Instead of a hasty assumption that the author of the origional symbol messed it up in translation from an angel,
I think an indepth study of the exact moves made to take the image and rearrange it to say that, may possibly reval more than bad printing.
just a hunch.
Quoting: MitherielExplain?
I don't think the author Apostle John messed it up at all. He had a vision of the future, in which he was told by an angel to write down what he saw.
From the Article
"In his vision, rather than being shown the Greek letters that represent the number 666, John may have actually
been shown Arabic words and symbols, which he could not
understand, but nevertheless faithfully recorded to the best of his ability.
Allowing for this possibility, it seems likely that the scribes, who were later commissioned to copy the original text, would have been unable to recognize the foreign (Arabic) words and symbols as recorded by John. Faced with these odd looking characters, they might have done exactly what many people in their position would do, which is to assume a mistake, or perhaps some poor penmanship on John’s part. Thus, in an effort to make sense of these markings,
they may have chosen to slightly modify them into the Greek
characters that they most
closely resembled."
