Notes: I can’t find this particular Brad Scott presentation online so I’m writing this from my memory of it. I want to acknowledge Richard Bartholomew and his post on a similar topic which was of great help to me: http://barthsnotes.com/2008/06/30/cufi-speaker-666-is-in-the-name-of-allah-2/
Brad Scott claimed that the Greek letter “Xi” looked like “in the name of Allah” or “bismallah” in Arabic. The first problem with this is that the Arabic is significantly longer. In modern script it is something like:
بسم الله
More often it is written with a long line in “in the name of” http://aboutislam.net/wp-
However, this is not how it was originally written. When you get into the relevant scripts (the earliest Qurans) the comparison is even harder to make. In the 8th century script you can see “Allah” الله the second word from the right below the orange line of Arabic text in the picture:
As a side note you can see how the writing evolved by 1154 where “in the name of” is the word with a long line in it followed by the word “Allah” at the beginning of both covers/pages:
The Greek and Arabic comparison is further made different by the fact that the ancient Greek Xi looks very little like the script Brad Scott used. Here is a comparison someone made in their post (compare the three examples to the last inserted picture)
from here: http://benstanhope.blogspot.
You can double check this in the image of the original Codex Sinacticus although it is hard to see: http://www.
This is partially because Greek was originally written in all capital letters (majuscule) and minuscule (lowercase) script only emerged in the 9th century but Brad Scott was using minuscule (lowercase) script for his comparison:
Lastly, what Brad Scott was actually doing was comparing later Greek lowercase script not to “in the name of Allah” but to “Allah,” (which looked like it was not in the original Arabic script of the Quran) الله
I’ve compared below “Allah” and lowercase “xi” in modern Greek. I don’t have the script that he got “Allah” from.
الله ξ
In addition to what I already stated there is another problem here: “Allah” generically refers to “God” in Arabic and can be found as the name of God in Arabic Christian bibles. You can see it here as the fourth word in Genesis (from the right): http://www.
Brad Scott says he got this theory from Walid Shoebat but contrary to Brad Scott, Shoebat alleges that letters in Arabic were inserted in the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus and this is what scholars (mistakenly) read as “666”
In this video Walid Shoebat asserts that the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus and “other codexes” don’t have the number 666 in Greek but instead just the three Greek letters (which he asserts are actually Arabic and an Islamic symbol). . . However, the Codex Sinaiticus has the numbers written out in Greek (not in the form of the three letters: chi, xi, and stigma) while Codex Vaticanus did not originally include The Book of Revelation which was added to it in the 15th century.
Here’s confirmation of this from Sinaicticus if you look at verse 13:18 (I don’t have a font for the ancient script so it is displayed in modern)
“εξακοϲιαι εξηκο τα εξʼ”
“The extant New Testament of Vaticanus contains the Gospels, Acts, the General Epistles, the Pauline Epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews (up to Heb 9:14, καθα[ριει); thus it lacks 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and R
Shoebat says he read the Codex Vaticanus and saw Arabic words (and an Islamic symbol) instead of Greek letters. However, the Greek script he saw is minuscule 15th century which does not represent how the original Greek would have looked in majuscule. Irenaeus wrote in the second century that the number was 666 (he alleged that 616 which is in the earliest documents we have was a scribal error) when they were still writing in capitals in Greek and this is before the manuscripts that Shoebat mentions: http://www.
The 15th century addition (which shouldn’t be relevant) of the Codex Vaticanus contains this for the number of the beast:
of which Shoebat is trying to say the middle letter is this in Arabic:
