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Emperor Nero of wicked repute

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  by Damien F. Mackey     Who, then, was this Nero?   Where does Nero fit into this list of kings?   And can Nero be the man-beast numbered 666 in John’s Revelation 13:18?     Introduction   The emperor Nero I have found extremely difficult to slot into an appropriate time frame in my revision of ancient history.   In this sense, Nero has been for me like - in the case of Assyrian history - the difficult Ashurnasirpal, or his presumed (but not actual) son-successor, Shalmaneser so-called III.   In earlier times I would simply have considered Nero as – just as the text books tell us – a Roman emperor who reigned in the era thereby assigned to him, after Claudius.   The conventional (or text book) succession of Roman rulers is given as follows:   1st century AD   (Julius Caesar) Augustus  (27 bce–14 ce) Tiberius  (14–37 ce) Caligula  (...
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Joseph and Moses loom large in Egyptian dynastic history

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  by Damien F. Mackey   Joseph and Moses serve to knit together Egypt’s early dynastic history, and they even bring into synchronicity the Old Kingdom with the so-called ‘Middle’ Kingdom.     Introduction   Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) renders to Joseph the highest praise (49:15): “… no man like Joseph has been born , and his bones are cared for”. Joseph, a saviour of Egypt during the Famine, may have said this very thing of himself. For, in what was one of his many Egyptian guises, as I think (see below), he will say:   “I am a man without equal …. I am the front of people and the back of people because (my) like will not exist; he will not exist. (My) like could not have been born; he was not born”.   Moses, on the other hand, would probably never have said anything like this about himself. Although it was later written of him that (Acts 7:22): “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful ...
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