Revelation 13:16-17

Detection was inevitable, for the very coins were stamped (Matthew 22:19) with the head of the Cæsar, the gods, or Rome itself, and the prophet apparently expected that genuine Christians would refuse to sanction idolatry and condone blasphemy by handling such emblems of profanity (cf. Ign. ad Magn. 5, δύο νομίσματα, ὃ μὲν θεοῦ, ὃ δὲ κόσμου). Only abject, servile devotees of the cultus will stoop to that! Irenæus has a similar allusion (iv. 30. 2) to those who carried money “cum inscriptione et imagine Cæsaris”. μέτωπον. This highly figurative allusion is to the habit of marking soldiers and slaves with a conspicuous tattoo or brand (cf. Lucian, Dea Syra; 3Ma 2:29, where the Alexandrian Jews are branded with the mark of Dionysius; also on Galatians 6:17); or, better still, to the religious custom of wearing a god's name as a talisman (cf. Deissmann, 349 f.). The general sense of the prediction is that the faithful will be shut up to the alternative of starving or of coming forward to avow their prohibited faith, so subtly and diabolically does the cultus of the emperor pervade all social life. Another solution is to think of the χάραγμα or red stamp, which was essential to all documents of exchange (Deissmann, 240 f.); it consisted of a red seal with tho emperor's name or effigy. Ramsay (Seven Letters, pp. 106 f.) takes the whole description as a symbolic and rather sarcastic way of referring to a boycotting demand that every Asiatic Christian should somehow “stamp himself overtly and visibly as loyal, or be disqualified from participation in ordinary social life and trading”. Probably the passage is a figurative and unqualified expression for conspicuous loyalty to the Imperial cult. In Ep. Lugd. the devil is said to work against Christ by “excluding us from houses, baths, and markets, and also by forbidding any one of us to appear anywhere”.