“No, no deception involved or necessary. He just explained what he saw based on the language of the time. Simple as that.”
No, it’s certainly not as “simple as that”. People 2000 years ago still had language that was completely sufficient to describe something that seems miraculous but actually isn’t. In fact, I just wrote such a description in the last sentence and didn’t use any novel technical jargon that was unavailable to them. So if you insist that this what what John was trying to describe, but instead of using such terms, he used the term “miracle”, then there isn’t any other option than to conclude that he was being deceptive. And that God would for some reason allow that. Which is altogether preposterous.
And why would anyone decide to believe such a thing? When John says they were miracles, well, that is the most obvious, plain reading of the text. So why search for something else that John might have meant besides the plain reading? Unless you are determined that Satan and his minions can’t possibly perform miracles, I can’t conceive of any other reason that one would be searching for an alternate meaning. Yet we already know from the Bible that Satan and his minions can indeed perform supernatural acts that qualify to us mere humans as “miracles”. So there’s no need to search for some less plausible explanation at all.
Regarding the “mark of the beast”, this is a different animal. John didn’t say that would be miraculous or anything like that at all. He simply said it would be a mark. So it’s possibly that he could have been describing something technological, whether it be a microchip, or a QR code, etc, that his readers would not recognize, and just called it a “mark”, something they could understand. So to describe that in such a way would not be deceptive. But to describe something that John knew was not a miracle as being a miracle would clearly be deceptive.
If John witnessed an Apache helicopter firing missles from it's wing, would he describe it as a helicopter firing missiles off its wings, or would he use the best explanation he would have had for his time? An armored beast looking thing with the face of a man and the tail of a scorpion raining down fire, perhaps? If that were the case, would his description then be deceptive?
As I mentioned, I believe miracles will be performed. It's not that I don't believe that. And, if a demon can appear before someone as their dead granny, yeah, demons can perform miracles. It's the machinations behind those miracles that run with the tech narrative, be it performing miracles or marking a soul.