It's not the easiest. Should some future notion ever strike you give it another look, try doing so from the standpoint of someone 2000 years ago struggling to describe a vision of things to occur thousands of years in the future when words don't even exist in ones vocabulary to describe what he saw.
Were some cosmic event to occur this afternoon giving me a glimpse into a parallel universe of a planet identical to ours only thousands of years more advanced, it might struggle to find words to describe what I saw and my description might not make much sense to someone reading it thousands of years from now.
"It's not the easiest. Should some future notion ever strike you give it another look, try doing so from the standpoint of someone 2000 years ago struggling to describe a vision of things to occur thousands of years in the future when words don't even exist in ones vocabulary to describe what he saw."
one priest told us once the early christians used certain "code" words when writing to each other to obscure the meaning of the writings to outsiders. The idea being if a roman soldier managed to snatch a christian message, he wouldn't understand it and might refrain from turning them in or chopping off their heads.
Something like that (they weren't hiding in the catacombs for nothing!)
for ex: apparantly "Babylon" was the code word for Rome.
The beast described was most likely Nero.
I don't think he ever did say what the mark was supposed to be.