“Incidentally, those who read the Bible in one hand and the Newsweek in the other should know that historically, many have believed that the book of Revelation was John’s message of warning to the Christians of his day of horrible impending persecution from Nero (whose name in Hebrew is 666) and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70A.D. and has therefore largely been fulfilled.”
I know some folks believe that. But this has never seemed very credible to me. Although the destruction of the Temple was a pretty big deal to the Jews, it was a little tiny event in world affairs. It’s really hard to reconcile the earth shattering and very specifically described events related in Revelation to anything that has happened to date in world history—the Black Death is pretty much the closest event (high percent of world population dying). But it was not preceded or followed by anything remotely resembling the other events of Revelation.
And if you think the tribulation has already occurred, that means the millenial reign started sometime soon after that. If that’s the case, does this world for the past two thousand or so years look like Christ and the martyrs are ruling it in justice?
So either you toss out most of the Book of Revelation, you strain to apply it to events to which it has no obvious application, or you conclude the tribulation hasn’t started yet. I have a hard time with the notion that Revelation describes anything recognizable sequence of events that has occurred since it was written. So much of the Jewish prophecy is the type of thing you read and say (in retrospect), “duh, of course that’s what he meant.” Isaiah was describing the crucifixion of Jesus, duh. How come the Jews of the pre-Christian and early Christian era didn’t figure that out? Similarly, the Apostles clearly expected the second coming DURING THEIR LIVES, but modified that as their lives went along. My suggestion in that regard is that religions get stuck in early attempts to overfit prophecy to events and can’t see outside the box once they are stuck there. Revelation is so specific and describes events so huge that we are all going to say “duh, of course” when the events transpire. Either that, or Revelation should not be in the Bible. If we have to strain to interpret it and apply it to events, the events haven’t happened. So unlike the apostles, it doesn’t seem to me that the early interpretations of Revelation have adjusted their interpretation to reality. They have stayed stuck there for a long time.
As to Nero, is there any documentation of him dying and being resurrected three days later—Revelation kind of requires that or you need to toss that part of Revelation. And who were the two witnesses Nero killed whose death and resurrection were witnessed live by the entire world—I can’t find them in the History books. If the black death was one of the events described in Revelation, it is on the wrong timeline with Nero’s death and “resurrection” both in the “before and after” sense and in 1300 years rather than maximum of seven years Revelation confines one to. What was the mark without which noone could conduct commerce?
This is not meant as a polemic. This is just a small part of the thinking I was forced to when I studied Revelation. I do data analysis and modeling for a living. Attempts to apply the second part of Revelation to known world events strike me as being less credible than the strained man-made global warming models desperately trying to fit their models to the data and then adjusting the data when it doesn’t. We call that overfitting in the modeling world. To date, I have seen nothing to suggest anything other than that the early Church got stuck in a badly overfit model of Revelation to reality.
But I’d be interested in literature that presents a non-overfit case for Nero being the anti-christ and documents his name being 666 and how the other events of Revelation (including the woes and the millenial reign) fit events that we know have occurred. I got to say though, the case that we have gone thru a thousand years when Christ and the martyrs reigned in justice is going to be hard to make. That’s not the world I see around me.
I suggest you read Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation by Kenneth Gentry. It's addresses most of your issues/objections.
One friendly suggestion: make sure you are looking at the world through eyes informed by the Bible, not by human understanding of what the end times ought to look like.