Augustus wasn’t the most evil Roman Emperor, Caligula was. Augustus was more middling, really. The romans weren’t the real bad guys in the New Testament, though they weren’t nice, the pharasees were.
Not sure if Agustin and Nero are the same person. If you want to get your tinfoil hat on, the numerical equivalent thing applies to several famous people. One of them is Rupert Murdoch.
I’m not a big fan of the close interpretation of revaluations myself. Apparently it’s a remembered conversation between a local Shepard and someone who claimed to be a time traveler, but whom the Shepard insists was actually an angel. It also took place in Aramaic which is an even more maddeningly vague language than ancient Hebrew (which it was translated into) which is already really bad that way. It had very little in the way of concepts of numbers or other specific ideas, and to make it even worse Shepard’s were literally at the very bottom of the economic and education food chain at the time. You’ve got a man with effectively no education,mathematical, or world knowledge asking questions of someone with knowledge much greater than his, and then remembering it years later and we get the translation from one super vague language into another.
