Subject:
Numeric Patterns in the Greek New Testament
Date:
Mon, 7 Sep 1998 19:56:46 -0600 (MDT)
From:
"Paul C. Brodeur" <brodeur@datanet.ab.ca>
To:
donadams@telusplanet.net
Hi Don,
this is what we discussed on the phone a couple of months ago.
Abstract. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Greeks did not
have
numeric digits as we do (i.e. 1, 2, 3...). Instead, they assigned
numeric
values to the letters of their alphabet to express numbers. Someone
mused:
what if I assign those numeric values to the letters of a Biblical verse
and
add them up, and what if I start comparing those numeric values for
verses
pertaining to the same subject matter, would there be some kind of
consistent numeric pattern? He found that yes, there was a definite
patternness there, not perfect, but statistically highly unlikely to
have
happened at random. Interpretation: these patterns must reveal an
intelligent design: to have a text which is so rich in meaning and yet,
at
the same time, a text which has a statistically highly unlikely numeric
pattern that depends on the semantics of the text must have been
inspired by
a Higher Being indeed.
A. Bibliography.
Unknown. Cannot retrieve the author and title. Was written at least 20
years
ago. If you ask enough people, someone is bound to know what this book
is
and if further research has been done along these lines.
B. The Greek Alphabet and Numbers.
alpha = 1
beta = 2
gamma = 3
....
theta = 9
The rest of the letters were used as well. Why let anything go to waste?
iota = 10
kappa = 20
lambda= 30
....
pi = 80
(here they had a weird thing standing for 90)
rho =100
sigma =200
tau =300
....
omega =800
(and then they had other weird things standing for 900 and other
numbers).
(Cf. Smyth, Herbert Weir. Greek Grammar. Cambridge (Massachusetts),
Harvard
University Press, tenth printing 1976, #347-348.)
C. Numeric Patterns in the New Testament.
In a high, statistically significant number of occurrences, the
following
patterns were found:
phrases speaking about the Lord add up to 111
phrases about fishes add up to 153
(cf. John 21:11 says the apostles, upon seeing Jesus after His
resurrection,
caught 153 fishes. That's in the Biblical text. The author used that as
a
hypothesis: if he figured out the numeric values for biblical phrases
speaking about fishes, would he find the value 153, which was suggested
here
in John 21:11? The answer is: yes. A high, statistically significant
number
of occurrences was found to add up to 153.)
The author found several other patterns which I can no longer recall.
D. Caveats
1. This is totally unlike the Cabbalah, a Jewish thing that fell into
disrepute. Orthodox Jews would tell you. In Hebrew too, the letters were
used to express numbers. But the Cabbalists went too far. They started
believing in the underlying numbers more than in the inspired text of
the
Old Testament. They ended up professing various heresies (which even
Orthodox Jews recognize as such).
This author doesn't push the Greek numeric patterns against the meaning
of
the inspired New Testament text. In fact, the numeric patterns DEPEND ON
the
meaning of the text, i.e. phrases about the Lord add up to 111. First,
you
group the texts about something and then you add up their numeric values
and
that's when the patterns come up. He merely noted them as an interesting
aside, almost a curious artifact added by the Inspirer to show that this
was
no mere human text. This reminds me of a hidden certificate of
authenticity
built into a text file (to use a modern computer analogy, which the
author
did not use).
2. The Greek use of articles was quite unlike the use of articles in
English. For example, "the wise man" could be expressed as:
ho sophos aner
ho aner ho sophos
(In the second case, the article "ho" is repeated a second time.)
There are other uses or omissions of the article in Greek that would
seem
strange to us, but I won't get into details here.
Anyway, based on those peculiarities of the use of the article in Greek,
the
author took the liberty of sometimes including the numeric values of the
articles to add up to 111 or 153 or whatever, and sometimes excluding
the
numeric values of the articles, so that the numeric value of the verse
or
phrase would not exceed 111 or 153.
OK, that means there is a bit of give or take and may reduce the
interest of
the purists. HOWEVER, despite that liberty, the statistical odds of
those
results being so frequently achieved in verses about the Lord or fishes
or
whatever, still remain high above what you would expect if everything
were
to be working at random here.
E. Statistical Comparison with Arbitrary Numeric Values Reassigned to
the
Letters of the Greek Alphabet.
The author did an interesting test. He arbitrarily changed the numeric
values of each letter of the Greek alphabet and redid his calculations.
Would some new patterns emerge with approximately the same number of
occurrences?
The answer was no. He did only a few tests, and it would be interesting
to
do more. But he found that there was almost no pattern to speak of in
any of
the verses about the Lord or about fishes, when he used sets of
arbitrary
values being assigned to the letters of the Greek alphabet, as opposed
to
using the actual set of numeric values historically assigned to them.
The author asked a friend of his who worked at Boeing to do the
statistical
evaluations on a computer (remember, this was at least 20 years ago,
before
the days of personal computers), and his friend found that the
statistical
odds of this huge quantitative difference in the occurrences happening
at
random were just about nil.
Conclusion
Again, what we have here, is it a numeric fingerprint of God hidden
among
the letters of the text which He inspired?
Paul