BLOG

How the Bible Came to Us, part 1

Many have wondered if the Bible is truly the inspired word of God, and some wonder if men have omitted inspired books to suit their own opinions. In my view, we are indebted to Ivan Panin and his Numeric English New Testament (also in Greek) to establish the inspiration of Scripture through his study of gematria. He believed that the numeric patterns inherent in the text itself were the fingerprints of God and were the measure of inspired text.

Panin was a professor at Harvard and died in 1942, never having had a computer during his lifetime. He did all of his calculations of the numerical values of words and sentences by hand. This took a great deal of time, and he only had time to work on the New Testament. Even so, he studied the gematria of the Hebrew Old Testament books enough to know that they too showed the same numerical patterns seen in the Greek New Testament. No one to this day has worked with the Old Testament books the way Panin did with the New.

Ivan Panin had been an atheist in his early days. He became a believer when he discovered the numeric patterns in the New Testament and realized that no man could have included those patterns by his own design. It was then that he began to work on his Numeric New Testament. The problem he wanted to solve was the occasional difference in various old Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

Most of the discrepancies were minor, yet he wanted to know which was the inspired reading and which was a human alteration or error. Any extra word or letter, or any omission in the text, would change the numeric value of the sentence and the paragraph. By checking the gematria of each reading, Panin found that only one supported the numeric patterns, and the other destroyed those patterns. Hence, he was able to determine the inspired text.

Gematria

Today we take for granted the numbers we use in arithmetic, as if these always existed. But these came into use in the West only in the seventh century. We got them from the Arabs, who in turn borrowed them from India. In the Greek-speaking world, they used their Greek letters as their numbers. In Hebrew society, they used their Hebrew letters as numbers.

Whereas the Romans used only six of their letters as numbers (called Roman Numerals), the Hebrews used all 22 of their letters, and the Greeks used all 24 of their letters as numbers. Hence, gematria is not the invention of some modern prophet or mathematician. It was used in ancient times.

The Hebrew aleph was their number one, beth was two, gamma was three, etc. The first ten letters were their numbers from one to ten. The eleventh letter, kaf, was twenty, lamed was thirty, etc. The letter koof was 100, resh was 200, shin was 300, and the tav was 400. To write the number 120, they wrote koof (100), followed by a kaf (20).

The same basic system was used in the Greek language, except that the Greeks originally had 26 letters. Two of these, representing the numbers six and ninety, later became extinct. The numeric value of their final letter, omega, was 800. There is a list of these Hebrew and Greek letters on page 31 of the book, Theomatics, by Jerry Lucas and Del Washburn and also on pages 15 and 16 of Karl Sabiers’ book, New Discoveries in Bible Text.

The Sevens in Genesis 1:1

Genesis 1:1 is a short example of these numeric patterns hidden beneath the surface of the text.

913 In the beginning

203 Created

  86 God

401 Alef-Tav (“untranslatable,” but signifying that God is the Beginning and the End)

395 The heavens

407 And (with indefinite article)

296 The earth

There are precisely 7 Hebrew words in Genesis 1:1.

There are 28 Hebrew letters in Genesis 1:1. This is 4 x 7.

The first three words in Genesis 1:1 contain the subject and predicate: “In the beginning God created.” The number of Hebrew letters is 14, which is 2 x 7.

The last four words in the verse contain the object of the sentence: “the heavens and the earth.” This has 14 Hebrew letters, or 2 x 7. In fact, “the heavens has 7 letters, while “and the earth” also has 7 letters.

There are three important nouns in this verse: God, heaven, and earth. The numeric values of these are 86, 395, and 296, which total 777. The number of Hebrew letters used in these three nouns are 14, or 2 x 7.

The numeric value of the first verb in this verse is 203, which is 29 x 7.

If you count the Hebrew letters in Genesis 1:1, the first, middle, and last letters used in the verse have a total numeric value of 1,393, which is 199 x 7.

If you look at the first and last words in Genesis 1:1 and add the numeric values of their first and last letters, they total 497, which is 71 x 7.

If you add up the numeric value of just the last letters of the first and last words, they total 490, which is 70 x 7.

Other Passages

The odds of having just 24 features by accident is one in 191,581,231,380,566,414,401. That’s more than 191 quintillion. But Matthew 1:1-17 contains more than 200 features of sevens. The account of Jesus’ childhood in Matthew 2 continues these patterns of sevens.

Could anyone today write a single coherent paragraph, giving an account of one’s genealogy or childhood, having just five features of sevens?

Other passages, which deal with different topics, are structured around other numbers such as 11 or 12. These numbers have distinct meanings and undergird the topic in the text itself. For instance, when the book of Revelation speaks of the 12,000 from each tribe and the description of them in Revelation 7:13, 14, the numeric values are in multiples of 144.

When speaking of Jesus Christ, the numeric patterns shift to multiples of 888, because the numeric value of Jesus in Greek is 888 (and also 111).

The entire Bible is written in this way without the awareness of the writer. I personally conclude that the Bible—as it has come down to us today—is the inspired Word of God. Panin worked with other books, such as the Apocrypha, but he could find no numeric evidence that these were inspired or that they should be thought of as Scripture.

Just as God anonymously wrote Scripture in the language of mathematics, so also has He been able to give us His Word without portions of it being “lost.” We do not have a mangled Bible, as some have asserted. We do not have a Bible that was changed or altered by the scribes to suit their views, as others have said. Just because other ancient books have been discovered does not mean they should be added to the Bible. Such old books have historical value and some have good teachings and philosophy, but they lack the fingerprint of God.