I found this article interesting:
The authenticity of the Holy Bible has been attacked at regular intervals by atheists and theologians alike but none have explained away the mathematical seal beneath its surface.
It would seem the divine hand has moved to prevent counterfeiting in the pages of the Bible in a similar manner to the line that runs through paper money. Bible numerics appears to be God’s watermark of authenticity.
Vital research on this numeric seal was completed by a native of the world’s most reknowned atheistic nation, Russia. Ivan Panin was born in Russia on December 12, 1855. As a young man he was an active nihilist and participated in plots against the Czar and his government. He was a mathematical genius who died a Harvard scholar and a citizen of the United States in 1942.
Panin was exiled from Russia. And after spending a number of years studying in Germany, he went to the United States where he became an outstanding lecturer on literary criticism. Panin was known as a firm agnostic—so well known that when he discarded his agnosticism and accepted the Christian faith, the newspapers carried headlines telling of his conversion.
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In the original languages of the Bible, mostly Hebrew and Greek, there are no separate symbols for numbers, letters of the alphabet are also used to indicate numbers.The numeric value of a word is the sum total of all its letters. It was curiosity that first caused Panin to begin toying with the numbers behind the texts. Sequences and patterns began to emerge. These created such a stirring in the heart of the Russian that he dedicated 50 years of his life to painstakingly comb the pages of the Bible.
This complex system of numbering visibly and invisibly saturates every book of the scriptures emphasizing certain passages and illustrating deeper or further meaning in types and shadows. The 66 books of the Bible 39 in the Old and 27 in the New were written by 33 different people.
Those authors were scattered throughout various countries of the world and from widely different backgrounds. Many of them had little or no schooling. The whole Bible was written over a period of 1,500 years with a 400 year silence apart from the Apocrypha between the two testaments. Despite the handicaps the biblical books are found to be a harmonious record, each in accord with the other.
Panin says the laws of probability are exceeded into the billions when we try and rationalize the authorship of the Bible as the work of man. He once said: “If human logic is worth anything at all we are simply driven to the conclusion that if my facts I have presented are true, man could never have done this”.
“We must assume that a Power higher than man guided the writers in such a way, whether they knew it or not, they did it and the Great God inspired them to do it”.
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Let’s take the number seven as an illustration of the way the patterns work. Seven is the most prolific of the mathematical series which binds scripture together. The very first verse of the Bible “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), contains over 30 different combinations of seven.
This verse has seven Hebrew words having a total of 28 letters 4 x 7. The numeric value of the three nouns “God”, “heaven” and “earth” totals 777. Any number in triplicate expresses complete, ultimate or total meaning.
Also tightly sealed up with sevens are the genealogy of Jesus, the account of the virgin birth and the resurrection. Seven occurs as a number 187 times in the Bible (41 x 7), the phrase “seven-fold” occurs seven times and “seventy” occurs 56 times (7 x 8).
In the Book of Revelation seven positively shines out: there are seven golden candlesticks, seven letters to seven churches, a book sealed with seven seals, seven angels standing before the Lord with seven trumpets, seven thunders and seven last plagues. In fact there are over 50 occurrences of the number seven in Revelation alone.
There are 21 Old Testament writers whose names appear in the Bible (3 x 7). The numeric value of their names is divisible by seven. Of these 21, seven are named in the New Testament: Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea and Joel. The numeric values of these names is 1554 (222 x 7). David’s name is found 1134 times (162 x 7).
It’s got more, but you get the idea.
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