Just came across this as I was reading through some thoughts; perhaps it's been shared here, I do not know. To be truly honest, I developed a headache trying to follow all of it, but perhaps there are those that are more knowledgeable of such things that will have an easier time of understanding it than I. Again, I'm not trying to make a point or start an argument; I just found it interesting and thought to share it. I know that if one looks hard enough at something, he/she can make things appear that aren't really there, but still, something on this scale even makes that explanation hard to justify. Anyway, enjoy, or not, and make of it what you will...
- The Numerical Miracle -
All students of Scripture know the significance of the complete and perfect number "seven", as constantly used throughout the Bible. We excerpt the following from a well-known scholar, Ivan Panin, writing in the "New York World": Note! Text cited----Greek edition of the New Testament, Westcott and Hort.
"The first seventeen verses of the New Testament contain the genealogy of Jesus Christ. The genealogy consists of two parts. Verses 1-11 contain the genealogy of Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, to the captivity, when the Jews ceased to be an independent people. Verses 12-17 contain the genealogy from the captivity to Christ. Let us examine the first part of this genealogy.
"Its vocabulary has 49 words, or 7 sevens, of which 42, or 6 sevens, are nouns; and 7 are not nouns. Of the 42 nouns, 35, or 5 sevens, are proper names, and 7 are common nouns. Of the 35 proper names, 28, or 4 sevens, are male ancestors of Jesus, and 7 are not.
"The 49 words of the vocabulary are distributed alphabetically thus: Words under the first five letters of the Greek alphabet are 21 in number, or 3 sevens; under the second five letters, 14, or 2 sevens; under the next eleven letters, also 14, or 2 sevens. Again: These words have 266 letters, or 38 sevens, and these also are distributed alpha-betically, not at random, but by sevens; thus words under the first three letters have 84 letters, 12 sevens; under the fourth letter, 7; under the fifth and sixth, 21, or 3 sevens; under the eighth, 70, or 10 sevens; under the tenth, eleventh and twelfth, 21, or 3 sevens; under the thirteenth, 7; under the fifteenth to the twenty-first, 49, or 7 sevens; under the twenty-second, 7. It is thus clear that this part of the genealogy is constructed on an elaborate design of seven.
"Let us now turn to the genealogy as a whole. I will not weary readers with recounting all the numerical phenomena displayed therein. Pages alone would exhaust them. I will point out only one feature. The Greeks had no figures, but used instead the letters of their alphabet. Their first letter stood for 1; their second for 2, etc. Every Greek word is thus an arithmetical sum obtained by adding the value of its letters. The vocabulary of the entire genealogy contains 72 words. If we write its numerical value against each of these 72 words, and add them, we obtain for their value sum 42,364, or 6,052 sevens; and these 6,052 sevens are distributed alphabetically, not at random, but by sevens.
"It is thus clear that not only are the first eleven verses of this genealogy constructed on an elaborate design of sevens, but the entire genealogy is also thus constructed. One other feature: The 72 vocabulary words of this genealogy occur in 90 forms. If we add the numerical values of these 90 forms we get 54,075, or 7,725 sevens, with corresponding distribution into 7 alphabetical groups of seven.
"There is not, however, a single paragraph out of the hundreds in Matthew that is not constructured on exactly the same plan, only with each additional paragraph the difficulty of constructing it increases, not in arithmetical, but in geometrical progression. For He contrives to write His paragraphs so as to develop constantly fixed numeric relations to what has gone before and what follows.
"It happens, however, to be an additional fact that Luke's gospel contains exactly the same phenomena as those of Matthew and Mark; and so does John, and so does James, and Peter and Jude and Paul.