printer friendly version

"The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times Thou shalt keep them, O Lord; thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever"
(Psalm 12:6-7).

The date: December 12.
The year:1855.

Man was awakening to the dawn of a new age - within a few short decades, knowledge would explode throughout the civilized world. Brand-new sciences appeared almost overnight, as men concentrated mind and energies to find and conquer the secrets of their universe.

In Russia, the seeds of a revolutionary new religion were being sown. With its basic premise of "No God" and its Bible a text on dialectical materialism, it was soon to take root and spread like a parasitic mushroom across the world. Spearheading this ideological attack was an assault to defame, discredit, and finally destroy the Book that had given millions the promise of Christ.

It is thus strange how God in ironic humor chose a boy born in Russia to issue a counterchallenge to a skeptical world that has never been successfully refuted. His name - Ivan Panin. His challenge - the inspiration of Scriptures, factually demonstrated in the one language all sciences utilize - mathematics.

Panin died in 1942, after almost 50 years of brilliant work, and passed into the Presence of the God he loved and served. His writings and labors have been largely lost to the world of saints and scoffers alike, and have not been given the attention they deserve. A small fraction of his amazing discoveries are here reissued for the benefit of a generation of doubt.

Those familiar with the laws of statistical probability will most appreciate the issues at stake. Those with a knowledge of Hebrew and Greek will be even better prepared to analyze and understand this challenge. Those with neither are still invited to consider the facts, and to give any other answer than the one the overwhelming evidence presents - that the Holy Bible in its original languages is the skillfully-designed product of a Mathematical Mastermind far beyond any earthly capability and far above any human possibility of deliberate structuring. The evidence Panin presents may only be refuted one of two ways;

1. By showing that his facts presented here are not actually true;

2. By demonstrating that his mathematics are faulty and the statistical conclusions reached unfounded.

To check the first is simply a matter of verifying the author's statements from the original languages and sources. To check the second requires only a knowledge of high-school arithmetic, and a little knowledge of the laws of arithmetic and geometrical progression. If then neither can be faulted (and the author knows of no successful attempt to date) there is left no other reasonable or scientific answer to the evidence you are about to see than the simple Biblical statement of its origins - "Holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Pet. 1:21). You are invited to impartially examine the evidence, but should know before beginning that knowledge equals responsibility and the Bible will not leave you impartial to its claims for commitment to its Author! Accordingly, these are written "that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, you might have life through His name" (John 20:31).

The New Testament was originally written in Greek, the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic. Both Greek and Hebrew have a common peculiarity - neither use special symbols for their numbers (like our "1", "2", "3", etc.) but use instead the LETTERS of their alphabets to represent numbers. Accordingly, the 24 Greek letters of the alphabet also stand for the following numbers, in order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10; then 20, 30, etc. to 80; next 100, 200, etc. up to 800.

Likewise the Hebrew alphabet uses a similar numeric value for each of its letters. The Hebrew numbers 6 and 90 are not in the Greek; and the Greek numbers 500, 600, 700, and 800 are not in the Hebrew. All other numbers are common to both alphabets. We shall call these numbers the numeric values of the letters.

Each word in Hebrew and Greek thus represents a sum in arithmetic, obtained by adding the numbers for which each letter stands. Bear in mind that the numeric values are not assigned arbitrarily, but are part and parcel of the language. The resultant SUM of all the added letters in a word or phrase will be called its GEMATRIA. For the purpose of study, one further definition is necessary; the number of the place a letter occupies in the Hebrew or Greek alphabet will be called its PLACE VALUE. The numeric value is the same as the place value for the first 10 Hebrew letters; but the eleventh letter, caph, has a place value of 11 but a numeric value of 20. Keep in mind this distinction. Here is a complete list of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, plus numeric and place values:

Panin was a mathematics genius, one of the top ten men in his field at the time. He became a Christian after graduating from Harvard University in 1882 and began to devote time to study the Bible. He read fluently in a number of languages, Hebrew and Greek among them. Aware of the numerical values of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, he experimented one day by replacing the letters for their corresponding numbers in Scripture. Suddenly, his trained mind saw a mathematical pattern! He studied the gematria of the words more intensely, his excitement growing. More and more evidences of incredibly detailed mathematical design came to light. A few short hours of work had him utterly amazed.

The verses he had studied bore unmistakable evidence of an elaborate mathematical pattern, far beyond chance or of accident. He calculated roughly the time it would take for a mathematician even of his own caliber to produce a similar mathematical design, with the corresponding letters still making sense in a sentence. It was plainly impossible, even if the design had been intentional to the writer, within the space of many years to complete! This discovery marked the entire turning-point in his career; it revolutionized his life. From that time on until his death in 1942, he devoted his life to the study of Bible Numerics.

His painstaking researches into the original languages of Scripture in the light of this discovery brought to light a wealth of irrefutable objective evidence for the Divine Inspiration of Scripture. The Bible was assembled over a period of 1,600 years by 40 different writers; yet it shows an incredible unity, humanly impossible to construct under similar conditions, guarded by a protective mathematical code and kept for modern man!

Panin's work is highly detailed and exhaustive. At best this tract can only state some of his general findings and give a limited number of examples from his voluminous writings on the subject. But even the few selected will be far more than enough to convince the honest inquirer that the Bible is all it claims to be - the Holy, inspired, infallible Word of God. Panin supplied a representative of the Nobel Research Foundation with over 43,000 pages of his studies accompanied by his statement that this was his evidence that the Bible was the Word of God. Their reply was - "As far as our investigation has proceeded we find the evidence overwhelmingly in favor of such a statement."

He challenged nine noted rationalists and Bible critics through the medium of the "New York Sun" newspaper to publicly refute or give explanation for a few of his presented facts other than the obvious; that the Word of God was the product of a Divine Mastermind above all possibility of human construction, carrying within itself a self-checking and protecting factor to ensure against additions and subtractions to its text in the original languages. Four made lame excuses; the rest were silent. He issued a challenge throughout leading newspapers of the world to offer a natural explanation or refute the facts; not a single person has ever been able to do so.

Taking a given subject, like a genealogy, a passage of Scripture, a book of the Bible or the Bible in its entirety, he demonstrated among many other things the following phenomena:

PATTERNS of prime numbers, such as 11, 13, 17, and 23, but especially 7, so remarkable as to be beyond human ability to construct. The number 7 has always had a special significance in religious patterns of worship through the ages. The Bible is filled with sevens, from the 7 days of creation to the 7 angels in Revelation. It has been an old venture of Bible scholars to trace the recurrences of the number 7 through the Scripture. Numerics reveal an incredible pattern of sevens underlying and reinforcing the very words of Scripture, that are seemingly inexhaustible in detail and intricacy. The numbers on the surface only give us a clue to the wealth of numeric detail underneath. In a given passage or book, the following patterns of seven can be seen to occur, ALL BY DESIGN -

The following is an example of this from the New Testament:

Matthew 1:1-16 - Examining only the first 11 verses numerically:

The genealogy of Christ is divided into 3 sets of 14; Abraham to David; David to Babylon; Babylon to Christ. There are two natural sections; vs. 1-11 and vs. 12-17; of those first 11 verses:

Also!!

This diminishes the chance of accident to six hundred billion to one! Many other details are hidden here that come to light on further study. Panin said it would have taken Matthew working several months working 8 hours a day to construct the genealogy even if it were possible-but these names were chosen BEFORE MATTHEW WAS BORN.

But the pattern is certainly not limited to genealogies! Let us examine the following:

Matthew 1:18-25 - The account of the Virgin Birth of Christ:

Now the angel speaks to Joseph, his words forming a pattern of 7's of their own, yet dovetailing into the whole in a most remarkable manner:

This by no means exhausts the passage, which is said to be literally packed with sevens. Dr. Panin challenged anyone to produce a similar passage in 3 years of 161 words - the law of chances here operating in this little passage of 8 verses stand at ONE in 200-odd QUINTILLION - a number 21 digits long! EVERY paragraph, passage, and book in the Bible can be shown to be constructed in the same marvelous way, each doing a work estimated to take at least thousand years. Humanly speaking this is utterly impossible.

Consider for a moment the difficulty of constructing a similar book, even with the design in mind. With each additional paragraph, the difficulty of constructing it increases not in arithmetical but geometric progression. He must try to write paragraphs to develop fixed numerical relations constantly to what goes both before and after. It must not only conform to the numerical pattern consistently and in sufficient detail to yield evidence after evidence of design in its structure, but it must also make sense and read in smooth, literary style in the same simple majesty of the Bible documents. So Matthew was not only a historian and an accomplished literary man, but also a mathematical genius! And if he was, so were ALL the other writers of the Bible, because ALL ITS BOOKS show the same phenomena.

Consider the last few verses of Mark, a target for much criticism in recent years, and triumphantly rejected by many scholars on the grounds that it is an "addition" by some "overzealous scribes" because it is missing from the "best" manuscripts:

Mark 16:9-20 - The Resurrection testimony of Christ and His commission to the disciples:

And so on!

The above passage yields on analysis at least 75 such features of 7. The statistical chance that this occurred by accident is laughable. Yet Mark was a Roman, used a totally different style than Matthew and wrote for a different type of reader. Luke and John both also show different styles and design their books for different readerships also; but Luke and John also both show the same patterns!

What kind of fantastic collaboration between the disciples could have produced this structure without computers? How could mere fishermen and tax-collectors produce this kind of incredible structure and design? Panin stated that he only stayed on a given passage long enough to confirm beyond reasonable doubt the statistical evidence for supernatural design, but that each passage continued to yield further and further evidences of patterns within patterns until the mind reeled. No human being who ever lived could have written one book like these unaided. The evidence is objective and overwhelming to the careful and honest scholar. Scripture is inspired!

The Hebrew text also reveals the same amazing phenomena. For example, the very first verse in the Bible has been a target for much criticism. Observe the incredible detail the pattern reveals in just one simple verse of seven Hebrew words;

Genesis 1:1 - "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

There are over 30 different numeric features in this one verse alone. The chances of coincidence for the above 16 are one in 33-odd TRILLION. Explain it if you can in any other way than the obvious - God was in the writing of the Book that bears His Name.

ONLY the 66 books of the Scriptures bear this Divine seal. No other works of man in any other language faintly resemble the intricate structure and design of the Bible. Those who have made attempts to write poetry or prose by an artificial number pattern have not only made poor, stilted literature, but their extent and intricacy of design is trivial in comparison.

The fact remains; only an Infinite mind could have devised this Book of books. Will you carefully consider His personal message to you and be willing to do something about it?

PDF Version

Revision 1.2 ©1998 Winkie Pratney.