I learned about this several years ago, and at the time it actually amazed me, just the idea that anything can be written in this manner was amazing, but to write a whole book, especially one the size of the Bible was incredible. But let me go back to the beginning, a Russian immigrant to the USA, named Ivan Panin (born Russia 12 December 1855), had graduated from Harvard in 1882 as a mathematician, he was also a scholar in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (the original languages of the Bible) he referred to himself as an agnostic but often had lectured on atheism. To aid these lectures, Ivan started to study the Bible in their original scripts. The languages of Hebrew and ancient Greek do not use numerals as special characters, but instead assign numeric values to the letters of their alphabet, every letter can represent a number, so each character has a value.
Ivan was aware of this numbering system for the Greek and Hebrew letters, so one day he started to experiment, possibly inspired by the Holy Spirit, he started replacing the letters in a verse of the Bible by their numeric values. He was astonished when he started to see patterns emerging. Those verses showed an elaborate mathematical pattern that was beyond random chance, and as he progressed he realised that these patterns were beyond the human ability to construct. As you may expect, this discovery left a lasting impression on Ivan, and he became a believer for the remainder of his life until his death in 1942. He devoted his life to the study of the Bible and presented the Nobel Research Foundation with over 43,000 pages of his studies, along with a statement maintaining that the evidence and the numeric patterns was irrefutable evidence that the Bible was the Word of God. The foundation acknowledged Ivan's statement by stating: "As far as our investigation has proceeded, we find the evidence overwhelming in favour of such a statement."
What Ivan Panin discovered were patterns of prime numbers (numbers that can only be divided by 1 or themselves: 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 23, etc) especially the number '7'. Here is basically how it works; when one substitutes the Hebrew letters for their numbers, and then add up the values of words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books, the result is always '7'. Also the number of words in a vocabulary divides by 7, as follows
- The number of male and female proper names, , divides by 7.
- The number of words that begin with a vowel, or a consonant, divides by 7.
- The number of nouns is divisible by 7, as are the words that are not.
- The words that occur more than once in a sentence, paragraph, book, or the whole Bible are divisible by 7.
- Even the number of words beginning with each letter of the alphabet are divisible by 7.
and so on, almost every aspect of the Bible than one can think of can be added to this list, < please see the left side-bar for examples.
Dr Panin issued a challenge in all of the world's newspapers asking for an explanation or 'rebuttal' of the facts. Not a single person accepted.
