Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!brl-adm!rutgers!topaz!christian From: harwood@cvl.UUCP (David Harwood) Newsgroups: mod.religion.christian Subject: Re: gematria in the NT writings Message-ID: <7966@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> Date: Thu, 18-Dec-86 02:01:03 EST Article-I.D.: topaz.7966 Posted: Thu Dec 18 02:01:03 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 18-Dec-86 07:29:27 EST Sender: hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU Organization: Center for Automation Research, Univ. of Md. Lines: 39 Approved: christian@topaz.UUCP Sorry I didn't reply before by email to the author of the original article, which purports to discover numerlogical identities, associated with NT concepts, in the form of certain numbers which are said to be factors of sums, obtained by gematria, for relevant phrases of NT Greek text. For example, the number 37, said to be associated with the concept of Christ, is a factor of the sum 888 for Greek "Iesous", and is said to be a factor of sums for related NT phrases with unusual frequency. [Examples were posted from John] However, admittedly naive statistical reasoning suggests that, if such magic numbers are small relative to variation of sums for words, then arbitrary magic number F is a factor of the sum for an arbitary string of words with probability 1/F. Also, whether such a string has this property is roughly independent of whether some right/left expansion has this property. Then, naively, we should expect that the probabilty that an arbitrary word-token of text is included in some short phrase with length <= L with sum having factor F is P= 1- [(F-1)/F] exp [L*(L+1)/2], the number of such short left/right expansions. This would be somewhat reduced if there were syntactical conditions on admissability, but not importantly. For example, using the values F=37 and L=6, reported in the original article, we have P= .44, so that 44% of all word- tokens of text, or of selected "relevant" subtexts, might be expected to be included in some short phrase with length <= 6 having sum with factor 37. For F= 111, P= .17, etc. Now when you consider that there might well be several such magic factors, some composite, then it might well be miraculous that there are even a few words of the New Testament which are not contaminated by this dangerous heresy, which might be neatly epitomised by a "prime theological factorization theorem". God forbid ;-) Friends, the moral is: anybody can expand any word of text to obtain a phrase with sum having any sufficiently small magic factor with any large probability. Now if the sum of the entire Codex Vaticanus is a perfect number, then we really have something ;-) David Harwood