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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
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Posted: Thu Dec 18 02:01:03 1986
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	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