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A Current Commentary on Dr. Ivan Panin’s Bible NumericsJoshua M. SmithMath & Science Academy at Ocean Lakes High SchoolMagnet Honors English 9Professor StyronNovember 19, 2013AbstractThis paper examines the life work of Dr. Ivan Panin, who dedicated over 50 years and 43,000 pages of notes to mathematical patterns found in the Bible, and some questions his work leaves unanswered to this day. Using the numeric values of letters and words in the original Hebrew and Greek texts, also known as gematria (Slick, 2013), Dr. Panin published works from scriptures in Genesis, Matthew, and Mark, on subjects ranging from Creation, to the genealogy of Jesus Christ, to justifying controversial scriptures, yet still leaving the majority of his own life’s work unpublished. The most prominent of his findings was a reoccurring pattern of 7s that he named the Heptadic Structure, though other additional patterns were discovered as well (Panin, 2010). Skeptics of Dr. Panin’s work have dismissed his studies by trying to find other such patterns elsewhere and accusing him of manipulating variation in the texts, though nothing is yet conclusive of the influence of the accusations on his Bible Numerics (McKay, 1997).A Current Commentary on Dr. Ivan Panin’s Bible NumericsOver a span of 50 years, Dr. Ivan Panin intensely studied the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, discovering numerous mathematical patterns that he named “Bible Numerics.” Using the numeric equivalent of each letter in both languages, he discovered repetitions of certain numbers to which he attributed great significance (Panin, 2010). There are many who disregard his findings, deciding them false, for reasons that range from claiming to have found similar patterns elsewhere to accusing Dr. Panin of fraud and manipulation of the texts (McKay, 1997). Dr. Panin did not publish all of his findings, raising questions for some about the quality of his other work. For Dr. Panin (2010), Bible Numerics were a matter of proving divine authority over the Bible and his own life, and for some of those opposed to his work it is a matter of disproving the existence of the God of Christianity (McKay, 1997). After examining the published works of Dr. Panin and the accusations against him, the researcher will study some alternate portions of the Biblical texts in their original language with a method similar to Dr. Panin’s, and come to a conclusion of his own.Harvard graduate Dr. Panin (2010) first came across his beloved Bible Numerics in the year 1890 as he was reading a well-known Bible verse, John 1:1. In the King James Version [KJV], it reads “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What caught Dr. Panin’s attention was that in the original Greek of the passage, a word is present that is not translated into English (Panin, 2010). Before the first occurrence of ‘θεο?,’ or ‘God,’ the word ‘τον,’ meaning ‘the,’ appears (1881 Westcott-Hort New Testament [WHNT]). It should be noted that had Dr. Panin not been studying the Greek alongside the English, he would not have noticed this variation. It is therefore important not only to study one, the other, or both, but both of them together. As things have changed over time, words like ‘the’ have altered, and in order to see those alterations, both the original and the new must be present. Dr. Panin could not see any reasoning behind why the article was needed before ‘God’ in one case and not the other, so he began to examine the Greek text further. To do so, he delved into many endeavors, finding success only in gematria (Panin, 2010). In languages such as Greek and Hebrew, in which most of the Bible’s original texts was written, there are no separate symbols used to write numbers. Each letter has a numeric equivalent, and when all the values are added up in a word, the resulting calculation is gematria (Slick, 2013). For example, the word that began Dr. Panin’s work, ‘τον,’ has three letters: τ, ο, and ν; which have the numeric equivalent of 300, 70, and 50 respectively. Thus, the gematria of ‘τον’ is 420. It should be noted, for future reference, that this value is divisible by seven, an attribute that Dr. Panin would have undoubtedly pointed out, had he ever published any work on John 1:1. The majority of Dr. Panin’s Bible Numerics were based upon this, though he used other mathematical concepts as well, such as counting consonants and vowels, and computing calculations with the place value of letters, meaning the order in which the letters occur in a word (Panin, 2010).Dr. Panin first entered the public arena with his Bible Numerics in a letter to the New York Sun after it printed a letter from another one of its readers, challenging someone to give facts in support of Christianity. Dr. Panin began his response by stating his purpose and intended scriptural reference, Matthew 1:1-17, the Genealogy of Jesus Christ. Within the following two paragraphs he enumerated instances of 7 found through the use of counting consonants and vowels (Panin, 2010). Dr. Panin (2010) summarized the work he had laid out in this:Just as the number of words in the vocabulary is a multiple of seven, so is the number of its letters a multiple of seven; just as the sum of the factors of the number of the words is a multiple of seven, so is the sum of the factors of the number of their letters a multiple of seven. And just as the number of words is divided between vowel words and consonant words by seven, so is their number of letters divided between vowels and consonants by sevens. (p. 2)The strand of Bible Numerics encompassing the number seven is further defined as Dr. Panin’s Heptadic Structure, and so far he had only listed eight repetitions found in one part of the Bible. He went on to list four more. Through gematria he explains the fifteenth, in that the sum of all the letters is 42,364, a number divisible by seven (Panin, 2010). While the enumerations of seven are remarkable, it should be noted that the probabilities that Dr. Panin associated with them are inaccurate. According to his pattern, with fifteen features of seven, the odds are one in seven to the fifteenth power, or 1715 (Panin, 2010). What he failed to take into account was that if he searched for seven features, one of them was likely to be true, so if he searched for more features, they should’ve been implemented into his equation. The statistics are astronomical, though not quite as much so as Dr. Panin would have liked to think.Throughout the remainder of the letter, Dr. Panin briefly skims over the remainder of the first two chapters of Matthew, and even more briefly over the New Testament as a whole. For a time he writes under the assumption that the Bible is written without any divine inspiration, and then reaches an impasse in his line of reason (Panin, 2010). The next statement is the inference he has made from all of his Bible Numerics: “But once you assume that one Mind directed the whole, and the problem is solved simply enough; but this is Verbal Inspiration—of every jot and tittle of the New Testament” (Panin, 2010, p. 5). Dr. Panin took his work with the greatest of severity and gave it importance over the very driving force of his life, but there are others since his time that dispute over the validity of his work and the conclusions he drew from it. Before delving into the content of their conflicting viewpoints, it must be pointed out that just because Dr. Panin’s Bible Numerics hold true, if they do, it does not mean that the conclusions he took from them are just as true, and also, that if the accusations opposing his work hold true, it does not mean that the conclusions they take from them are just as true. The work and the conclusions are related, yet separate in verification.There are two prominent cases against Dr. Panin’s Bible Numerics; the first is that the patterns he found are not as improbable as he calculated; and the second is that he manipulated the texts to fabricate his results. One such argument according to the former case is explained in a satirical message from Brendan McKay (1997) to Computers for Christ about one of their websites. McKay (1997) chose the following three sentences:If you are an atheist, agnostic or think the bible is other than the inspired word of God then I strongly urge you to first read the following document from Computers for Christ. It shows startling mathematical evidence of the Bible's divine origin. It presents evidence that could only be unlocked in our time with the wonders of computers. (para. 5)Using those three sentences, McKay listed 56 repetitions of an occurrence of seven through a method similar to Dr. Panin’s (McKay, 1997). Finding one passage, though, is not comparable to 66 books written by dozens of different people across a time span of over a millennium.McKay does not finish in his argument with satire over one passage, but treats the first line of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” in a similar way for a total of 16 repetitions of 7 (McKay, 1997). This, similarly, is not comparable to the work of Dr. Panin and the Bible, as it is but a line in a poem trying to stand up against a book that has stood the test of time. Perhaps the most ambitious point of McKay’s is made by his program “Panin’s Panic” which analyzes for patterns within any input of text (McKay, 1997). The most ambitious, though, is perhaps too ambitious, because the whole idea of Dr. Panin was a reoccurring pattern throughout a large amount of text by many different people over an extended period of time, while “Panin’s Panic” focuses on entirely different patterns with each text. While there may be validity to the first case, not enough evidence has been presented to make it seem most plausible.The second case, the one concerning fraud, is also argued by McKay, among others. He pointed out that nearly every edition of the original Greek text of the Bible has slight variations, and any variation would be destructive to Dr. Panin’s Bible Numerics, as Dr. Panin stated in his own work. Dr. Panin chose from a variety of editions for his studies, not just one, though his primary was the WHNT. From this, McKay inferred that his selectivity in edition was proof enough that Dr. Panin designed his patterns himself, creating a circular logic (McKay, 1997). The validity of McKay’s accusations of fraudulency have neither been confirmed nor denied, and will likely remained an unanswered question for a long time. Dr. Panin, in some of his own work, explained his selectivity by reason that whichever edition of a passage followed the patterns of Bible Numerics was the right one (Panin, 2010), a point not discussed by McKay.It is important for a researcher not only to learn what others have done, but to do things himself so that he might fully understand what has been done. For this reason, the researcher will first examine some of the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible to see if Dr. Panin’s acclaimed patterns indeed exist. Secondly, the researcher will investigate the claims against Dr. Panin’s work that have been mentioned, among others, to see if they have any truth within them. Thirdly, the researcher will attempt to find patterns similar to Dr. Panin’s in scriptures on which Dr. Panin never published any work. Lastly, and most importantly, the researcher will examine all of the information collected concerning Bible Numerics and consider the implications of the results.ReferencesMcKay, B. (1997). Panin and friends. Retrieved from , I. (2010). Inspiration of scriptures scientifically demonstrated & other writings. Wainwright AB, Canada: Prophetic Word.Slick, M. (2013). The Greek and Hebrew alphabets with numeric equivalents. Retrieved from ................
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