THE FIRST CHECKSUM
By Donald P. Poor

In 1882, a young immigrant from Russia was just graduating from Harvard. He had a wonderful conversion to Christ, after traveling as an agnostic who often lectured on atheism! A brilliant  mathematician, multi-lingual scholar and literary figure [A personal friend of men like William James, Pres. Eliot of Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott’s father and other well-known scholars of that day (“Shorter Works” p. 11)], Ivan Panin began to study the Scriptures as a Christian. Knowing Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, he began to read them in the original languages.

Now both Hebrew and Greek are unique in that they do not have a number system. In other words, they do not use special symbols for their numbers (like our Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc.) but use instead the letters of their alphabets to represent numbers. Each letter is assigned numeric value, according to certain rules.

Aware of the numerical values of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, Panin experimented one day by replacing the letters with their corresponding numbers in Scripture. Here is Panin … a mathematical
genius, a Hebrew and Greek scholar, and he loves playing with numbers.  Suddenly, his trained mind saw a mathematical pattern! As he studied more intensely, his excitement grew. 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 random chance or human ability to construct. This discovery marked the turning point of his career, and from that time until his death in 1942, he devoted his entire life to the study of Bible numerics.

He showed, first of all, that the Bible, in its original language, is a skillfully designed product of a mathematical mastermind – far beyond any human possibility of deliberate structuring. He later supplied a representative of the Nobel Research Foundation with over 43,000 sheets 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 then issued a challenge throughout leading newspapers of the world to offer a “natural explanation” or refute the facts; not a single person was able to do so.

Panin found that patterns of prime numbers, such as 11, 13, 17, and 23, BUT ESPECIALLY 7, were found in great clusters. He would add up the sum of all numerical values for different words, sentences, paragraphs, passages, and whole books, and he found the same patterns in each of these forms! He found that the number of WORDS in a vocabulary divides by 7. The number of proper names, both male AND female divides by 7. The number of words that begin with a vowel divides by 7, likewise the number of words that begin with a consonant. The number of LETTERS in a vocabulary divides by 7, and of those letters, those that are vowels AND those that are consonants also divide by 7. Words that occurred more than once divide by 7, and also words that appeared only once! The number of nouns is divisible by 7, also the words that are not. Even the number of words beginning with each letter of the alphabet! And on and on… Panin only stayed on a passage long enough to confirm beyond reasonable doubt the statistical evidence for supernatural design. But he stated that the longer you stayed on one, it would continue to yield further and
further evidences of pattern within patterns until the mind reeled!!  Here is an example from the Old Testament.

Just the very first sentence of the Bible – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”  (Genesis 1:1). That’s the way it comes out in English, in the Hebrew it is exactly 7 words. The 7 words have exactly 28 (4×7) letters. There are three nouns (God, heavens, and earth). Taking the letters of these, substituting their number equivalents and adding them up, you get a combined total of 777 (111×7)! There is one Hebrew verb – created. Its total numerical value is 203 (29×7). The first three words contain the subject with exactly 14 (2×7) letters, likewise the other four are the object with exactly 14 letters. The
Hebrew words for the two objects (heaven and earth) each have 7 letters. The value for the first, middle, and last letters in the sentence is 133 (19×7). The numeric value of the first and last letters of all words is 1393 (199×7); the value of the first and last letters of the first and last words of the verse is 497 (71×7). The
value of the first and last letters of EACH of the words between is 896 (128×7). And so on, and so on … in this verse alone there are 30 different features of 7. I have listed only 11 of them! The chance of this happening accidentally is 1 in 33,000,000,000,000 (33 trillion).

And now an example from the New Testament: Matthew chapter 1, verses 1 through 11. The vocabulary has 49 words (7×7). 28 words begin with a vowel (4×7), the remaining 21 with a consonant (3×7). 7 end with a vowel, 42 with a consonant (6×7). The 49 words have 266 letters (38×7). Out of the 266 letters, 140 are vowels (20×7), 126 are consonants (18×7). Also, of these 49 words, 14 occur only once (2×7), 35 occur more than once (5×7), 42 (6×7) are nouns, 7 are not.  The remaining common nouns have exactly 49 letters (7×7). Male names occur in all 56 times (8×7). The names of only 3 women appear in the passage, and the Greek letters of their names add up to 14 exactly!  Panin said it would have taken Matthew several months, working 8 hours a day to construct the genealogy even if it WERE possible. But the names were chosen BEFORE MATTHEW WAS BORN!

The whole Bible is like this. I am just taking one small chunk of it and doing it in detail. Every paragraph, passage and book in the Bible can be shown to be constructed in the same marvelous way.  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 structuring and design? What is crazy, is that Mark is a Roman, Luke a Greek, and Matthew a Jew, but they all wrote with the same pattern. Each one wrote with their own unique flavor. Mark’s style is different, but the pattern is the same right through!

So who wrote it? One Mind, one Author – one God – many different writers, but one Writer. Can you imagine what kind of Mind would do this and not even care if you ever found out?! What I want you to see is how smart God is! These are not just words, it’s an incredible mathematical pattern. It dances with its own poetry in mathematics. A computer would go into raptures over this! It’s like a building where every piece joins perfectly into each other. And what is wild, is you can’t pull even ONE word out, without damaging the whole pattern. So the Bible carries within itself, a self-checking self-verifying protection factor. If a person comes along and says I don’t like this one, the whole pattern falls apart. This cannot be
found in any other religious “holy” book in the world.

(For a more detailed coverage of this same subject, see the file titled, “Computer proof that God wrote the Bible.” Please read also the articles offering a critique of the premise on which this and similar works are based.)

Computers for Christ – Chicago