Bible codes
I have recently become aware of a book called The Mysterious Bible Codes. The book claims that God has encoded events and figures of historical significance into the original languages of the text. To decipher these codes, computers are used to scan the Hebrew and Greek letters skipping an equal amount of letters each time. For example, if you skipped every 7 letters in the first sentence of this paragraph, you would arrive at the following sequence of letters: ebwblyuc (aka ELS: Equidistant Letter Sequence). In this example, we have an incoherent list of letters. The author of The Mysterious Codes, Grant Jeffrey, claims that if one applies this same method to the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible, words such as "Hitler", "Auschwitz", and "Holocaust" appear. Mr. Jeffrey claims that multiple scans have been performed with multiple results that have historical significance. His argument is that God has encoded the Bible as a strategy to win over those who are skeptical of the Bible.
Apologetics is the field in Theological discussion which seeks to give people intellectual reasons to accept the message of the Bible. The word apologetics itself can be a little misleading. It has nothing to do with saying "I'm sorry." The word actually comes from the Greek word apologia which is translated as "defense" in 1 Peter 3:15 (NASB). I think that the field of apologetics is very important for every Christian. Today, we live in a world that generally sees Christians as ignorant and naive, and for this reason alone, Christians everywhere should devote themselves to learning as much as they can about their faith and educate themselves as much as possible about as many fields of research as possible. In my opinion, Christians should be the smartest people in the world.
So let's hear what you think...Do you think that this is possible? What would be your reaction to someone who presented this idea to you and was convinced that it was true?
posted by Josh Belcher @ 9:02 AM
6 Comments:
Good article Josh. I agree that Christians should be some of the most educated, well-read, well-researched people on the planet. If we really love Jesus as much as we say we do, we should turn over ever stone, open every book etc. to learn all we can to be better followers of him. The "bible code" has some very large problems and is in essence diametrically opposed to the entire purpose of the Bible. The mere fact that it is so poular makes me think what that says about our society.
I heard on the radio this one time about a guy who used Bible coding as an outreach. He talked about how it is really interesting to non-Christians and is a way to get them in the door to a personal relationship with Christ.
BJ,
Was the guy advocating that God made Bible codes or did he just talk about Bible codes to get their attention and gave the gospel?
I once heard that there was a code that told of the secret location of the Garden of Eden.
I think it was up, up, down, left, B, A. On second thought.. Forget I said anything.
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There are over 3 million letters in the Bible. By taking subsets of equidistant letters, we are essentially randomizing the letters. For example, there are 7 sets of of letters that are 7 letters apart. Each set has more than 400,000 letters. We can pick other equidistances as well to expand our pool of sequenced letters. Now the question becomes: Is the probability of finding recognizable words (holocaust, auschwitz, hitler) higher in our sets of sequenced letters than in a random selection of letters of similar size? My guess is that it is not significantly higher. Remember, we are not dealing with just 3 million letters, but 3 million letters divided up into an indeterminate number of subsets and resequenced. Each division yields another arrangement of the same 3 million letters. If we continue rearranging the letters even in such a programmatic fashion, we are bound to find hundreds if not thousands of instances where eerily significant words appear. So what?
The significance of the Bible is that it tells us about God and our proper relation to him and to one another. It is simply silly to look for some kind of mysterious code in the letters of the Bible, whether in the original languages or not.
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