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I'm not even sure that this is the right section of the forum to launch this in; because strictly speaking, it's not about theism vs. atheism, but rather Christianity vs. any and all non-Christian views - or to be even more precise, belief in the verbal divine inspiration of the New Testament vs. any view that disbelieves this.
Unfortunately I can't see any section of the forum which fits this category. Therefore mods, if you decide it belongs elsewhere, by all means move it and let me know so I can keep track of it.
A few months ago I prepared a paper which is much too long to quote in full in a thread post (particularly since the appendix runs to 25 pages), and in any case I wanted to show it to a few of my acquaintances who I judged competent to review it and check for significant errors or gaps in the argument. A couple of controls were suggested, which I've carried out, which tend to support the basic thesis negatively, while positively, I've been meaning to review the data in the appendix on which the argument works itself out, but have been busy and only just got round to starting that - but what I've done so far by way of revision suggests that no material difference to the initial outcome is to be expected.
Sorry to keep you all on tenterhooks. Here's what it's all about:
As you know, over the years there have been various Jewish and Christian Scripture students who have claimed to find significant numerical patterns in the Hebrew Bible and/or Greek NT. Before you start yawning, my paper offers brief criticism of some of the better-known of these attempts, pointing out that the main difficulty is the complication involved which renders satisfactory statistical analysis problematic if not impossible.
The point is, one needs to be able to walk before ever thinking of running. So in order to see whether there might be anything at all in the general concept, one needed to set up an experiment that would be free of the pitfalls to which previous inquiries were susceptible.
To summarize what I wrote:
(1) Nobody can doubt that the Bible explicitly ascribes theological significance to certain numbers; of which 7 is the chief, by common consent.
(2) For a whole range of reasons which I describe, 8 is associated with Jesus.
(3) Therefore since, according to the NT, Jesus is God incarnate, one expects both 7 and 8 to be associated with him in contrast to all other numbers.
(4) If there is anything at all in the idea of 'covert' Biblical numerics, it should reveal itself at the simplest level possible; if not, there is no point in expecting it at any more abstruse level.
(5) Pretty much the simplest statistic that can be imagined re. a text, is the number of letters in it. (Well, maybe the number of words, but for the present inquiry that would be tricky as the phrases are biased to being shorter than 7 words long.)
(6) Therefore, I undertook to go through the entire Greek NT, selecting every phrase and clause describing Jesus' unique identity and attributes (as determined by explicit NT teaching), and testing the letter counts of the resulting data set for divisibility by 7 or 8.
(7) The probability that a random number is divisible by 7 or by 8 (or both) is 15/56 or about 0.267.
(8) The total number of theologically qualifying word strings I found on initial investigation was 783. Of them, 449 were db7 or db8.
(9) The expected number of 'numerically' qualifying word strings is about 210.
(10) For this binomially-distributed random variable (re. divisibility or not), the chance of getting at least 449 qualifying strings out of 783 turns out to be 1.24 x 10^-71.
Now that's a thunderclap.
I myself knew of no prior to reason to expect any statistically significant result, let alone one as outlandishly astronomical as this. Hence my caution and request for second opinions. Like I said, a couple of controls were suggested and carried out. For example, I tested the same 783 strings for db5, given that there were no separate grounds to link 5 to Jesus. As I expected, the results were well within the bounds of the null hypothesis, viz. 139 out of 783, where the expected frequency was 156.6.
Another control was to take 100 random verses, which in this case was every 10th verse beginning at Matthew 1:1 and ending at 27:6. This found 21/100 cf. the 26.8/100 expected. Nothing the null hypothesis couldn't support.
Anyway, I meant to review the list in question, to make quite sure that the partitions were semantically and linguistically natural as well as theologically relevant. I've been busy over the last two months and more, but have finally been able to start revising it. And so far, the revision has made only a slight difference, not beginning to seriously affect the material result. That is, where the initial result for Matthew was 41 / 79, it's now 38 / 77. I think it's very reasonable to suppose that no great difference will be made to the rest of the New Testament listing either.
So: it's over to you. If anyone would like to see the paper, or at least the paper minus the appendix, do PM me and I'll try to share as needed.
Just to reiterate: the idea of such hidden numerics is one that would never have occurred to me; I'm only investigating it because other people have raised the issue. If there's nothing in it, the sooner that's exposed the better so Christians don't waste any more time on it
But as I say, it looks like there really is something in it after all.
Unfortunately I can't see any section of the forum which fits this category. Therefore mods, if you decide it belongs elsewhere, by all means move it and let me know so I can keep track of it.
A few months ago I prepared a paper which is much too long to quote in full in a thread post (particularly since the appendix runs to 25 pages), and in any case I wanted to show it to a few of my acquaintances who I judged competent to review it and check for significant errors or gaps in the argument. A couple of controls were suggested, which I've carried out, which tend to support the basic thesis negatively, while positively, I've been meaning to review the data in the appendix on which the argument works itself out, but have been busy and only just got round to starting that - but what I've done so far by way of revision suggests that no material difference to the initial outcome is to be expected.
Sorry to keep you all on tenterhooks. Here's what it's all about:
As you know, over the years there have been various Jewish and Christian Scripture students who have claimed to find significant numerical patterns in the Hebrew Bible and/or Greek NT. Before you start yawning, my paper offers brief criticism of some of the better-known of these attempts, pointing out that the main difficulty is the complication involved which renders satisfactory statistical analysis problematic if not impossible.
The point is, one needs to be able to walk before ever thinking of running. So in order to see whether there might be anything at all in the general concept, one needed to set up an experiment that would be free of the pitfalls to which previous inquiries were susceptible.
To summarize what I wrote:
(1) Nobody can doubt that the Bible explicitly ascribes theological significance to certain numbers; of which 7 is the chief, by common consent.
(2) For a whole range of reasons which I describe, 8 is associated with Jesus.
(3) Therefore since, according to the NT, Jesus is God incarnate, one expects both 7 and 8 to be associated with him in contrast to all other numbers.
(4) If there is anything at all in the idea of 'covert' Biblical numerics, it should reveal itself at the simplest level possible; if not, there is no point in expecting it at any more abstruse level.
(5) Pretty much the simplest statistic that can be imagined re. a text, is the number of letters in it. (Well, maybe the number of words, but for the present inquiry that would be tricky as the phrases are biased to being shorter than 7 words long.)
(6) Therefore, I undertook to go through the entire Greek NT, selecting every phrase and clause describing Jesus' unique identity and attributes (as determined by explicit NT teaching), and testing the letter counts of the resulting data set for divisibility by 7 or 8.
(7) The probability that a random number is divisible by 7 or by 8 (or both) is 15/56 or about 0.267.
(8) The total number of theologically qualifying word strings I found on initial investigation was 783. Of them, 449 were db7 or db8.
(9) The expected number of 'numerically' qualifying word strings is about 210.
(10) For this binomially-distributed random variable (re. divisibility or not), the chance of getting at least 449 qualifying strings out of 783 turns out to be 1.24 x 10^-71.
Now that's a thunderclap.
I myself knew of no prior to reason to expect any statistically significant result, let alone one as outlandishly astronomical as this. Hence my caution and request for second opinions. Like I said, a couple of controls were suggested and carried out. For example, I tested the same 783 strings for db5, given that there were no separate grounds to link 5 to Jesus. As I expected, the results were well within the bounds of the null hypothesis, viz. 139 out of 783, where the expected frequency was 156.6.
Another control was to take 100 random verses, which in this case was every 10th verse beginning at Matthew 1:1 and ending at 27:6. This found 21/100 cf. the 26.8/100 expected. Nothing the null hypothesis couldn't support.
Anyway, I meant to review the list in question, to make quite sure that the partitions were semantically and linguistically natural as well as theologically relevant. I've been busy over the last two months and more, but have finally been able to start revising it. And so far, the revision has made only a slight difference, not beginning to seriously affect the material result. That is, where the initial result for Matthew was 41 / 79, it's now 38 / 77. I think it's very reasonable to suppose that no great difference will be made to the rest of the New Testament listing either.
So: it's over to you. If anyone would like to see the paper, or at least the paper minus the appendix, do PM me and I'll try to share as needed.
Just to reiterate: the idea of such hidden numerics is one that would never have occurred to me; I'm only investigating it because other people have raised the issue. If there's nothing in it, the sooner that's exposed the better so Christians don't waste any more time on it
But as I say, it looks like there really is something in it after all.
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