From agnostics to theologians
Ivan Panin was born almost at the very end of the unsuccessful Crimean War for Russia - December 12, 1855. He came from a good wealthy family, but in his youth, like many of his contemporaries, he joined the ranks of the populists and considered himself a nihilist. True, he did not have to take an active part in the revolutionary movement. At the age of 18, the future “father of Russian numerology” went to study in Germany.
For three years he stubbornly studied linguistics and literature, and then in 1878 he emigrated to the United States. There he entered Harvard University and continued his studies, mastering the Greek language and Hebrew. After graduating from university, he began to engage in literary criticism, lectured on the works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol - that is, the most significant Russian writers who, as he believed, reflected the nerve of the time.
The recent student Panin did not believe in any god. He called himself an agnostic and believed only in the revolution. No wonder the first book he wrote was the essay "The Revolutionary Movement in Russia", published in 1881. Panin, like other political emigrants, believed that his word from across the ocean would reach his homeland and help accelerate the revolutionary process. In this he saw his destiny. Over the decade, his name has become well known in the United States and Canada. Everyone considered him a talented young writer, sneering at the Christian faith.
However, in 1890 Panin renounced his own agnosticism. A 35-year-old man began translating the New Testament from Greek. After translating the first verse of the first chapter of John's Gospel, he thought hard. And he began to look for mathematical patterns in a phrase familiar from childhood: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Dissecting this phrase, like a frog natural scientist, he nevertheless revealed mathematical patterns and decided to apply an unexpected result to the entire text of Holy Scripture. Newspapers, meanwhile, came out with articles equipped with many exclamation marks: Panin believed in God!
There was something to be surprised at. In 1891 his work "The Structure of the Bible: Proofs of the Divine Inspiration of Scripture" was published with a scrupulous study of the original source. The main conclusion was this: even if several of the greatest mathematicians worked on writing the text of the Bible, correlating words with their numerical values, then they would not have been able to achieve the divine pattern that the text is. Hence, this book is indeed dictated by God himself.
In late 1899, he held a public debate with the major critics of the Bible with the editorial staff of the New York newspaper Sun (published before 1950). The divine plan took Panin's mind so much that he stopped lecturing on literature and settled with his wife on a tiny farm in the Canadian province of Ontario. There, for almost half a century, until his death in 1942, he was engaged only in translating the Bible and searching for mathematical patterns in its text.
Promotional video:
Holy seven
Analyzing the first verse of the first chapter of the Gospel of John, Panin drew attention to a strange thing: if you replace the letters of the Hebrew or Greek language with the corresponding numbers (and the Jews and Greeks used letters to denote numbers), you get an interesting mathematical pattern. This pattern is woven from combinations of prime numbers such as 7, 11, 13, 17, 19.
The first number he noted was the number 7. It organizes both the first verse of the first chapter of John and the first verse of Genesis - "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Panin correlated the appearance of this number in both phrases with the fact that the biological foundations of life are closely related to the seven. The lunar month (7 × 4) lasts 28 days, the week lasts 7 days, sunlight can be decomposed into seven colors, the octave consists of seven tones. Even the periods of pregnancy in humans and animals are multiples of seven: 280 (7 × 40) days for women, 147 days (21 × 7) for sheep, 98 days (14 × 7) for lions, 63 days (9 × 7) for dogs, 56 days (8 × 7) in cats, 28 days (4 × 7) in hares, 21 days (7 × 3) in mice.
Every 7 years, the human body is renewed. Memory is able to capture no more than 7 concepts at a time, and so on. In the phrase “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” in Hebrew - 7 words, which consist of 28 (7 × 4) letters. The shortest word of the phrase is located in the center, each one standing to the right and left of it is formed from 7 letters. If the most important words of the phrase ("God", "heaven", "earth") are replaced with numbers, then the total will be the number 777. The entire genealogy of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew is also built on the basis of the seven. It consists of 42364 (7 × 6052) text units. And there are many such numerical bundles in the Bible. It is literally written in numbers - yes, he who knows how to count will count.
Interestingly, to designate the names of Satan (and he has several of them), the Bible used another prime number - 13 and multiples of 13, and for the name of Jesus - the number 888.
The next step of Panin's search for patterns was the exact translation of the Bible into English. He explained the need for a new translation simply: over the millennia, Bible scribes made a lot of distortions, changing the original word given by God. It is possible to return the text to the correct, sacred form only by restoring the correct numerical drawing.
Since there are no meaningless phrases in the Bible, all phrases have special symmetry and numerical meaning. If this is suddenly not there, an error has occurred and it must be eliminated. Panin carried out this long, difficult and painstaking work until the end of his days, despite the ailments and diseases that began to torment him towards old age. He completely verified and published first the first English translation of the New Testament, and then the second, improved. He handed over 43 thousand pages with his comments and notes to the commission for the study of the Bible.
From numbers to prophecies
Panin's research aroused great public interest. Following him, the Israeli mathematician Elia Rips took up the analysis of sacred texts. His report provoked disbelief at first and was sent for verification to the cipher specialist Harold Gens. He took up work with reluctance, but got so carried away that he found in the texts of two thousand years ago predictions of events of the 20th century - from flights to the moon to the assassination of President Kennedy.
Our contemporaries liked the idea that the entire future is encrypted in one ancient book so much that the American journalist Michael Droznin immediately began to popularize it. All with horror and delight awaited what new surprises the Bible would bring.
However, skeptical scientists ran completely unholy texts through the computer, like Melville's novel "Moby Dick", and also received mathematical relationships and prophecies "already accomplished." Mostly the names of the killed celebrities and the dates of their murders. It turned out that Melville also "encrypted" the death of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, President Kennedy and Lady Dee in the novel … Scientists have come to the conclusion that any grammatically correct text has mathematical laws. Not just the Bible. This is the property of language.
Many church hierarchs also oppose attempts at numerological deciphering of sacred books. They are absolutely right: if God existed, then He would speak to people in plain text, which does not need to be deciphered. Otherwise, the whole meaning of God's communication with man is lost. And the idea that it took people several thousand years to decipher the words of the Creator seems completely wild …
Magazine: Mysteries of History No. 20, Nikolay Kotomkin