The New Testament begins in a strange way. Let us remember, please, that the New Testament is the Biography of One Who has been a Hero to the people of God all their lives. He has become their God. Lets us see how the Book devoted to the description of the life and doings of this Hero begins, taken from the corrected American Revised Version, in order to enable us to have almost the Greek before us.
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judah and his brethren.
And thus it goes on for forty names; most of them you never hear of again in the NT, and hardly even hear of them in the Old. Well, that is a queer kind of send-off. The genealogy of The Lord Jesus Christ is in the first chapter of Mathew. The first seventeen verses consist essentially of three separate, of rather divided accounts of Israel. The first few verses deal with Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, until David, who became their King, and in whom was promised the Messiah to come. The second period is from David to the Captivity, when God cast off His chosen people for reasons of His Own, and ceased certain dealings with them. The third division is from the Captivity to The Messiah. So it is essentially a genealogy history of God’s dealings with His People.
The vocabulary to the first half of this genealogy of the first eleven verses has 49 words. 49 happens to be 7 x 7. It has two separate numeric features. First, it is a multiple of 7; second, the sum of it’s factors is 14 twice 7. Of these 49 words 28 are, or 7 x 4 begins with a vowel, and 21, or 7 x 3 begins with a consonant. That is to say, the words of the vocabulary are divided into words beginning with a vowel and words beginning with a consonant, not at random, but by sevens. So we have four features of sevens. The 49 words of the vocabulary have 266 letters. This is a multiple of 7, i.e., 38 x 7, but that is not all. The sum of the figures of 266 is 14, or twice seven, and the sum of the factors 7 x 2 x 19 is also a multiple of seven; and we have three additional features of seven.
I have said that the 49 words in the vocabulary are divided between vowels and consonants by seven. The 266 letters of the vocabulary follow exactly the same plan, namely, 140 of them, or 7 x 20, are vowels, and 126 or 18 x 7 are consonants.
There is only one chance in a million that these things could have happened accidentally, but if that where all we might say – “Well, a strange thing may happen once in a while, even though the chance is only one in a million”; but is so happens that of those 49 words, 42 are nouns 6 x 7, 7 are not nouns. Of the 42 nouns 35, 7 x 5 are proper names the other 7 are common names. Of the 35 proper names 28 are male ancestors of the Lord Jesus Christ. This presents not only a set of divisions of seven, but it diminishes the chances 343 times. In other words, this scheme alone shows that some mathematical artists, for some reason, sat down and said to himself – “I will construct that small portion of genealogy in such a way that when I get through, all the remarkable features of 7 appear.” I tried to sit down and figure out how long it would have taken Matthew to write that particular piece of genealogy, and I reckoned that it would have taken, if he did nothing else, and did not sleep or eat or do any business or see any visitors, a good month to do that. You will see soon that it would have been impossible for him to do it at all, because there are features that make it impossible.
The second half of the first chapter of Matthew, containing the account of the Birth of our Lord has 161 words – 23 x 7. Those words occur in 105 forms – 15 x 7. The vocabulary to that passage contains 77 words – 11 x 7, and the same features I described to you before can be found here again. In additions to the vast structure of numerics of sevens in that portion of the chapter, there is also this. The angle happens to make a speech to Joseph and he uses 28 words of the 77 of the vocabulary, namely 7 x 4, and he uses 35, or 7 x5, of the 105 forms. The angel has a little scheme of seven all to himself separate from the rest. The two have each a separate scheme, and the whole portion is constructed on that plan. I could spend a good hour in expounding to you the numerics of that passage alone.
We come to the second chapter of Matthew. It is a longer chapter. The number of vocabulary words is a multiple of seven. The number of forms is a multiple of seven. There are several paragraphs in the second chapter Matthew, and every paragraph has it’s own numerics, and yet the entire chapter is all one mathematical unit on the same plan as brought before you above.
I realise friends that the subject is novel, and no wonder you have a little difficulty hearing it. (Continued in Next Post)
IVAN PANIN
(With Personal permission to use by the previous publishers)