The Sevens

It is fair, and it is why those two projects deserved the beating they got. But notice what they were doing. Panin worked with a shifting method and a habit of settling for close enough. The Bible Code searched for letters spaced at intervals, reading between the lines for words nobody wrote. Brendan McKay took the same method to Moby Dick and it produced the same results, which is exactly what a method that finds anything should do.

Nothing on these pages is read between the lines. Every count here is of words that are printed on the page, in the order they are printed, using the numbers the Book itself names. Seven is not a number chosen because it was convenient; it is the number this Book has used for completeness from the seventh day to the seventh seal. Seventy times seven is not a number chosen either; the Lord Jesus said it to Peter. Six hundred threescore and six is not chosen; we are told, in the text, to count it.

The fair test of a method is whether it works on other books. Run this one on the New International Version, or the English Standard Version, or the New American Standard, and the counts collapse. Jesus and Christ do not fall on 777 and 777. God's words in Genesis 1 do not fall on seven times seven times seven. The method is not producing sevens; the King James Bible is.

This is the objection that should be answered by showing the work, so on every page in this section, the rule for each count is printed beside it. Open the panel, read the search, and judge for yourself whether it is honest. No number is asked to be taken on trust.

Where a rule sets something aside, the exclusions are named one by one. The name Jesus appears 983 times, and all but three of them are the Lord Jesus Christ, leaving seventy times seven twice over; the other three are Joshua in Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8 and a man called Justus in Colossians 4:11. That is the whole rule, it is three verses, and you can read all three in a minute. Excluding Peter's and including Paul's would be cherry picking; excluding both, as the 153 count does, is the consistent rule.

Where case matters, the count takes the word exactly as the Cambridge text prints it. Amen stands there seventy seven times with the capital and once without, and the Book uses it as a title of Christ in Revelation 3:14; Earth capitalised is the proper name God gives the dry land in Genesis 1:10. Both rules are stated openly on the page that uses them.

And some things need no rule at all. Count every verse from Genesis 1:1 and the 666th is Genesis 25:7. Count the words God speaks in Genesis 1 and there are seven times seven times seven of them. There is nothing to trim.

This site will not, and the reason is worth understanding, because it is the same reason the objection above has force.

Probability answers the question how often would this happen by chance only when you fix the question before you look. Once a pattern has already been found, the odds you compute for it afterwards are close to meaningless, because you did not specify in advance which of a million possible patterns would count. A figure of one in ten trillion, arrived at that way, sounds like proof and is not, and putting one at the top of this page would hand the whole argument to the first statistician who read it.

So the case here is built on something a statistician cannot wave away. The King James Bible produces these counts and the other versions do not. That is not a probability estimate. It is a comparison, it is repeatable, and it takes an afternoon and a free piece of software to check. Compare the versions yourself and then decide what you are looking at.

Then produce the verse. There is no passage anywhere in Scripture that confines the perfection of God's words to the languages they were first given in. There are passages that point the other way.

God wasn't confined to Hebrew when He gave the New Testament in Greek, and at Pentecost He wasn't confined to Greek either: “And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? ... we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” (Acts 2:8, 11)

And consider which tongue. In 1611 English was a young language spoken by perhaps five million people on one island at the edge of Europe, of no weight in trade, diplomacy or scholarship. The learned world wrote in Latin. Nobody choosing a language for the ages would have chosen English. Four centuries later it is the most widely understood language on earth. God's words came to rest in a small island tongue that was about to go everywhere.

More on this at About and why the KJB and Objections Answered.

No. Nobody is saved by arithmetic. “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Corinthians 1:21)

None of this is a code to be unlocked, and it predicts nothing. Paul's very next words are “the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:22–23), and the numbers aren't the sign and they aren't the wisdom. They're the Book's fingerprint, and a fingerprint points to a hand. The numbers are not the point. The Book is not the point either, except that it is the only place the point is written down.

“Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.” (John 5:39) If this section does anything at all, let it do that.