THE LAST TWELVE VERSES OF MARK - MARK 16:9-20
The Last 12 Verses of Mark’s Gospel
The Roman Emperor Diocletian is famous for probably the biggest persecution that Christianity has ever faced. Diocletian imprisoned Christians, destroyed churches & burned every Bible in sight.
In 303 AD he launched one of the most vicious attacks against the Bible that the world has seen against any book. Over a burned Bible he erected a monument w/this inscription, “Extinct! Is the name of Christians!”
Yet just 22 years later, Christianity became the official religion of Rome, with the Bible enthroned as its indestructible judge of truth!
You see the Word of God is like a mighty Anvil that has worn out many hammers. Godless men have tried to hammer away at the Bible. And hammer after hammer has worn out, but the Anvil of the Bible still stands.
A godly fellow by the name of ‘Asia Conrad’ put it this way about the Word of God…
Century follows century, but there it stands.
Empires rise & fall, but there it stands.
Dynasty succeeds dynasty, but there IT stands.
Kings are crowned & uncrowned, there IT stands.
The flames are kindled about it, but there it stands.
Jesus was right when He said, ‘Heaven & Earth will pass away, but the Word of God shall never pass away,’ Here IT still stands!
As we conclude Mark’s Gospel this morning, I want to begin by looking at another attack upon God’s Word, to this very portion & those who claim to be scholars say, that these verses weren’t in the Original Text.
In fact, some of your Bibles, might have an asterisk (before or after this portion), saying it is not in the original manuscript that Mark wrote. The claim is made, because it does not appear in two 4th Century manuscripts.
In my NKJV it says, *“Verses 9-20 are bracketed in NU text as not original. They are lacking in Codex Siniaticus & Codex Vaticanus, although nearly all other manuscripts of Mark contain them.” Not Koine GK
They claim Mark stopped writing at (v.8) w/these women afraid at an empty tomb & with no eyewitness accounts of Jesus being resurrected from the dead. What kind of Good News is that?!
I want to declare to you that I disagree with these scholars & believe that this portion was in the original & truly should be a part of the Divinely Inspired Scripture.
Let me give you five quick reasons:
-1st, (v.8) ends with a speechless fearful group of witnesses of an empty tomb, but not of a risen Jesus.
I don’t think Mark intended, nor Jesus, nor the Holy Spirit that this inspired gospel story end in that manner.
-2nd, There are over 100 1st Century Early Church Fathers who (200 years) before these questionable manuscripts even existed, who quoted & preached from these very verses. 200 more between 300-600AD
-3rd, These are only two manuscripts questioning the authenticity of Mark 16, & trying to cast doubt on their authenticity, but there are 18 other manuscripts of equal authority & antiquity that include these verses.
-4th, Of these two manuscript’s, the Vaticanus, which is housed in the Vatican, is missing other major portions of our present Bible including (Gen.1:1-46:28), (Ps.106-138), passages in Matthew & Romans, the entire Pastoral Epistles & the entire book of Revelation! And they want to argue about Mark 16?
Well, of course they do, because in doing so, they leave the first recorded gospel account without a single human eyewitness of the Resurrected Christ. Those are ‘the External Evidences’, here’s ‘the Internal.’
-5th, The ‘Internal’ questions the actual text, style & word usage. They are saying it is not like Mark.
They claim that there are 17 words in (v.9-20) that are not found in the rest of Mark's Gospel.
But that’s a poor excuse to throw these out, for in (Mark 15:44-16:8) there are 17 words that aren’t found in the rest of Mark’s Gospel. So, it’s poor logic! These are the same scholars who say Paul didn’t write Ephesians because there are 36 words not found anywhere else in Paul’s writing?
With the rest of this blog I'll present more (External & Internal Evidences) in detail on why I believe this portion of Mark's Gospel is completely divine & original.
I have to admit, however, that my worst liked subject throughout my education was mathematics. I hate math! There, I said it! I feel relieved. Deep breath in, deep breath out.
While the work that continues below may be tedious for some, because it is a bunch of numbers, for others it may be a world of evidence for the divine origin of Mark’s gospel, specifically the final twelve verses.
I pray the following words bless & build your faith. The following is a mixture of my words and those of various articles & sermons that were researched. Enjoy!
What we have in our hands today, in what we call the Holy Bible in print form is a copy of copies made from the originals. The actual original manuscripts that were written by the Biblical authors do not exist. Even the Dead Sea scrolls were copies of copies from the originals.
How did the Bible come to us?
Peter (2Pet.1:21) that ‘prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke/wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.’
From those originals, scribes have carefully copied the Holy Scripture by hand, because they didn’t have copy machines in those days & those copies have been preserved from generation to generation. By the way, scribes copied scripture character by character and not word for word. They were very careful to pass on down to us the exact word of God.
Many centuries later, there are more than 5,000 manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts, all of them containing some portion of the original words of the NT. (This is all what we call ‘External Evidence.’)
In my NKJV at home which is Thomas Nelson Published, it says, “this portion is bracketed…as not original,”
it says (this portion is) lacking in two manuscripts the Siniaticus & the Vaticanus, although nearly all other manuscripts of Mark contain them.”
The Siniaticus & Vaticanus are 4th Century manuscripts, which means they were copies passed down over 400 years after the originals were written. What they don’t tell you is that 18 other manuscripts do contain them!
The (Vaticanus) manuscript which is in the Vatican library is also missing (Genesis 1:1 through Gen.46).
It’s missing (Ps.106-138). It’s missing a few verses out of Matt.16 & Romans 16. It’s missing the pastoral epistles & it’s missing the book of Revelation. It’s missing from the book of Hebrews everything after (9:14).
These are the same people that are claiming that (Mk.16:9-20) can’t be trusted as original?
The oldest existing manuscripts of the Greek New Testament text are three that had their origins in Alexandria in the 4th and 5th centuries. Since they are the oldest (in our present possession), many regard them as having an eclipsing authority. There are a number of passages that do not appear in these Alexandrian manuscripts, and therein lies an intense ecclesiastical debate.
Textus Receptus
At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed.
After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan school throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text.
From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").
The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus.
Textus Receptus Dethroned
Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts.
Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.
They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.
Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.
Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having expurgated these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.
(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement, Salvation, etc. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)
Evidence from the Church Fathers
There are over 100 1st Century early church fathers who either preached from or quoted from these verses in question in their writings. (100 years after the originals were written).
-There are 200 more church fathers between 300 & 600 AD that preached & quoted from these verses.
Papias in 100AD a disciple of John the Apostle quotes these verses.
Justin Martyr-151AD, Irenaeus-180AD, Hippolatus-190AD
Internal Evidence
Now, when we look at the ‘Internal Evidence’ of the passages themselves & study them, a fellow by the name of Dr. Ivan Panin wrote a book called ‘the last 12 verses of Mark’ documenting his discovery of 75 patterns of heptadic structure in the last 12 verses of Mark’s Gospel.
What does that mean? In these last 12 verses, by design, there are 75 different patterns of sevens, which we know is the divine number of perfection in Scripture.
The "Heptadic" (sevenfold) structure of Biblical text is one of the remarkable characteristics of its authenticity.
What about these disputed 12 verses?
There are 175 (7 x 25) words in the Greek text of Mark 16:9-20. Curious. These words use a total vocabulary of 98 different words (7 x 14), also an exact multiple of seven. That's also rather striking.
The insistence that Mark's Gospel ends at 16:8 leaves the women afraid and fails to record the resurrection, Christ's final instructions, and the Ascension. It is understandable why these verses are an embarrassment to the Gnostics, and why Westcott and Hort would advocate their exclusion, and insist that they were "added later."
However, it seems that Irenaeus in 150 A.D., and also Hypolytus in the 2nd century, each quote from these disputed verses, so the documentary evidence is that they were deleted later in the Alexandrian texts, not added subsequently.) But there is even more astonishing evidence for their original inclusion that is also profoundly instructive for broader reasons.
The Fingerprints of the Author
Let's examine these verses and explore their underlying design. Just as we encounter fingerprint or retinal scanners to verify an identity in today's technological environment, it seems that there is an astonishingly equivalent "fingerprint" hidden beneath the Biblical text that is still visible despite the veil of the centuries. (Fasten your seat belts!)
The Heptadic Structure of Scripture
Everyone who explores their Bible quickly discovers the pervasiveness of Seven: there are over 600 explicit occurrences of "sevens" throughout both the Old and New Testaments. As many of our readers are aware, there are also prevalent evidences of design hidden behind the text.
The "Heptadic" (sevenfold) structure of Biblical text is one of the remarkable characteristics of its authenticity.
Try constructing a passage in which both the number of words and the number of letters are precisely divisible by seven (with no remainder)! The random chance of a number being precisely divisible by 7 is one chance in seven. In seven tries, there will be an average of six failures.
The chance of two numbers both being divisible by 7 exactly is one in 72, or one in 49. (This is a convenient simplification; some mathematical statisticians would argue the chance is one in 91. ) This still might be viewed as an accidental occurrence, or the casual contrivance of a clever scribe. But let's look further. The number of letters in this passage is 553, also a precise multiple of seven (7 x 79). This is getting a bit more tricky. The chance of three numbers accidentally being precisely divisible by seven is one in 73, or one in 343. This increasingly appears to be suspiciously deliberate.
In fact, the number of vowels is 294 (7 x 42); and the number of consonants is 259 (7 x 37). Do you sense that someone has gone through a lot of trouble to hide a design or signature behind this text?
As we examine the vocabulary of those 98 (7 x 14) words: 84 (7 x 12) are found before in Mark; 14 (7 x 2) are found only here. 42 (7 x 6) are found in the Lord's address (vv.15-18); 56 (7 x 8) are not part of His vocabulary here. This is, conspicuously, not random chance at work, but highly skillful design. But just how skillful?
With 10 such heptadic features, it would take 710, or 282,475,249 attempts for these to occur by chance alone. How long would it take the composer to redraft an alternative attempt to obtain the result he was looking for? If he could accomplish an attempt in only 10 minutes, working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, these would take him over 23,540 years!
But there's more. The total word forms in the passage are 133 (7 x 19). 112 of them (7 x 16) occur only once, leaving 21 (7 x 3) of them occurring more than once; in fact, these occur 63 (7 x 9) times.
If we examine more closely the 175 words (7x 25), we discover that 56 (7 x 8) words appear in the address of the Lord and 119 (7 x 17) appear in the rest of the passage.
The natural divisions of the passage would be the appearance to Mary, verses 9-11; His subsequent appearances, verses 12-14; Christ's discourse, verses 15-18; and the conclusion in verses 19-20.
We discover that verses 9-11 involve 35 words (7 x 5). Verses 12-18, 105 (7 x 15) words; verse 12, 14 (7 x 2) words; verses 13-15, 35 (7 x 5) words; verses 16-18, 56 (7 x 8) words. The conclusion, verses 19-20, contains 35 (7 x 5) words.
It gets worse. Greek, like Hebrew, has assigned numerical values to each letter of its alphabet. Thus, each word also has a numerical ("gematrical") value.
The total numerical value of the passage is 103,656 (7 x 14,808). The value of v.9 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); v.10 is 5,418 (7 x 774); v.11 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); vv.12-20, 86,450 (7 x 12,350). In verse 10, the first word is 98 (7 x 14), the middle word is 4,529 (7 x 647), and the last word is 791 (7 x 113). The value of the total word forms is 89,663 (7 x 12,809). And so on.
This all is among the legendary results of the work by Dr. Ivan Panin. In fact, he identified 75 heptadic features of the last 12 verses of Mark.
We have highlighted only 34 heptadic features. If a supercomputer could be programmed to attempt 400 million attempts/second, working day and night, it would take one million of them over four million years to identify a combination of 734 heptadic features by unaided chance alone.
Authentication Codes
Just as we encounter coding devices in our high technology environments, here we have an automatic security system that monitors every letter of every word, that never rusts or wears out, and has remained in service for almost two thousand years! It is a signature that can't be erased and which counterfeiters can't simulate.
Why are we surprised? God has declared that He "has magnified His word even above His name!" We can, indeed, have confidence that, in fact, the Bible is God's Holy Word, despite the errors man has introduced and the abuse it has suffered throughout the centuries. It is our most precious possession-individually as well as collectively.
And it never ceases to unveil surprises to anyone that diligently inquires into it.
The Roman Emperor Diocletian is famous for probably the biggest persecution that Christianity has ever faced. Diocletian imprisoned Christians, destroyed churches & burned every Bible in sight.
In 303 AD he launched one of the most vicious attacks against the Bible that the world has seen against any book. Over a burned Bible he erected a monument w/this inscription, “Extinct! Is the name of Christians!”
Yet just 22 years later, Christianity became the official religion of Rome, with the Bible enthroned as its indestructible judge of truth!
You see the Word of God is like a mighty Anvil that has worn out many hammers. Godless men have tried to hammer away at the Bible. And hammer after hammer has worn out, but the Anvil of the Bible still stands.
A godly fellow by the name of ‘Asia Conrad’ put it this way about the Word of God…
Century follows century, but there it stands.
Empires rise & fall, but there it stands.
Dynasty succeeds dynasty, but there IT stands.
Kings are crowned & uncrowned, there IT stands.
The flames are kindled about it, but there it stands.
Jesus was right when He said, ‘Heaven & Earth will pass away, but the Word of God shall never pass away,’ Here IT still stands!
As we conclude Mark’s Gospel this morning, I want to begin by looking at another attack upon God’s Word, to this very portion & those who claim to be scholars say, that these verses weren’t in the Original Text.
In fact, some of your Bibles, might have an asterisk (before or after this portion), saying it is not in the original manuscript that Mark wrote. The claim is made, because it does not appear in two 4th Century manuscripts.
In my NKJV it says, *“Verses 9-20 are bracketed in NU text as not original. They are lacking in Codex Siniaticus & Codex Vaticanus, although nearly all other manuscripts of Mark contain them.” Not Koine GK
They claim Mark stopped writing at (v.8) w/these women afraid at an empty tomb & with no eyewitness accounts of Jesus being resurrected from the dead. What kind of Good News is that?!
I want to declare to you that I disagree with these scholars & believe that this portion was in the original & truly should be a part of the Divinely Inspired Scripture.
Let me give you five quick reasons:
-1st, (v.8) ends with a speechless fearful group of witnesses of an empty tomb, but not of a risen Jesus.
I don’t think Mark intended, nor Jesus, nor the Holy Spirit that this inspired gospel story end in that manner.
-2nd, There are over 100 1st Century Early Church Fathers who (200 years) before these questionable manuscripts even existed, who quoted & preached from these very verses. 200 more between 300-600AD
-3rd, These are only two manuscripts questioning the authenticity of Mark 16, & trying to cast doubt on their authenticity, but there are 18 other manuscripts of equal authority & antiquity that include these verses.
-4th, Of these two manuscript’s, the Vaticanus, which is housed in the Vatican, is missing other major portions of our present Bible including (Gen.1:1-46:28), (Ps.106-138), passages in Matthew & Romans, the entire Pastoral Epistles & the entire book of Revelation! And they want to argue about Mark 16?
Well, of course they do, because in doing so, they leave the first recorded gospel account without a single human eyewitness of the Resurrected Christ. Those are ‘the External Evidences’, here’s ‘the Internal.’
-5th, The ‘Internal’ questions the actual text, style & word usage. They are saying it is not like Mark.
They claim that there are 17 words in (v.9-20) that are not found in the rest of Mark's Gospel.
But that’s a poor excuse to throw these out, for in (Mark 15:44-16:8) there are 17 words that aren’t found in the rest of Mark’s Gospel. So, it’s poor logic! These are the same scholars who say Paul didn’t write Ephesians because there are 36 words not found anywhere else in Paul’s writing?
With the rest of this blog I'll present more (External & Internal Evidences) in detail on why I believe this portion of Mark's Gospel is completely divine & original.
I have to admit, however, that my worst liked subject throughout my education was mathematics. I hate math! There, I said it! I feel relieved. Deep breath in, deep breath out.
While the work that continues below may be tedious for some, because it is a bunch of numbers, for others it may be a world of evidence for the divine origin of Mark’s gospel, specifically the final twelve verses.
I pray the following words bless & build your faith. The following is a mixture of my words and those of various articles & sermons that were researched. Enjoy!
What we have in our hands today, in what we call the Holy Bible in print form is a copy of copies made from the originals. The actual original manuscripts that were written by the Biblical authors do not exist. Even the Dead Sea scrolls were copies of copies from the originals.
How did the Bible come to us?
Peter (2Pet.1:21) that ‘prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke/wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.’
From those originals, scribes have carefully copied the Holy Scripture by hand, because they didn’t have copy machines in those days & those copies have been preserved from generation to generation. By the way, scribes copied scripture character by character and not word for word. They were very careful to pass on down to us the exact word of God.
Many centuries later, there are more than 5,000 manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts, all of them containing some portion of the original words of the NT. (This is all what we call ‘External Evidence.’)
In my NKJV at home which is Thomas Nelson Published, it says, “this portion is bracketed…as not original,”
it says (this portion is) lacking in two manuscripts the Siniaticus & the Vaticanus, although nearly all other manuscripts of Mark contain them.”
The Siniaticus & Vaticanus are 4th Century manuscripts, which means they were copies passed down over 400 years after the originals were written. What they don’t tell you is that 18 other manuscripts do contain them!
The (Vaticanus) manuscript which is in the Vatican library is also missing (Genesis 1:1 through Gen.46).
It’s missing (Ps.106-138). It’s missing a few verses out of Matt.16 & Romans 16. It’s missing the pastoral epistles & it’s missing the book of Revelation. It’s missing from the book of Hebrews everything after (9:14).
These are the same people that are claiming that (Mk.16:9-20) can’t be trusted as original?
The oldest existing manuscripts of the Greek New Testament text are three that had their origins in Alexandria in the 4th and 5th centuries. Since they are the oldest (in our present possession), many regard them as having an eclipsing authority. There are a number of passages that do not appear in these Alexandrian manuscripts, and therein lies an intense ecclesiastical debate.
Textus Receptus
At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed.
After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan school throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text.
From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").
The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus.
Textus Receptus Dethroned
Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts.
Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.
They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.
Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.
Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having expurgated these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.
(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement, Salvation, etc. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)
Evidence from the Church Fathers
There are over 100 1st Century early church fathers who either preached from or quoted from these verses in question in their writings. (100 years after the originals were written).
-There are 200 more church fathers between 300 & 600 AD that preached & quoted from these verses.
Papias in 100AD a disciple of John the Apostle quotes these verses.
Justin Martyr-151AD, Irenaeus-180AD, Hippolatus-190AD
Internal Evidence
Now, when we look at the ‘Internal Evidence’ of the passages themselves & study them, a fellow by the name of Dr. Ivan Panin wrote a book called ‘the last 12 verses of Mark’ documenting his discovery of 75 patterns of heptadic structure in the last 12 verses of Mark’s Gospel.
What does that mean? In these last 12 verses, by design, there are 75 different patterns of sevens, which we know is the divine number of perfection in Scripture.
The "Heptadic" (sevenfold) structure of Biblical text is one of the remarkable characteristics of its authenticity.
What about these disputed 12 verses?
There are 175 (7 x 25) words in the Greek text of Mark 16:9-20. Curious. These words use a total vocabulary of 98 different words (7 x 14), also an exact multiple of seven. That's also rather striking.
The insistence that Mark's Gospel ends at 16:8 leaves the women afraid and fails to record the resurrection, Christ's final instructions, and the Ascension. It is understandable why these verses are an embarrassment to the Gnostics, and why Westcott and Hort would advocate their exclusion, and insist that they were "added later."
However, it seems that Irenaeus in 150 A.D., and also Hypolytus in the 2nd century, each quote from these disputed verses, so the documentary evidence is that they were deleted later in the Alexandrian texts, not added subsequently.) But there is even more astonishing evidence for their original inclusion that is also profoundly instructive for broader reasons.
The Fingerprints of the Author
Let's examine these verses and explore their underlying design. Just as we encounter fingerprint or retinal scanners to verify an identity in today's technological environment, it seems that there is an astonishingly equivalent "fingerprint" hidden beneath the Biblical text that is still visible despite the veil of the centuries. (Fasten your seat belts!)
The Heptadic Structure of Scripture
Everyone who explores their Bible quickly discovers the pervasiveness of Seven: there are over 600 explicit occurrences of "sevens" throughout both the Old and New Testaments. As many of our readers are aware, there are also prevalent evidences of design hidden behind the text.
The "Heptadic" (sevenfold) structure of Biblical text is one of the remarkable characteristics of its authenticity.
Try constructing a passage in which both the number of words and the number of letters are precisely divisible by seven (with no remainder)! The random chance of a number being precisely divisible by 7 is one chance in seven. In seven tries, there will be an average of six failures.
The chance of two numbers both being divisible by 7 exactly is one in 72, or one in 49. (This is a convenient simplification; some mathematical statisticians would argue the chance is one in 91. ) This still might be viewed as an accidental occurrence, or the casual contrivance of a clever scribe. But let's look further. The number of letters in this passage is 553, also a precise multiple of seven (7 x 79). This is getting a bit more tricky. The chance of three numbers accidentally being precisely divisible by seven is one in 73, or one in 343. This increasingly appears to be suspiciously deliberate.
In fact, the number of vowels is 294 (7 x 42); and the number of consonants is 259 (7 x 37). Do you sense that someone has gone through a lot of trouble to hide a design or signature behind this text?
As we examine the vocabulary of those 98 (7 x 14) words: 84 (7 x 12) are found before in Mark; 14 (7 x 2) are found only here. 42 (7 x 6) are found in the Lord's address (vv.15-18); 56 (7 x 8) are not part of His vocabulary here. This is, conspicuously, not random chance at work, but highly skillful design. But just how skillful?
With 10 such heptadic features, it would take 710, or 282,475,249 attempts for these to occur by chance alone. How long would it take the composer to redraft an alternative attempt to obtain the result he was looking for? If he could accomplish an attempt in only 10 minutes, working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, these would take him over 23,540 years!
But there's more. The total word forms in the passage are 133 (7 x 19). 112 of them (7 x 16) occur only once, leaving 21 (7 x 3) of them occurring more than once; in fact, these occur 63 (7 x 9) times.
If we examine more closely the 175 words (7x 25), we discover that 56 (7 x 8) words appear in the address of the Lord and 119 (7 x 17) appear in the rest of the passage.
The natural divisions of the passage would be the appearance to Mary, verses 9-11; His subsequent appearances, verses 12-14; Christ's discourse, verses 15-18; and the conclusion in verses 19-20.
We discover that verses 9-11 involve 35 words (7 x 5). Verses 12-18, 105 (7 x 15) words; verse 12, 14 (7 x 2) words; verses 13-15, 35 (7 x 5) words; verses 16-18, 56 (7 x 8) words. The conclusion, verses 19-20, contains 35 (7 x 5) words.
It gets worse. Greek, like Hebrew, has assigned numerical values to each letter of its alphabet. Thus, each word also has a numerical ("gematrical") value.
The total numerical value of the passage is 103,656 (7 x 14,808). The value of v.9 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); v.10 is 5,418 (7 x 774); v.11 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); vv.12-20, 86,450 (7 x 12,350). In verse 10, the first word is 98 (7 x 14), the middle word is 4,529 (7 x 647), and the last word is 791 (7 x 113). The value of the total word forms is 89,663 (7 x 12,809). And so on.
This all is among the legendary results of the work by Dr. Ivan Panin. In fact, he identified 75 heptadic features of the last 12 verses of Mark.
We have highlighted only 34 heptadic features. If a supercomputer could be programmed to attempt 400 million attempts/second, working day and night, it would take one million of them over four million years to identify a combination of 734 heptadic features by unaided chance alone.
Authentication Codes
Just as we encounter coding devices in our high technology environments, here we have an automatic security system that monitors every letter of every word, that never rusts or wears out, and has remained in service for almost two thousand years! It is a signature that can't be erased and which counterfeiters can't simulate.
Why are we surprised? God has declared that He "has magnified His word even above His name!" We can, indeed, have confidence that, in fact, the Bible is God's Holy Word, despite the errors man has introduced and the abuse it has suffered throughout the centuries. It is our most precious possession-individually as well as collectively.
And it never ceases to unveil surprises to anyone that diligently inquires into it.
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HEARING GOD IN A BUSY WORLD - 1 KINGS 13
February 28th, 2025
THE POWER OF CHRIST OVER DARKNESS: A JOURNEY THROUGH LUKE 11
February 25th, 2025
The Power of Persistent Prayer & the Gift of the Holy Spirit Luke 11:5-13
February 18th, 2025
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