O blessed Jesus, Your love is wonderful! It is the admiration, joy and song of glorified saints. The experimental sense of Your love on earth sweetens the bitterness of life and disarms death of all its terrors! It was love which moved You to bow the heavens, to come down and sojourn on earth, to humble Yourself, to take on You the form of a servant, and become obedient onto death, even the death of the cross! You pitied me in my lost estate. You sought and found me when I sought You not. You spoke peace to me in the day of my distress, when the clouds of guilt and darkness hung heavy on my soul and I was brought to the borders of despair. You have borne with all my weakness, corrected my mistakes, restored me from my wanderings, and healed my backslidings. May Your lovingkindness be ever before my eyes to induce me to walk in Your truth. May Your love be the daily theme of my meditations, and the constant joy of my heart!
John Fawcett

Critique Of Analysis Rebuttal

Critique Of Analysis Rebuttal

Critique of the article entitled, “Computer Analysis and Proofs That God, The Creator of All Things, Did (in fact) Write The 66 Books of The Holy Bible.”

PREFACE

Well, the infamous article discussed herein begins with a preface, so heck, I figured, “Why not me, too?”

I have been a Christian for 17 years now. I spent some of those years majoring in Bible and Theology in college, and some more teaching Bible fulltime, as well as Christian doctrine, apologetics, ethics, church history, and other subjects relating to Christian thought and living. I have also put quite a bit of time into study of logic and philosophy, and some time in New Testament Greek.

It’s been some years since I was so heavily involved in Biblical teaching and study. My personal hobby for the past 8 years or so has been computer programming. I started with BASIC (as so many, if not most, computer freaks do), moved on to Z-80 machine language (not assembly language, as my computer had no assembler at the time — I actually entered my programs in hex code), and from there on to 6502 assembly language. I still work with 6502 assembly, but I am also now involved with 8088 code for IBM compatibles, and I dabble some with C. Besides my hobby interest, I am also now involved in some commercial programming. All of the above is to establish the fact that I know at least a little about both the Bible and computers.

During this past 17 years, one of the things that has continued to fascinate me is the gullibility of some of my fellow Christians. I have seen some believe and help to spread false rumors about various corporations (MacDonalds and Proctor & Gamble come immediately to mind), myths about a computer called “The Beast” that supposedly existed in the World Trade Center in New York and which was ready to implement a 666-based number system for every individual in the world, and various other myths that I knew, and could for some of them prove, to be false.

I have never thought that my gullible brethren have intended to spread or believe falsities. Rather, that a criterion of judgement that they would normally use in other, more “secular,” contexts has been left out of their thinking when the subject of certain spiritual claims has been close to their heartfelt faith. It’s easy to develop a defensive mentality in a world that on the whole thinks you are wrong in your religious views. Some of us want to vindicate our faith so much that the motivation to believe something that purports to prove the truth of our faith can be so great that we can forget to ask such basic questions as “How do you know that such is true?” or “What are the sources and the evidences for these claims?” Especially when we hear something from another Christian, it’s tempting to think, “Well, surely another Christian wouldn’t lie about such a thing, after all, lying is wrong for a Christian.” It may simply be the case, though, that the other Christian heard the story in the same way as we, and that he/she thought about it and accepted it on the same basis. The fact that a myth makes claims that, if true, would support our own faith or vindicate it before unbelievers can also be a strong factor in our motivation to accept it without proper question as to evidences, rationality, etc.

The article herein under question is a good example of the type of thing I am talking about. I read it briefly some months ago, shook my head and laughed at some of its absurdities, and then threw it away as not worth closer scrutiny. But then recently I saw a message on a Christian BBS wherein one Christian was trying to make a point to another regarding the reliability of the Biblical text. He referred to the article as proof in support of his claims. In the further dialogue, no one seemed to question the veracity or reliability of the article itself — its “results” were simply accepted by both parties without doubt. So, I left a message in response wherein I expressed my basic opinion about the article in somewhat derogatory manner. I was a bit bugged that such a grand claim as is made in the article was simply being accepted, and that no one so far seemed to have looked at the article with a more critical eye. Since I offered in my message to provide some detailed reasons for my opinion if they were requested, I downloaded the article again and scrutinized it more closely. The closer I looked it over and checked its claims, the more appalled I grew as to how terribly BAD a piece of scholarship and claimed research it was. I decided to write this article instead of simply making my point in another message, as the flaws and falsities (I don’t like to say that they were lies, but some of the falsities cannot qualify as mistakes; however, I will try and be as generous as I can in what kind of character I attribute to the author(s)). Even this article doesn’t go into all that can be said in refutation of the article’s claims, but I believe enough is shown herein to make the point: there has been no “scientific proof” take place. Indeed, I will go so far as to question whether the claimed research was even done.

Preface over, flame off, time to dig out the magnifying glass…

I suppose that part of the reason that the article’s claims have been so easily accepted is that it seems to SOUND so scientific and rigorous in its claimed methods. Such popular buzzwords as FACT, PROOF, EVIDENCE and PHENOMENA are strewn throughout the text. The claim is made that all of the evidence will qualify as “scientific,” that the research can be reproduced under laboratory conditions. Close scrutiny is invited, and the challenge to prove the study and its results wrong is levied. I would submit that the reason that the challenge has never been taken up is possibly that most of those who may have seen the text file and who are qualified to critically analyze it have reacted somewhat like I did when I first saw it — it’s so ridiculous in its claims and logic that it’s beneath serious thought. The article is supposed to be usable as a tool to convince “intellectuals,” “agnostics,” and “atheists” of the Bible’s truth. PLEASE don’t try to use it as such — it will be like trying to cut down a tree with a soup spoon, and you will end up looking about that intelligent.

Now on to a few of my arguments and criticisms. I will number each major point and will illustrate where in the article we are (let’s give the article the shorter title ANALYSIS) with quotations.

  1. In ANALYSIS’ preface the claim is made of “FACTS and PROOFS of God being the AUTHOR of the BIBLE” (their emphasis). I submit that the existence of God himself hasn’t been proven. No unassailable argument or “proof” of God’s existence has yet been developed after almost 2,000 years of attempts. Some of the arguments have helped to establish the point that belief in God is at least not an unreasonable or irrational faith, that it is at least a plausible belief. But nothing yet has proven beyond all question his existence. Even those arguments that seem to support belief in SOMETHING beyond the natural (such as those based on the laws of thermodynamics) do NOT prove that that something is the God revealed in the Bible. An argument that could prove that something is there doesn’t necessarily at the same time prove what that something is like, whether it is personal and, if so, what are its character traits and attributes, etc. It takes special revelation, as when Christ said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” to understand the personality and attributes of God. Nature and reason by themselves can never obtain such understanding. To “prove” that God wrote the Bible there has at least to be a prior belief in God’s existence, and in this case, the JudeoChristian God as against the god’s of other religious persuasions. For those who reject the existence of deity (agnostics, atheists, etc.) or even of the Christian deity (Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.), the MOST that ANALYSIS could possibly accomplish if its “phenomena” and arguments are valid (which is about to be seriously questioned) would be the claim, “Look here — some extremely odd and unexplained phenomena!” The scientific mind is more than used to dealing with unexplained phenomena without the need for a “god of the gaps.”
  2. The claim is made that “all alleged errors” in the Bible “have been shown, in context, to be non-existent upon careful investigation.” Such a claim has so far only been accepted by conservative evangelicals or fundamentalist Christians. The somewhat tortuous arguments used by some to explain many of the “alleged errors” have found no acceptance among those who do not already believe that no error COULD exist in the Bible. How many times DID Peter deny Christ, anyway? That depends on how you try to “harmonize” the different Gospel accounts.
  3. After looking at a supposed numerical phenomena in Genesis 1:1, an argument is developed: IF God is the same at all times (based on the statement in Hebrews 13:8 that God is the “same yesterday, today and tomorrow”), THEN “the numeric phenomena, briefly shown above, should be a measure of whether God wrote the remainder of Genesis, the books of Exodus, Jonah, or any other Old Testament phrase or book and, (2) It would also hold true for the New Testament … in IDENTICAL patterns.” The proposed argument is open to serious question. Hebrews 13:8, according to the best exegetical understanding, is speaking fundamentally of Christ’s basic nature and character. It does not necessarily follow from continuing consistency of character that one would write 66 different books according to one overall mathematical pattern. Being always the same type of person doesn’t mean that one always does, or has to do, something in the same way or according to a certain pattern. God always loves His children, but although He has miraculously healed some who were sick, He hasn’t and doesn’t ALWAYS do so, in spite of the truth of Hebrews 13:8. God doesn’t change in His essential character and attributes, but the way that He does things HAS and DOES change at times, as when He changed the way in which He dealt with His people, from the legal system of the Old Covenant to the system of grace in the New Covenant. Thus, if the above argument premise (if A then B, or IF God is always the same THEN the numeric phenomena should be a measure of whether He wrote the Bible) is rejected on the basis of the above thoughts, even if the phenomena exists as claimed throughout the whole Bible (which is yet to be thrown into serious doubt), it is NOT shown logically to be a “proof” of divine origin for the Bible. IF the phenomena exists, ALL we have is some extremely odd and unexplained phenomena.
  4. The statement is made that “the ‘evidence’ we are about to present would be null and void, in most cases, if EVEN ONE CHARACTER WERE DELETED, CHANGED OR ADDED!” (their emphasis). The claim is made throughout ANALYSIS that for both the Old and the New Testaments, the research and computer analysis is done on the “original” text, thus implying that there is one set of manuscripts for both testaments that is understood and accepted as having “original text” status. This is simply not the case.

In the literal sense, there IS no “original text.” The original documents as penned by the authors themselves are not available, and all we have are copies of copies, all done by hand by scribes. I’m more familiar with the facts regarding the New Testament manuscript sources and criticism than I am with the Old Testament sources, but even for the Old Testament I do know that there are various different text copy sources for the different books. Besides the basic Masoretic text, for example, there is for the Penteteuch the Samaritan Penteteuch (the five books of Moses), which does diverge from the Masoretic text at certain points. There are also the Dead Sea Scrolls, with fragments from many of the Old Testament books, along with the complete book of Isaiah. These scrolls are much older by hundreds of years, and therefore closer to the “originals” in time, than anything that had been been available prior to their discovery, including the oldest copies of the Masoretic text. When the KJV Bible was translated, the Masoretic text was basically it. More modern translations, as well as critical Hebrew manuscripts, HAVE to take the Dead Sea Scrolls into account in order to further insure reliability in the text. There supposedly has not been found anything in the Scrolls that diverge seriously from the text as we had it up until this century (the Jewish scribes WERE very meticulous in their copying practices), but that is NOT to say that there are not any relatively minor differences in the textual details. All of these manuscript sources, along with various and sundry other manuscript fragments, constitute part of the most basic and fundamental evidence that has to be considered in reliably establishing just what the text of the original documents was. Even the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament used by the Jews in Christ’s time, and quoted from by Christ and Paul themselves, due to its age and the corresponding fact that it was translated from quite an old Hebrew source, can’t be left out of the picture.

In the case of the New Testament, the textual evidence is even more dense. There are over 4,000 manuscripts and manuscript fragments from which the text of Greek New Testaments are derived. All of the manuscript evidence must be taken into account when compiling a reliable Greek text, and ALL of the Greek New Testaments, from which translations are made, are the results of extensive work in collating, comparing and analyzing the document evidence. The overall result is a highly reliable Greek text in just about all of the Greek New Testaments, and no fundamental Christian doctrine has ever been under threat due to variant textual readings in manuscripts. But there’s the rub: with over 4,000 different documents and document fragments there ARE SOME differences between them in the text. The differences are usually pretty minor; a definite article may be included in a phrase in one document while missing in another, for example. In some other cases, a whole verse or more may be under question (such as in the case of the ending of Mark, or I John 5:7).

Such a massive amount of textual evidence requires a heck of a lot of work in order to decide upon the most likely original reading when important manuscripts and manuscript “families” do vary in some detail. This is the work done in the science of Textual Criticism. And although the results of textual criticism have been to give us an even more highly reliable Greek New Testament, there ARE times when the most that the best authorities in the field are able to do is to make a best educated guess. Such times include those when two manuscripts of fairly equal weight and importance (such as the Sinaitic and the Vatican, both from the 4th century) differ in the wording of a phrase and there is no other textual evidence to support either reading.

Sorry if I have bored you with all of the above detail, but if you’re going to make a point in proof of a statement it behooves you to provide evidence to back up your point. And my whole point here is that THERE ARE DIFFERENCES in the text between even the most reliable and important Biblical manuscripts, both Hebrew and Greek. And there IS NO original language Testament, whether Hebrew or Greek, wherein the scholar(s) who produced it has not had to deal with the problem of these variant readings in some way. As I said, I know the New Testament evidence better than I do the Old. But in the case of the New Testament alone, there are quite a few original language, or Greek, New Testaments that have been used extensively in Bible translation. Probably the one that has had the most influence in the Protestant world has been the Stephan’s “Textus Receptus” (Latin for Received Text). This was the most basic Greek text source for the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. Most of the actual work that produced this text was done by Desiderius Erasmus, a Roman Catholic. And although Erasmus didn’t have access to as much material for his work as scholars do today, he nevertheless did have more manuscript evidence than he could handle, and he had to deal with the same problems of variant readings that today’s scholars do. The story of I John 5:7 is especially interesting, but I won’t go into it here.

Since Erasmus’ times, as more and more manuscript evidence has become available, there has been continued production of Greek New Testaments by others in order to continue to enhance the reliability of the Biblical text. Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, Nestle-Aland, and the United Bible Society have been just a few of those producing important Greek New Testaments. And in every case, including that of the Textus Receptus, NO SINGLE manuscript source was used in producing the final result. Educated guesses have had to be made in every case regarding variant readings. Surely, not all of the guesses in any one case have been accurate.

All of the above has been presented in order to basically say this: WHATEVER “original” language source the authors of ANALYSIS might have used in their “scientific research”, it cannot plausibly lay claim to absolute accuracy in every detail regarding every character. There’s just no way in the world to prove such an outlandish proposition, given all of the evidence of over 4,000 manuscripts and fragments for the contrary. They may believe and claim that their “original” had this character, but believing and claiming is not proving. And according to their own statement, if the text is off by even ONE character, the results of their “research” are “null and void.” I anticipate the claim by them or someone defending them that even if they can’t prove the 100% accuracy of the text that they used by other means, the existence of the such outstandingly improbable mathematical phenomena in the text is surely a proof that they have somehow happened on the precise “original” as breathed by God. Sorry, it doesn’t work. The authors do not even inform us as to exactly which “original” texts they used, so there is NO WAY to reproduce their research, as they claim, under “laboratory conditions.” If they used the Textus Recceptus, for example, and I happened to choose the UBS Greek New Testament for checking for the phenomena; or if they used the Dead Sea Scroll version of Isaiah and I used the Masoretic version; I would most definitely not be able to reproduce their results. That’s not what I would call a very “scientific proof.”

Let’s see — they don’t tell us which Hebrew and Greek “originals” that they used. They don’t tell us how they used a computer in their “research” (although they do mention much paper and pencil), what type of software (computer programs), hardware, how they got all of that Greek and Hebrew text onto computer disk for analysis, or anything else. Not very reliable information for taking up their invitation to reproduce their “phenomena” and results, is it? Sounds more like a great big snow job to me. The results simply can’t be thoroughly checked, and in light of the above FACTS about the manuscript evidence for reading variances, the evidence that we DO have seems to point to “null and void” results. It’s their OWN claim that even one minor variance in just one character brings about this voidness in the results. Well, there are enough variances in the thousands of different manuscripts to definitely satisfy that requirement for disproof. And until they can inform the public as to exactly WHICH Hebrew and Greek sources they used, all of their claims are just that — null and void. They have “proven” exactly nothing.

Of course, all of the above makes the gratuitous assumption that the authors of ANALYSIS actually did the research that they claim to have done. Much of what I am about to point out next throws even that assumption into serious doubt. After scrutinizing their article fairly closely, and checking what “phenomena” I was able to devise means for checking, I am personally convinced that most of what they claim to have done in their “research” was never actually done. As I said, I don’t like to say that they’re lying, but look at some of these things for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

5. In describing how the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek languages used their respective alphabetic characters to signify numeric values, the authors state that “In the Greek language, there are 22 characters. The last character would have a place value of 22, and a numeric value of 400.” GEEZ!!! How in the world did they analyze and do research on original Greek text if they don’t even know the Greek alphabet?!? If you have access to ANY beginner’s Greek grammar book, lesson tutorial, etc., you can look in the first few pages and find that the Greek alphabet consists of 24 characters, not 22. And given the numeric scheme that they point to, the last character (omega) has a place value of 24, and a NUMERIC value of 600. Considering that the “phenomena” that is the supposed “proof” of their whole argument is numeric in nature, and is BASED on the numeric values of the Biblical languages’ alphabetic characters, it would seem to me that a SERIOUS error in math has been made (if the work could actually have been done by consistently skipping two characters throughout the Greek text), and that such error would, again, render the authors’ WHOLE argument “null and void.” Such a blatant and simple mistake makes me wonder: is someone possibly lying here?

6. The authors state that “The Bible begins with the Hebrew word ‘beginning’ and ends with the Greek word “saint.” Well, you can throw the phenomena based on THIS paragraph out. Open your Bible to the very end of the book of Revelation and read the last verse. I think you’ll find that it says something like, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” Some of the Greek texts omit the word “Amen,” but whether it’s there or not the result is still the same. The actual Greek text of this verse can be transliterated thus: H CHARIS TOU KURIOU IHSOU META PANTON. AMHN. The Greek word for “saint,” AGIOS, is just not there. What’s going on here? They don’t know the Greek alphabet, they don’t even know the text of scripture in this case. They develop a whole paragraph from the above sentence, and the sentence is blatantly FALSE and easily proven so. If they are susceptible to such simplistic and blatant errors, how can they be remotely capable of carrying on such complex research and producing reliable results?

7. The authors give a list of the Bible writer’s names, along with the claimed numeric value for each name. Interesting — John occurs twice in the list, each time with a different value. Okay, I give up; which is the proper value? Oh, wait a minute — if we delete the first occurrence of John, along with its claimed value, then totaling the names’ values results in 7,931, just as the authors claim.

I wasn’t quite satisfied, though, so I devised a quick and dirty program in QuickBASIC to calculate the value of any Greek word. I used the numeric pattern as reported by the authors (alpha=1, etc.), but alas I HAD to include those two missing Greek alphabetic characters in the pattern. Since John has an omega as part of his Greek name (IOANNHN), I’ll bet that the numeric value I get is different than that of the authors. Yup, I get 737, which doesn’t agree with either of their claimed values. How about James? They have 833, and I get 722. Jude? They have 685, and I get 364. But wait: Jude’s name in Greek doesn’t contain either of the last two Greek letters, the ones left out by their claim that the Greek alphabet consists of 22 characters (psi and omega). Why do our results therefore differ? Aren’t we using the same numeric formula? The names PAULUS and PETROS, Paul and Peter, also fit within the 22-letter range, yet I get 441 for Paul, as opposed to the authors’ 781, and 405 for Peter, as opposed to 755. Either the authors haven’t been honest with us, or they have left something out of their description of how they obtained their numeric phenomena. For me, it’s their honesty that’s questionable.

If you’re interested in how I used a computer to calculate the above values, I insert herein the QuickBASIC code that I wrote. It’s at least more than the authors of ANALYSIS have been willing to do. As I said, the code was written in QuickBASIC (4.0), but it is easily adaptable to any form of BASIC. One quick disclaimer: I program better than this, really. This is just something I threw together very quickly in order to do some quick calculations. It’s a poorly written program, but it does the job. I am really not interested in improving it, as I am not into numerology.

DIM v%(24)
FOR i = 1 TO 9: v%(i) = i: NEXT v%(10) = 10: v%(11) = 20: v%(12) = 30: v%(13) = 40: v%(14) = 50 v%(15) = 60: v%(16) = 70: v%(17) = 80: v%(18) = 90: v%(19) = 100 v%(20) = 200: v%(21) = 300: v%(22) = 400: v%(23) = 500: v%(24) = 600

15 a% = 0
PRINT “To figure the value of a string, enter the number representing the” PRINT ” place value of each letter. Enter 0 when finished.”

20 INPUT z
30 IF z = 0 THEN GOTO 100
a% = a% + v%(z)
GOTO 20
100 PRINT a%: END

As I said above, these are just SOME of my criticisms of ANALYSIS’ claims and arguments. There is more that could be said — other mistakes that have been made, flaws in the arguments’ logic, etc. But I think that enough has so far been said that anyone with any rational ability can draw the conclusion that the infallible proof claimed by the authors of ANALYSIS simply doesn’t exist.

Well, as I wind up this article, I wonder to myself, “Why did I do this? I’ve got many other, more pressing, demands on my time. Why waste my time on such an unimportant matter as whether someone else, whom I have never met (and I hope I never will), is either lying or seriously mistaken?” I guess it’s because this whole thing has been done in the name of Christ, whom I love dearly and hate to see misrepresented. Christ doesn’t need or desire for us to tell lies or fabricate evidences for His truth. And given that He IS the truth, he surely doesn’t want His people to believe things that are false. And that is exactly what the arguments and claims of the article criticized herein are: FALSE. I love God, and I love God’s people, but I HATE to see God’s people deceived by a bunch of crap wrapped up in a pretty package.

Charles Shelton