The Code's Origin
If it can be accepted that the New Bible Code is a genuine phenomenon and not a statistical fluke, then it must also be accepted that the code was created by design. But who was the designer? The art of cryptography is well developed: could the New Bible Code be the work of some human agency? Let's look at the NIV Bible, which is the vehicle for much of the code.
The NIV Bible was, of course, written by humans, as were all previous bibles. It is interesting, therefore, to look at just how this version was produced. I will quote from the introduction to the 2001 edition. The first thing to note is that the NIV was created by a large number of scholars.
“The New International Version is a completely new translation of the Holy Bible made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts.”
This team of scholars was international in makeup and interdenominational in outlook.
“The fact that participants from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand worked together gave the project its international scope. That they were from many denominations - including Anglican, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Brethern, Christian Reformed, Church of Christ, Evangelical Free, Lutherian, Mennonite, Methodist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Wesleyan and other churches - helped to safeguard the translation from sectarian bias.”
The process of translation was truly a team effort.
“The translation of each book was assigned to a team of scholars. Next, one of the intermediate editorial committees revised the initial translation, with constant reference to the Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. Their work then went to one of the General Editorial Committees, which checked it in detail and made another thorough revision. This revision in turn was carefully reviewed by the committee on Bible Translation, which made further changes and then released the final version for publication......It may well be that no other translation has been made by a more thorough process of review and revision from committee to committee than this one.”
Under such circumstances it would surely be extremely difficult for any human agency to construct a numerical code, especially one that runs throughout the entire NIV Bible. Yet, as this website just as surely demonstrates, such a code exists. Moreover, it can be shown that this code has developed along with the Bible itself. Here are two examples:
1. Verses were incorporated into the Bible in the 13th Century and chapters added in the 16th Century. Yet chapter and verse numbers form an integral part of the code. The encoding of the standard value of ‘Jesus Christ’ must have been completed in the 16th Century, when verses were added (see In His Name).
2. Throughout the Old Testament there are numerical lists, originally compiled over 2000 years ago, that encode 9/11-related numbers. For instance, from the evidence I’ve seen the lists of Babylonian exiles given in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 have not changed in at least 1000 years and therefore far predate modern English. Yet they encode several numbers that meant nothing until 9/11 had occurred and the New Bible Code discovered and understood.
So this secret, yet immensely powerful, cabal must have been active for thousands of years, controlling the development of the Hebrew and Christian bibles, designing biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek and modern English, even guiding the course of history. To have such all-powerful influence, extending over the entire period in which the bible evolved, such an agency would literally have to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, the very characteristics we ascribe to God! Moreover, if the code was of human origin, the entire effort would be in the service of what they would have known was a monumental lie. People are willing to go to great efforts for the sake of something they believe to be true, but not to create a fictional code that would take thousands of years to be discovered. Therefore, without postulating a coordinating Higher Power, the code is almost impossible to explain. I propose that the code was created by a transcendent Intelligence operating from a realm beyond our own, yet able to influence the actions of the people throughout history, including the translators of the NIV Bible, through their unconscious minds.
The code must therefore be the result of a teleological process. A teleological process is one that leads towards a desired goal, a presupposition of this argument being that the goal was formulated by a conscious mind. This idea is behind the well-known Teleological Argument for the existence of God (design in nature implies a Designer) and is the basic assumption of the Intelligent Design movement. The Teleological Argument might be considered to be outmoded since the discovery of natural selection, which has huge empirical support, however, I think the discovery of the New Bible Code gives an old idea new life. Although I am not an advocate of Intelligent Design theory as it currently stands and although bibles are not natural objects, I think that the evidence I have shown for design in some of the NIV Bible’s ‘natural’ (that is, not humanly-designed) features raises the possibility of a teleological process also operating in nature, working alongside natural selection.
Since the Bible was obviously written by people, how was a code put into it? I believe the code was inserted into the NIV through a very sophisticated weave of what Christians sometimes humorously call 'God-incidence', but what is more widely known as synchronicity, the “acausal connecting principle” [1], that brings inner and outer events together in space and time - ‘synchronising’ them - so that an event is created that has great meaning to the experiencer. Although the recognition that a synchronicity has occurred and the understanding of its meaning for us is one of the essential elements of such an event, this does not have to occur at the time, or even to the experiencer. The code was probably inserted by such a process, the Hebrew scribes, compilers of the biblical canon and translators of the NIV all unwittingly collaborating over the centuries in the insertion of fragments of encoded information that slowly coalesced into a complete code, one that has meaning for us here and now. In fact everyone who ever spoke the English language had a part to play in the creation of the New Bible Code, as language evolves through the way people speak and write it. So ultimately the code and the events that it interpets are a giant tapestry of meaning, stitched by a higher power from the threads of millions of lives. Its tableaux are only visible to us now, because this is the 'omega point' when it was all meant to come together.
Bill Downie (updated 2/11/12)
Notes
1. This description was by C. G. Jung, who also coined the term ‘synchronicity’.