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Loading...I started this small thread in response to a question about the use of “gematria” in the New Testament, the ancient Jewish interpretive technique that uses the numerical value of letters to find deeper significance in the words they are found in. If you did it in English, and a = 1, b= 2 and so on, when you got to j it would = 10, k = 20, and so on. In that case if your name is Jack your name would add up to 34; when you found another word whose letters also add up to 34 (say, “brilliant” or “egocentric” – neither of which, of course, does add up to 34…) then you could connect the two words and say that the one explains the other.
One possible use of gematria occurs in the very first passage of the NT, the genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew. I pointed out in my previous post that Matthew presents a numerically significant genealogy of Jesus in order to show that something of major significance happen every fourteen generations: from Abraham, the father of the Jews, to David, the greatest king of the Jews: fourteen generations; from King David to the Babylonian Captivity, the greatest disaster for the Jews: fourteen generations; and from the Babylonian Captivity to the Messiah Jesus, the ultimate savior of the Jews: fourteen generations.
It’s a terrific genealogy. But to get to this 14-14-14 schema, Matthew had to manipulate the names in a couple of places, for example, by leaving out some of the generations and by counting the final set of names as fourteen, even though there are only thirteen. And so, we might wonder whether the number fourteen, in particular, was for some reasons significant for Matthew. Why not 15, or 12?
Over the years interpreters of Matthew have puzzled over the question and have suggested two interpretations, in particular, that strike me as interesting.
First, an interpretation that plays with the significance of the number but does not involve gematria: In ancient Israel, as in a number of other ancient societies where numbers had symbolic significance, the number 7 was supremely important: it signified…
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A better explanation is given in my recent book “The Judas War”. The genealogy is part of a calendar which divided the whole of human history from the creation to the apocalypse into seventy periods of one generation each. These were grouped as ten “weeks” of seven “days”. The Matthew genealogy covers weeks 4 to 9. We can find evidence of this calendar in several other places; most significantly the Animal Apocalypse and Apocalypse of Weeks in the Book of Enoch, as well as the Dead Sea scrolls and the Book of Daniel. In my book I call the proto-Christian version of this calendar the “Almanac”. The book shows how the Almanac was carefully constructed to be symmetrical about the mid-point of history which falls precisely between the reigns of David and Solomon. At this point the temple was constructed and the united kingdom of David and Solomon came into existence. Another special point is the “sabbath of sabbaths”, the seventh day of the seventh week, when the temple and the city of Jerusalem were destroyed and the house of David extinguished. The Almanac played a vital part in the development of the Christ myth.
SP Laurie
That sounds interesting. What does the scholarly community think of this idea?
1. Christ is the Son of David.
There are 40 references to David in the Four Gospels {Matthew, Mark, Luke, John}. One of these (#7) is a typological reference ‘City of *the Great King*’.
David is a type (as in typology) of Christ Who is The Great King as the earthly Jerusalem is a type of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
http://bibleproofs.org/dv.html
2. Christ is the Son of Mary
There are 40 references to [‘Mary’ / ‘Mother’ of The Lord Jesus Christ] in {Matthew, Mark, Luke}
Here we use Orthodox Holy Tradition (see Homily of Saint Gregory Palamas on The Resurrection) for the identification of “the other Mary” and “the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome” with The Theotokos (Mother of God).
http://bibleproofs.org/mr.a.html
3. Three of the Four Gospels {Matthew, Mark, Luke} have listings of the names of the Twelve Apostles.
Not counting amongst them Judas who betrayed The Lord, if we enumerate the *names of the Eleven* over the three listings (3 sets of 11 = 33) we arrive at a value of 40.
http://bibleproofs.org/holy-apostles.html
4. Alternatively, if we count all the *persons* mentioned in these three sets – the Eleven Apostles and their relatives, we again arrive at a value of 40.
Unrelated question, what research projects do you currently have on the go? How is your scholarly writing on the afterlife progressing? Do you still plan on writing a trade book on revelation/end times?
Yes, my scholarly book on the afterlife is due to the publisher in three weeks. It’ll be close. I do have a contract for the trade book on the apocalypse; I have to get my mind aroudn all that next. I can’t figure out if this is the ideal or the worst time for a book about the coming end. I somewhat suspect the latter (since we’re all tired of this crisis), but I need to think through it.
An interesting post although I think they pushed the number 14 too far to match the events / people you mention.
That 7 is an important number is a fact, far beyond Judaism and Christianity. Just look at the more “inner” religions, the religions that most people on earth worshiped in the first millennia BC. Hinduism (which is much older than the Jewish texts/Hebrew bible) uses 7 in many different ways, including chakras (7 spiritual points in the body that must be spiritualized. Also in Buddhism which came on the scene around 500 BC, uses the 7 chakras in more or less the same way, spiritual points/meetingpoints (churches perhaps?, who knows) in the parh of spiritual awakening or spiritual ascend if one like. A funny observation is that the famous symbol, “Eye of Ra” (Horus Eye), which is one of the very strong symbols in ancient Egyptian mythology, is physically very similar to the Pineal gland (“god-eye” as some see it) which corresponds to the “Crown chakra” found in Hinduism and Buddhism).
If I were into comparative religious study, I would probably say that the similarity between these symbols and the symbols found in (at least esoteric christian approach) is quite striking.
In my mind, looking into this sacred number (7) in the Judo christian tradition, one should have in mind its meaning in the Babylonian/Egyptian astronomical views, but ALSO its meaning in Hinduism and Buddism.
Really admire the way you’ve connected this post with the previous gematria post. Thank you Dr. Ehrman.
Just curious, is there any reason why the supposedly last 14 generation period that culminated with Jesus only has 13 generations? Is it purposeful and has some significance gematria based or otherwise or it’s simply a calculation error that slipped through Mathew’s attention?
It looks like a pure slip.
How much is known today about Jewish inheritance rights during Jesus’ lifetime? Would the first audience of Matthew’s gospel have thought the genealogy puzzling given Jesus wasn’t Joseph’s biological son, or would the Matthean passage where Joseph accepted Mary and named the Christ child be inferred by the audience to be the bestowal of full inheritance rights by Joseph?
I don’t think we know a *lot*, but it’s usually assumed that an adopted child would have been granted birthrights. There would not be any policies for a son born of a virgin, of course. 🙂
Cool!
Interesting stuff. I’ve seen Licona reference gematria in his debates trying to explain why Matthew crafted a genealogy different from Luke.
What I don’t understand is (1) how much do we know about the popularity of gematria in the first century? I’ve read about much later kabbalists and other mystical traditions trying to explain the secrets the text and the universe through this sort of numerology. (2) Why would a Greek-speaking Christian who has to translate Aramaic for his readers be knowledgeable of Hebrew/Aramaic gematria, and incorporate it for a Greek readership?
Best,
ZG
1. Very little indeed; 2. He wouldn’t probably. He probably heard it from somewhere and used it. The “somewhere” would have been from an earlier bi-lingual source.
Ah, so there might be an Aramaic or Hebrew tradition emphasizing 14 generations between epochal events in history, and this might have resonated with an Aramaic or Hebrew audience that understood the name David to equal 14 in gematria – and the author of Matthew may have imported this tradition into Greek with or without knowing the Hebrew numerology.
But we don’t know if first-century Jews more broadly understood their own history in terms of 14 generations between major events.
Numerology can be fun. I once had a Yamaha keyboard in which the musical style known as Gospel had the code 28. I also once read that the number 2 signifies witness and that 8 signifies resurrection. And the Gospels are witness to the resurrection. So there!
Other than that fun little diversion, I grew up reading a lot of William Barclay commentaries so you can infer from that what my previous education is concerning the interpretation of Matthew’s geneology. But even back then, I was suspicious of the assumption that ancient peoples would have regarded biological fatherhood as uniquely “genuine”. When I came across some of your material on adoption in the ancient world, a little part of me said, “I told you so!”