“When a word transcends the moment in which it is spoken, it carries within itself a ‘deeper value.’ This ‘deeper value’ pertains most of
all to words that have matured in the course of faith-history.”
Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth
[i] Michael G. McCartin, the author of the page entitled “Mathematical Proof of God’s Existence”, did not invent nor first discover the gematria code that he has called here the St. John Code. Oddly enough, he found this A=6, B=12, C=18 gematria code on the internet on a website entitled “Real World News.” On the date of this writing, that website, which has now ceased to operate, attributed this gematria code to the work of Dr. J.R. Church. There was no mention on that website of the “little scroll” of Chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation. Also, when Mr. McCartin first began exploring the gematria calculator on that website in February 2010, there were no 1110 results on that website at all. Soon thereafter, many appeared, some of which you see here. Yet nearly all of the results found on this Saint John’s Apocalypse Code website are the result of the original work of Mr. McCartin, who used the gematria calculator on the “Real World News” website to obtain his results (and then confirmed them with his own printing calculator). Mr. McCartin is therefore extremely grateful to the work of those who prepared that website, particularly, it’s gematria calculator, although he does not endorse any of the content of that website.
[ii] http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/node9.html.
[iii] David J. Gross, “The Role of Symmetry in Fundamental Physics”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1996, located at http://www.pnas.org/content/93/25/14256.full.
[iv] Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, Symmetry and The Beautiful Universe, p. 20.
[v] Anthony Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, p. 281.
[vi] Dr. Mario Livio, The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry, p. 5.
[vii] Leon M. Lederman, “The Role of Physics in Education”, was once (but no longer is) published at http://rcf.fisica.uh.cu/files/Archivos/2003/Vol.%2020,%20No.%202/2003202100.pdf.
[viii] St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book VI, Chap. 11, located at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02106.htm. In this ancient work, cited by Pope St. John Paul II no less than five times in Fides et Ratio [meaning Faith and Reason], St. Clement interprets Genesis 14:14:
... in arithmetic we have the same Abraham. “For, hearing that Lot was taken captive, and having numbered his own servants,
born in his house, 318 (τιὴ )”, he defeats a very great number of the enemy. They say, then, that the character [Tau] representing
300 is, as to shape, the type of the Lord’s sign, and that the Iota and the Eta indicate the Saviour’s name; that it was indicated,
accordingly, that Abraham’s domestics were in salvation, who having fled to the Sign and the Name became lords of the captives,
and of the very many unbelieving nations that followed them.
Ibid. (emphasis added). This ancient passage from St. Clement only makes sense once one understands that, in Greek, the letter Tau looks like a cross – i.e., like “the Lord’s sign” – and, importantly, in Greek gematria this letter equaled the number 300, while the Greek letters Iota and the Eta, the first two letters of Jesus’ name in Greek, had gematria values of 10 and 8 respectively, totaling 318, the number from Genesis 14:14 that St. Clement was interpreting by use of Greek gematria.
ST CLEMENT: GEMATRIA = 1110
Consider all of this, if you will, in light of what Pope Benedict XVI wrote about St. Clement in The Fathers, that is, after he called him “a great theologian”: “For him, the Greek philosophical tradition, almost like the Law for the Jews, was a sphere of ‘revelation’; they were two streams which flowed ultimately to the Logos himself.” Pope Benedict XVI, The Fathers, pp. 30, 33, which can also be located at http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20070418.html. This is an important observation since, at the time of Church Fathers like St. Clement and before, the Greek philosophical tradition unquestionably included the practice of gematria. It was something that was in the intellectual air, so to speak, something that was believed to reveal patterns that displayed the underlying order and harmony – or even, the Logos – of the universe.
There is one scholarly work that makes this point convincingly: it’s David Fideler’s Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism, a book that Mr. McCartin discovered after he published his own. Although this book is heavily laden with considerable chaff, the type of which St. Irenaeus properly warned against in his famous work Against Heresies, despite that fact, the wheat within it is still worthy of review, as it adequately shows how the Greek philosophical tradition most certainly included gematria, and thus it allows the reader to understand why we find St. Clement using it to teach within the Greek tradition, as he did. Among the wheat in this book is the identification of a connection between gematria and the Logos, “one of the most important concepts of the Hellenistic world.” David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, p. 38. Under this ancient system of belief, Logos designated “the power of ‘reason,’ the pattern or order of things, [and] the principle of relationship”. Id. (emphasis added). Indeed, Fideler asserts that “in Greek mystical and cosmological thought, including early Christian thought, the idea of The Logos in a cosmic sense encompassed ... the underlying Order of the Universe, the blueprint on which all creation is based.” Id. (emphasis added). Gematria brings these qualities of the Logos to the fore – out into the sunlight – and it convincingly demonstrates them in precise numerical form: pattern, order, relationship, “a blueprint on which all creation is based,” all of these things become readily apparent to the human mind, and all by use of the most basic of functions of that human mind, that is, simple language and simple math.
Regarding the obvious chaff contained in Fideler’s book (and some others who have used gematria in the past), though, we should keep in mind that while heretical Gnostics have used gematria, that does not make gematria inherently heretical, nor does it make gematria inherently gnostic. Gematria is really nothing more than a tool; like a farmer’s ax or a cop’s gun, it can be used for good or evil. And just as wheat can be carefully sifted away from chaff, good uses of gematria can be carefully sifted away from bad uses of gematria. One good use of gematria, it would seem, is to reveal the innate intelligibility of God, His pattern, His order, and His design, which is inherently attractive to the human mind because it is inherently beautiful. When beauty is used to attract the human being towards God, that is a good thing.
For Roman Catholics, outside of the Sacred Liturgy itself, the ultimate kind of beauty involving language can be found in the Holy Bible and Pope St. John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is interesting because of this result.
BIBLE, CATECHISM, GEMATRIA = 1110
G.H. Hardy (1877-1947 A.D.), a renowned professor of geometry at Oxford University, wrote: “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.” A Mathematician’s Apology (London 1940), p. 14.
With all of this in mind, it is notable that Greeks like St. Clement, who was born in Athens around 150 A.D., knew that, in the Greek language, the name of Jesus (Ιησους) had a Greek gematria value of 888. On this point, see Chapter 8 of Mr. McCartin’s e-book, the whole of which can be reviewed on this website. (Click “e-Books” on the header to find it for free.) It shows this 888 gematria result for Jesus’ name in Greek. And it also shows how the numbers found naturally built into the St. John Code mirror the precise mathematical ratios that are universally found in music across human cultures, including the 2:1 ratio of the octave – i.e., 888:444 – as well as the 3:2 ratio of the perfect fifth, the 4:3 ratio of the perfect fourth, and the 5:4 ratio of the major third. Once this is demonstrated, the St. John Code is shown to be perfectly “tuned” for its pre-planned purposes. It has the correct key of six in the correct language of English. (This does not mean, however, that the St. John Code does not also work in other languages, but that is beyond exploration here.)
It’s also prudent to keep in mind that not only did Pope St. John Paul II’s Catechism quote St. Clement of Alexandria twice, but on October 28, 2012, at the conclusion of the Synod for the New Evangelization, Pope Benedict XVI ended his homily by quoting this great Church Father:
Today, we too turn to the Lord Jesus, Redemptor hominis and lumen gentium, with joyful gratitude, making our own a prayer of
Saint Clement of Alexandria: “until now I wandered in the hope of finding God, but since you enlighten me, O Lord, I find God
through you and I receive the Father from you, I become your coheir, since you did not shrink from having me for your brother.
Let us put away, then, let us put away all blindness to the truth, all ignorance: and removing the darkness that obscures our vision
like fog before the eyes, let us contemplate the true God ...; since a light from heaven shone down upon us who were buried in
darkness and imprisoned in the shadow of death, [a light] purer than the sun, sweeter than life on this earth.”
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20121028_conclusione-sinodo.html (emphasis added).
And the smartest of today’s Catholic intellectuals have noted that St. Matthew, in Mt 1:1-17, when he repeated three sets of fourteen generations leading to the birth of Jesus, was actually pointing his readers to King David three times over. How? It was by use of the Hebrew gematria value of David’s name, which was fourteen. (This use of Hebrew gematria would, of course, have been many decades before St. Clement used the Greek version of gematria to interpret the Old Testement’s first book. And, in St. Matthew’s case, it was not used to interpret the scriptures; it was used in the actual writing of the scriptures, under the direction of the Holy Spirit. And, in the case of St. Matthew, it was not done by a Church Father; rather, it was done by an actual Apostle who talked to, ate with, and, mostly likely, touched the Risen Lord Jesus Christ.) Here’s Dr. Scott Hahn’s biblical analysis regarding what St. Matthew did at the very beginning of the New Testament:
In Hebrew numerals the letter daleth (D) represented 4, and the letter vav (V) represented 6. Because letters also represent numbers,
you could add up the letters in a Hebrew name and get a number. And people often did that, seeing a mysterious symbolic value
in the numbers that went with various names. Since there were no vowels in Hebrew, the name David was spelled with the letters
for DVD. Add up the letters in David’s name – 4 + 6 + 4 – and you get fourteen. Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen: by repeating the number
of David’s name a perfect three times, Matthew is showing us that Jesus is the ideal heir of David, the true Anointed One who inherits
all the promises God made in the Davidic Covenant.
Scott Hahn, Ph.D., Understanding The Scriptures: A Complete Course On Bible Study, p. 322 (emphasis added). Parenthetically, please take note of this result.
DALETH, VAV, DALETH: DAVID = 1110
Now, on July 19, 2015, Bishop Robert Barron, in a homily posted on his Word On Fire website, took up the same point made by Dr. Hahn above:
Jesus is presented unambiguously throughout the gospels as a Davidic figure, isn’t he? As a Son of David. Think of Matthew’s genealogy
here, when he gives us ... three sets of fourteen generations that lead up to Jesus. Fourteen, of course, was the number corresponding to ...
David. Matthew is saying: David, David, David has come.
http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/homily/looking-for-a-shepherd/4826/. See also the November 9, 2013 Homily of Bishop (then Fr.) Barron here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H8YDWPCijg (beginning at about 18:04 minutes into the video). See also the Homily of Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., January 27, 2016 for a discussion of this same point, found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4vlG0Rzaak (beginning at about 22:44 minutes into the video).
That Dr. Hahn, Bishop Barron, and Fr. Pacwa are echoing sound biblical teaching is without doubt because they are in complete unison with the commentators of The Navarre Bible: New Testament (2008): “[Matthew] is clearly using numbers as part of his argument. In Hebrew, the numerical values of the consonants of the word David (D [=4] plus V [=6] plus D [=4]) is fourteen; thus Matthew is pointing out that Jesus is the true Son of David.” Ibid., p. 48 (numbers in brackets are in the original).
KING DAVID, DVD, GEMATRIA = 1110
And if this were not enough, in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Jesus of Nazareth about St. Matthew’s opening description of “Jesus’ family tree at the beginning of his Gospel.” There he wrote: “As this family tree presents it, history is divided into three groups of fourteen generations, fourteen being the numerical value of the name of David.” Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, p. 9 (emphasis added).
Now consider the following gematria result – not one obtained from the Hebrew gematria that St. Matthew used to identify Jesus as the Son of David – but one obtained from the St. John Code where A=6, B=12, C=18 ... Z=156:
GEMATRIA OF MATTHEW = 1110
So it is notable that, right out of the block, the Holy Bible’s New Testament – which all devout Christians believe is sealed with the Holy Spirit’s approval – begins by use of gematria, one that tied the human nature of Jesus to King David, and thus identified Him as the Christ by the repeated use of the number fourteen.
KING DAVID: FOURTEEN = 1110
(Quite interestingly, too, since the 1700s and the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German philosopher and mathematician, the binary number (or Base-2 number) for 14 has been 1110.)
The significance of all of this should be stated as plainly as possible so that it cannot be missed by anyone: Just as the New Testament began with the use of gematria, definitively identifying Jesus as the heir of King David and thus as the Christ, so too the St. John Code uses gematria, in the Modern-day English language, to definitively identify Jesus as that same Christ, as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. So, in all reality, the St. John Code arises out of a biblical tradition that is as old as the writing of the New Testament.
Along these lines, there is an important teaching embedded right into the opening verse of the last book of the New Testament, that is, the last book that was written in the order of time (although the Church did not place it last inside of the Holy Bible). The best scholarship establishes that St. John wrote his Gospel after he wrote the Book of Revelation, and, thus, that it was the last book of the Holy Bible to be drafted under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Of course, St. John begins the Prologue to his Gospel with the famous words: “In the beginning was the Word [in Greek Logos, written as λόγος’], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God.” Jn. 1:1. In September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI taught: “‘In the beginning was the λόγος’. … Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God”. See http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html.
GOD’S DIVINE MIND = 888
The Greek word λόγος (logos), though, has a meaning that can be even further unpacked. In fact, logos is defined in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon as “(A) the word or outward form by which the inward thought is made known;” and, very importantly, as “(B) the inward thought or reason itself; so that λόγος comprehends both the Latin ratio and oratio.” Tufts University has an online Latin Word Study Tool that shows that in addition to reason, the Latin word ratio can also mean “a reckoning, numbering, casting up, account, calculation, computation.” See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=ratio&la=la (emphasis added). That same online resource defines the Latin word oratio as “a speaking, speech, discourse, language, faculty of speech, use of language.” See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=oratio&la=la (emphasis added). So the Beloved St. John’s use of Logos, a somewhat odd word (Word) in the English language, actually points towards something quite interesting, and perhaps even mystically profound. Combining the words ratio and oratio – Latin words that spring forth from the “final word on the biblical concept of God”, that being the Greek Logos used by St. John the Evangelist – we can see that there is a real God-based link between the concepts of calculation and language. And gematria is, of course, the process in which there is a calculation of language. Now, please note these observations from the St. John Code, again where A=6, B=12, C=18 ... Z=156:
LOGOS: HOLY BIBLE CODE = 1110
BIBLE CODE: LOGOS/WORD = 1110
ENGLISH CALCULATION = 1110
Again, this is a calculation of language, one that incorporates both the Greek word Logos, and it's unpacked Latin-based meaning. And to state this same point just a bit differently we could more explicitly use the words reckoning of language, understanding that, according to the online Oxford Dictionaries, the biblically-related word reckoning (see Rev 13:18, which makes an overt reference to the schematic system of gematria) means, "[t]he action or process of calculation", which leads to this observation in the St. John Code.
RECKONING OF LANGUAGE = 1110
In the same September 2006 lecture cited above, Pope Benedict XVI said something that perhaps can be applied to these observations: “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html (emphasis added).
We can conclude this point with two quick thoughts, both of which come from this same brilliant Church intellect. In 2002, prior to becoming pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote: “Human words, at any rate the great fundamental words, always carry within them a whole history of human experiences, of human questioning, understanding, and suffering of reality.” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, pp. 70-71. And, more recently, as Pope Emeritus, “Father Benedict,” as he prefers to be called, said this: “The word is much more than words, because it is through words that we encounter the Word himself. The Word is Jesus Christ himself, and we encounter the Word in those who reflect him, who show the face of God and who reflect his mildness, his humility of heart, his simplicity, his affection, his sincerity.” See http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/benedict-xvi-gods-truth-love-and-goodness-are-what-make-us-pure/#ixzz3nWLTCmv4 (emphasis added). Joining these two ideas, we can say that we also encounter The Word in those who simply and humbly speak His words in human language, which, because it is the product of centuries piled upon centuries of human experiences, questioning, and even suffering, always involves God. As Pope Benedict XVI concluded in his masterful Jesus of Nazareth, in a way rightly applicable here: “This is a process in which the word gradually unfolds its inner potentialities, already somehow present like seeds, but needing the challenge of new situations, new experiences and new sufferings, in order to open up.” Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, p. xix (emphasis added).
[ix] St. Augustine, City of God, Book XI, Chap. 30 located at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.XI.30.html.
[x] St. Augustine, quoted by Andrew Frisardi in “The Commedia as Cosmos”, The Temenos Academy 14, p. 62 (2011) (emphasis added). St. Augustine, it appears, learned this viewpoint from Euclid, who wrote: “The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.” See http://www.mathopenref.com/euclid.html. And this viewpoint continues even among modern-day Nobel laureates such as physicist Leon Lederman, who wrote: “The language of the laws of nature is mathematics.” Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, Symmetry and The Beautiful Universe, p. 29.
[xi] Quoted by Andrew Frisardi, “The Commedia as Cosmos”, The Temenos Academy 14, p. 62 (2011).
[xii] Ibid. (quoting Wis 11:21) (emphasis added).
[xiii] http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20060603_veglia-pentecoste.html (emphasis added).
[xiv] Mitch Stokes, Ph.D., Galileo, p. 36.
[xv] http://www.bethinking.org/science-christianity/advanced/conflict-myths-galileo-galilei.htm (emphasis added).
[xvi] http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/Vatican.php?id=9858 (emphasis added).
[xvii] Ibid. (emphasis added).
[xviii] Fr. Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D., “Apocalypse: Definitions and Related Terms” located at http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/Apoc_Def.htm.
[xix] Quoted in the YOUCAT, p. 51.
[xx] The Confessions of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Chap. 1 located at http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/augconfessions/bk1.html.
List of Sources of Images
The Number 906 Upside-Down: Photo by Michael G. McCartin.
Icon of the Crucifixion, Museum of National Art.
The Number 1110 Upside-Down in a Mirror: Photo by Michael G. McCartin.
St. Augustine adopted from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiffany_Window_of_St_Augustine_-_Lightner_Museum.jpg.
Rendering of DNA adopted from: http://www.genome.gov/dmd/img.cfm?node=Photos/Graphics&id=92961.
The Divine Mercy Image: http://thedivinemercy.org/popups/photopopup.php?photoID=3855&NID=2826.
Michelangelo’s Pieta adopted from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Piet%C3%A0_de_Michel-Ange_(Vatican)_(5992856909).jpg.
Pope St. John Paul II adopted from: http://www.saintjohnpaulmedals.com/st-john-paul-ii/.
Pope Francis adopted from: (Jeon Han) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/koreanet/14758513027/in/set-72157646006317609.
Photo of the Rosary and “A Little Scroll” by Michael G. McCartin.
Photo of the Author by (the Hudson River’s best angler) John McCartin.
[ii] http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/node9.html.
[iii] David J. Gross, “The Role of Symmetry in Fundamental Physics”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1996, located at http://www.pnas.org/content/93/25/14256.full.
[iv] Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, Symmetry and The Beautiful Universe, p. 20.
[v] Anthony Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, p. 281.
[vi] Dr. Mario Livio, The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry, p. 5.
[vii] Leon M. Lederman, “The Role of Physics in Education”, was once (but no longer is) published at http://rcf.fisica.uh.cu/files/Archivos/2003/Vol.%2020,%20No.%202/2003202100.pdf.
[viii] St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book VI, Chap. 11, located at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02106.htm. In this ancient work, cited by Pope St. John Paul II no less than five times in Fides et Ratio [meaning Faith and Reason], St. Clement interprets Genesis 14:14:
... in arithmetic we have the same Abraham. “For, hearing that Lot was taken captive, and having numbered his own servants,
born in his house, 318 (τιὴ )”, he defeats a very great number of the enemy. They say, then, that the character [Tau] representing
300 is, as to shape, the type of the Lord’s sign, and that the Iota and the Eta indicate the Saviour’s name; that it was indicated,
accordingly, that Abraham’s domestics were in salvation, who having fled to the Sign and the Name became lords of the captives,
and of the very many unbelieving nations that followed them.
Ibid. (emphasis added). This ancient passage from St. Clement only makes sense once one understands that, in Greek, the letter Tau looks like a cross – i.e., like “the Lord’s sign” – and, importantly, in Greek gematria this letter equaled the number 300, while the Greek letters Iota and the Eta, the first two letters of Jesus’ name in Greek, had gematria values of 10 and 8 respectively, totaling 318, the number from Genesis 14:14 that St. Clement was interpreting by use of Greek gematria.
ST CLEMENT: GEMATRIA = 1110
Consider all of this, if you will, in light of what Pope Benedict XVI wrote about St. Clement in The Fathers, that is, after he called him “a great theologian”: “For him, the Greek philosophical tradition, almost like the Law for the Jews, was a sphere of ‘revelation’; they were two streams which flowed ultimately to the Logos himself.” Pope Benedict XVI, The Fathers, pp. 30, 33, which can also be located at http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20070418.html. This is an important observation since, at the time of Church Fathers like St. Clement and before, the Greek philosophical tradition unquestionably included the practice of gematria. It was something that was in the intellectual air, so to speak, something that was believed to reveal patterns that displayed the underlying order and harmony – or even, the Logos – of the universe.
There is one scholarly work that makes this point convincingly: it’s David Fideler’s Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism, a book that Mr. McCartin discovered after he published his own. Although this book is heavily laden with considerable chaff, the type of which St. Irenaeus properly warned against in his famous work Against Heresies, despite that fact, the wheat within it is still worthy of review, as it adequately shows how the Greek philosophical tradition most certainly included gematria, and thus it allows the reader to understand why we find St. Clement using it to teach within the Greek tradition, as he did. Among the wheat in this book is the identification of a connection between gematria and the Logos, “one of the most important concepts of the Hellenistic world.” David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, p. 38. Under this ancient system of belief, Logos designated “the power of ‘reason,’ the pattern or order of things, [and] the principle of relationship”. Id. (emphasis added). Indeed, Fideler asserts that “in Greek mystical and cosmological thought, including early Christian thought, the idea of The Logos in a cosmic sense encompassed ... the underlying Order of the Universe, the blueprint on which all creation is based.” Id. (emphasis added). Gematria brings these qualities of the Logos to the fore – out into the sunlight – and it convincingly demonstrates them in precise numerical form: pattern, order, relationship, “a blueprint on which all creation is based,” all of these things become readily apparent to the human mind, and all by use of the most basic of functions of that human mind, that is, simple language and simple math.
Regarding the obvious chaff contained in Fideler’s book (and some others who have used gematria in the past), though, we should keep in mind that while heretical Gnostics have used gematria, that does not make gematria inherently heretical, nor does it make gematria inherently gnostic. Gematria is really nothing more than a tool; like a farmer’s ax or a cop’s gun, it can be used for good or evil. And just as wheat can be carefully sifted away from chaff, good uses of gematria can be carefully sifted away from bad uses of gematria. One good use of gematria, it would seem, is to reveal the innate intelligibility of God, His pattern, His order, and His design, which is inherently attractive to the human mind because it is inherently beautiful. When beauty is used to attract the human being towards God, that is a good thing.
For Roman Catholics, outside of the Sacred Liturgy itself, the ultimate kind of beauty involving language can be found in the Holy Bible and Pope St. John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is interesting because of this result.
BIBLE, CATECHISM, GEMATRIA = 1110
G.H. Hardy (1877-1947 A.D.), a renowned professor of geometry at Oxford University, wrote: “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.” A Mathematician’s Apology (London 1940), p. 14.
With all of this in mind, it is notable that Greeks like St. Clement, who was born in Athens around 150 A.D., knew that, in the Greek language, the name of Jesus (Ιησους) had a Greek gematria value of 888. On this point, see Chapter 8 of Mr. McCartin’s e-book, the whole of which can be reviewed on this website. (Click “e-Books” on the header to find it for free.) It shows this 888 gematria result for Jesus’ name in Greek. And it also shows how the numbers found naturally built into the St. John Code mirror the precise mathematical ratios that are universally found in music across human cultures, including the 2:1 ratio of the octave – i.e., 888:444 – as well as the 3:2 ratio of the perfect fifth, the 4:3 ratio of the perfect fourth, and the 5:4 ratio of the major third. Once this is demonstrated, the St. John Code is shown to be perfectly “tuned” for its pre-planned purposes. It has the correct key of six in the correct language of English. (This does not mean, however, that the St. John Code does not also work in other languages, but that is beyond exploration here.)
It’s also prudent to keep in mind that not only did Pope St. John Paul II’s Catechism quote St. Clement of Alexandria twice, but on October 28, 2012, at the conclusion of the Synod for the New Evangelization, Pope Benedict XVI ended his homily by quoting this great Church Father:
Today, we too turn to the Lord Jesus, Redemptor hominis and lumen gentium, with joyful gratitude, making our own a prayer of
Saint Clement of Alexandria: “until now I wandered in the hope of finding God, but since you enlighten me, O Lord, I find God
through you and I receive the Father from you, I become your coheir, since you did not shrink from having me for your brother.
Let us put away, then, let us put away all blindness to the truth, all ignorance: and removing the darkness that obscures our vision
like fog before the eyes, let us contemplate the true God ...; since a light from heaven shone down upon us who were buried in
darkness and imprisoned in the shadow of death, [a light] purer than the sun, sweeter than life on this earth.”
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20121028_conclusione-sinodo.html (emphasis added).
And the smartest of today’s Catholic intellectuals have noted that St. Matthew, in Mt 1:1-17, when he repeated three sets of fourteen generations leading to the birth of Jesus, was actually pointing his readers to King David three times over. How? It was by use of the Hebrew gematria value of David’s name, which was fourteen. (This use of Hebrew gematria would, of course, have been many decades before St. Clement used the Greek version of gematria to interpret the Old Testement’s first book. And, in St. Matthew’s case, it was not used to interpret the scriptures; it was used in the actual writing of the scriptures, under the direction of the Holy Spirit. And, in the case of St. Matthew, it was not done by a Church Father; rather, it was done by an actual Apostle who talked to, ate with, and, mostly likely, touched the Risen Lord Jesus Christ.) Here’s Dr. Scott Hahn’s biblical analysis regarding what St. Matthew did at the very beginning of the New Testament:
In Hebrew numerals the letter daleth (D) represented 4, and the letter vav (V) represented 6. Because letters also represent numbers,
you could add up the letters in a Hebrew name and get a number. And people often did that, seeing a mysterious symbolic value
in the numbers that went with various names. Since there were no vowels in Hebrew, the name David was spelled with the letters
for DVD. Add up the letters in David’s name – 4 + 6 + 4 – and you get fourteen. Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen: by repeating the number
of David’s name a perfect three times, Matthew is showing us that Jesus is the ideal heir of David, the true Anointed One who inherits
all the promises God made in the Davidic Covenant.
Scott Hahn, Ph.D., Understanding The Scriptures: A Complete Course On Bible Study, p. 322 (emphasis added). Parenthetically, please take note of this result.
DALETH, VAV, DALETH: DAVID = 1110
Now, on July 19, 2015, Bishop Robert Barron, in a homily posted on his Word On Fire website, took up the same point made by Dr. Hahn above:
Jesus is presented unambiguously throughout the gospels as a Davidic figure, isn’t he? As a Son of David. Think of Matthew’s genealogy
here, when he gives us ... three sets of fourteen generations that lead up to Jesus. Fourteen, of course, was the number corresponding to ...
David. Matthew is saying: David, David, David has come.
http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/homily/looking-for-a-shepherd/4826/. See also the November 9, 2013 Homily of Bishop (then Fr.) Barron here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H8YDWPCijg (beginning at about 18:04 minutes into the video). See also the Homily of Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., January 27, 2016 for a discussion of this same point, found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4vlG0Rzaak (beginning at about 22:44 minutes into the video).
That Dr. Hahn, Bishop Barron, and Fr. Pacwa are echoing sound biblical teaching is without doubt because they are in complete unison with the commentators of The Navarre Bible: New Testament (2008): “[Matthew] is clearly using numbers as part of his argument. In Hebrew, the numerical values of the consonants of the word David (D [=4] plus V [=6] plus D [=4]) is fourteen; thus Matthew is pointing out that Jesus is the true Son of David.” Ibid., p. 48 (numbers in brackets are in the original).
KING DAVID, DVD, GEMATRIA = 1110
And if this were not enough, in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Jesus of Nazareth about St. Matthew’s opening description of “Jesus’ family tree at the beginning of his Gospel.” There he wrote: “As this family tree presents it, history is divided into three groups of fourteen generations, fourteen being the numerical value of the name of David.” Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, p. 9 (emphasis added).
Now consider the following gematria result – not one obtained from the Hebrew gematria that St. Matthew used to identify Jesus as the Son of David – but one obtained from the St. John Code where A=6, B=12, C=18 ... Z=156:
GEMATRIA OF MATTHEW = 1110
So it is notable that, right out of the block, the Holy Bible’s New Testament – which all devout Christians believe is sealed with the Holy Spirit’s approval – begins by use of gematria, one that tied the human nature of Jesus to King David, and thus identified Him as the Christ by the repeated use of the number fourteen.
KING DAVID: FOURTEEN = 1110
(Quite interestingly, too, since the 1700s and the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German philosopher and mathematician, the binary number (or Base-2 number) for 14 has been 1110.)
The significance of all of this should be stated as plainly as possible so that it cannot be missed by anyone: Just as the New Testament began with the use of gematria, definitively identifying Jesus as the heir of King David and thus as the Christ, so too the St. John Code uses gematria, in the Modern-day English language, to definitively identify Jesus as that same Christ, as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. So, in all reality, the St. John Code arises out of a biblical tradition that is as old as the writing of the New Testament.
Along these lines, there is an important teaching embedded right into the opening verse of the last book of the New Testament, that is, the last book that was written in the order of time (although the Church did not place it last inside of the Holy Bible). The best scholarship establishes that St. John wrote his Gospel after he wrote the Book of Revelation, and, thus, that it was the last book of the Holy Bible to be drafted under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Of course, St. John begins the Prologue to his Gospel with the famous words: “In the beginning was the Word [in Greek Logos, written as λόγος’], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God.” Jn. 1:1. In September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI taught: “‘In the beginning was the λόγος’. … Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God”. See http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html.
GOD’S DIVINE MIND = 888
The Greek word λόγος (logos), though, has a meaning that can be even further unpacked. In fact, logos is defined in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon as “(A) the word or outward form by which the inward thought is made known;” and, very importantly, as “(B) the inward thought or reason itself; so that λόγος comprehends both the Latin ratio and oratio.” Tufts University has an online Latin Word Study Tool that shows that in addition to reason, the Latin word ratio can also mean “a reckoning, numbering, casting up, account, calculation, computation.” See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=ratio&la=la (emphasis added). That same online resource defines the Latin word oratio as “a speaking, speech, discourse, language, faculty of speech, use of language.” See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=oratio&la=la (emphasis added). So the Beloved St. John’s use of Logos, a somewhat odd word (Word) in the English language, actually points towards something quite interesting, and perhaps even mystically profound. Combining the words ratio and oratio – Latin words that spring forth from the “final word on the biblical concept of God”, that being the Greek Logos used by St. John the Evangelist – we can see that there is a real God-based link between the concepts of calculation and language. And gematria is, of course, the process in which there is a calculation of language. Now, please note these observations from the St. John Code, again where A=6, B=12, C=18 ... Z=156:
LOGOS: HOLY BIBLE CODE = 1110
BIBLE CODE: LOGOS/WORD = 1110
ENGLISH CALCULATION = 1110
Again, this is a calculation of language, one that incorporates both the Greek word Logos, and it's unpacked Latin-based meaning. And to state this same point just a bit differently we could more explicitly use the words reckoning of language, understanding that, according to the online Oxford Dictionaries, the biblically-related word reckoning (see Rev 13:18, which makes an overt reference to the schematic system of gematria) means, "[t]he action or process of calculation", which leads to this observation in the St. John Code.
RECKONING OF LANGUAGE = 1110
In the same September 2006 lecture cited above, Pope Benedict XVI said something that perhaps can be applied to these observations: “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html (emphasis added).
We can conclude this point with two quick thoughts, both of which come from this same brilliant Church intellect. In 2002, prior to becoming pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote: “Human words, at any rate the great fundamental words, always carry within them a whole history of human experiences, of human questioning, understanding, and suffering of reality.” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, pp. 70-71. And, more recently, as Pope Emeritus, “Father Benedict,” as he prefers to be called, said this: “The word is much more than words, because it is through words that we encounter the Word himself. The Word is Jesus Christ himself, and we encounter the Word in those who reflect him, who show the face of God and who reflect his mildness, his humility of heart, his simplicity, his affection, his sincerity.” See http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/benedict-xvi-gods-truth-love-and-goodness-are-what-make-us-pure/#ixzz3nWLTCmv4 (emphasis added). Joining these two ideas, we can say that we also encounter The Word in those who simply and humbly speak His words in human language, which, because it is the product of centuries piled upon centuries of human experiences, questioning, and even suffering, always involves God. As Pope Benedict XVI concluded in his masterful Jesus of Nazareth, in a way rightly applicable here: “This is a process in which the word gradually unfolds its inner potentialities, already somehow present like seeds, but needing the challenge of new situations, new experiences and new sufferings, in order to open up.” Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, p. xix (emphasis added).
[ix] St. Augustine, City of God, Book XI, Chap. 30 located at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102.iv.XI.30.html.
[x] St. Augustine, quoted by Andrew Frisardi in “The Commedia as Cosmos”, The Temenos Academy 14, p. 62 (2011) (emphasis added). St. Augustine, it appears, learned this viewpoint from Euclid, who wrote: “The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.” See http://www.mathopenref.com/euclid.html. And this viewpoint continues even among modern-day Nobel laureates such as physicist Leon Lederman, who wrote: “The language of the laws of nature is mathematics.” Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, Symmetry and The Beautiful Universe, p. 29.
[xi] Quoted by Andrew Frisardi, “The Commedia as Cosmos”, The Temenos Academy 14, p. 62 (2011).
[xii] Ibid. (quoting Wis 11:21) (emphasis added).
[xiii] http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20060603_veglia-pentecoste.html (emphasis added).
[xiv] Mitch Stokes, Ph.D., Galileo, p. 36.
[xv] http://www.bethinking.org/science-christianity/advanced/conflict-myths-galileo-galilei.htm (emphasis added).
[xvi] http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/Vatican.php?id=9858 (emphasis added).
[xvii] Ibid. (emphasis added).
[xviii] Fr. Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D., “Apocalypse: Definitions and Related Terms” located at http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/Apoc_Def.htm.
[xix] Quoted in the YOUCAT, p. 51.
[xx] The Confessions of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Chap. 1 located at http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/augconfessions/bk1.html.
List of Sources of Images
The Number 906 Upside-Down: Photo by Michael G. McCartin.
Icon of the Crucifixion, Museum of National Art.
The Number 1110 Upside-Down in a Mirror: Photo by Michael G. McCartin.
St. Augustine adopted from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiffany_Window_of_St_Augustine_-_Lightner_Museum.jpg.
Rendering of DNA adopted from: http://www.genome.gov/dmd/img.cfm?node=Photos/Graphics&id=92961.
The Divine Mercy Image: http://thedivinemercy.org/popups/photopopup.php?photoID=3855&NID=2826.
Michelangelo’s Pieta adopted from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Piet%C3%A0_de_Michel-Ange_(Vatican)_(5992856909).jpg.
_(5992856909).jpg){kind=link}
Pope St. John Paul II adopted from: http://www.saintjohnpaulmedals.com/st-john-paul-ii/.
Pope Francis adopted from: (Jeon Han) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/koreanet/14758513027/in/set-72157646006317609.
Photo of the Rosary and “A Little Scroll” by Michael G. McCartin.
Photo of the Author by (the Hudson River’s best angler) John McCartin.
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