Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Why the Claim Does Not Hold

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Why the Claim Does Not Hold

The tidy story also does not survive the arithmetic. The Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters, whose true midpoint is the 595th, and depending on how one counts, that is Psalm 117 rather than 118; the popular version quietly adjusts the tally to land on the verse it wants. Psalm 117 being the shortest chapter and Psalm 119 the longest is true, but their flanking a supposed exact centre is a coincidence dressed up as design. The example is a useful one: it shows how a chain of individually near-true statements can be assembled into a false conclusion, and why claims of hidden numerical structure in scripture repay checking rather than repetition.

A hundred and eighteen factors as 2 x 59 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 62, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.