Numeric Patterns of 666

The title of this book might immediately cause readers to be skeptical, if not dismissive, of a claim that the King James Bible contains a hidden message from an intelligence transcending our time and space. Believers in God or not they could point out that the Bible has been studied for many centuries with the aim of finding such a message but with no tangible results that are unequivocal. So, what is different here? If the Bible has gone through several versions, just what version contains the message? And, wouldn't it be arbitrary to select one version over another? All these questions have answers, but first a look at the kinds of problems that naturally arise when searching for a hidden message in any context is in order.

Contact, by the late Carl Sagan, a best selling novel of 1985 later made into a movie, described messages that defined the methods of communication in a dynamic and static medium. In Contact listeners for signals from space received a series of radio pulses, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 ... the prime number sequence — those numbers divisible only by themselves and 1 — and thus assumed its artificiality as no known natural process generates such a sequence. After the initial signal, instructions were sent to Earth detailing the construction of an interstellar vessel. Once the task was completed a crew set out upon a pre-programmed voyage and after various adventures returned to Earth to begin a search for a different kind of message, one that would establish that the entire universe was the result of a transcendent design.

Where the first signal was dynamic the second appeared in a static context, the digits of Pi, 3.141 ... and it was found deep in the infinite sequence of its digits in base 11 numeration. The form it took was "... a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of naughts." (1.) This is the most common association of Pi: Pi times the diameter of a circle gives its circumference and Pi times the square of its radius gives its area. So this discovery completely fulfilled the fundamental criterion for recognizing a signal of artificiality in a static context, which is unequivocal self-reference. Thus in Contact this display established beyond any doubt or question that it could be the result of an operation of chance. The inescapable conclusion stemming from this discovery was then "... The universe was made on purpose ..." It was the creation of an Intelligence that transcended all of our actual dimensions.

This is the criterion employed herein to determine whether or not the intrinsic patterns from various sorting modes of the elemental components of the KJV, and other finite contexts, can be mere happenstance. By "Sagan's Criterion," as described, it will be demonstrated that they cannot and thus the same conclusion of design reached in Contact must obtain here to a degree. But the message in the KJV goes further than the fictional one in Contact in that it is not just one thing but very many. The self-reference is so deep, and with so many layers of recognition, that it defines redundancy. Here the question changes from "where is the message" to "where is it not?"

As for the question of which Bible to employ among its various versions the obvious answer would be to choose the most prominent, the one whose authority in the English language — the language of the message — is paramount, and this would be the version that is historically central. In G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion, when Henry Higgins admonishes Eliza Dolittle, "You speak the language of Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible," (2.) he does not refer to a Bible with a modernized 23rd Psalm such as "Even though I walk through a dark valley ..." but rather, "Lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ..." Moreover, when the Protestant Bible is quoted in speech or print most always it is as verses from the KJV like that above, "Lo ..."

The King James Version was published in 1611. Then, as various printers' errors crept in over the decades, there were revisions beginning in 1760. The authors of The Strongest Strong's, after Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (1894), state "The best modern version for this (KJV) is the Cambridge Paragraph Bible of 1873 ..." and an electronic edition of this was employed to crosscheck the initial concordance with a major index and thus theirs is "... the most thoroughly analyzed and most accurate concordance ever produced for the KJV." (3.) All relevant aspects of the signals in the KJV are in agreement with both books. For any reader who possess a Bible, and it is the Authorized King James Version, then every Biblical reference made in this book will be found in the Bible on your shelf.

Besides Biblical signals, others in related contexts directly point to those in the KJV. The signals are elementary; they do not stem from computer driven searches of the Bible like those of The Bible Code noted earlier. But, apropos of the discredited ELS method, grids appear in the signal contexts of the KJV. However, these grids are not the result of an arbitrary process but are lists of names from the Bible that form grids upon which appear corroborative acrostics, and with intrinsic focal points relating to the whole context.

Apropos of grids and their acrostics, another matter should be addressed before the message in the KJV, and its attendant signals, is explored: the number 666 about which so many Bible signals turn. For many, religious or not, the number conjures up The Revelation, the last book of the Bible, where it first appeared to etch itself upon historical imagination as "the number of the beast" and thus it is synonymous with evil, the Antichrist, or Satan. But however one feels about 666, a symbolic reference from the past or an evil to come, there can be no doubt that a decipherer of the message and its signals is directed to this last Bible book. But what this means, other than it is the core signal of design, may not be stated with any degree of certainty.

Every so often a new interpretation of 666 appears as technology advances. Besides being a "name" it is linked to a logo, or a bar code, or a computer chip implant, all of which are said to herald the coming of End Times and the terrible events described in The Revelation. Concerning this book, the Jerusalem Bible of Roman Catholic tradition has these comments: (4.)

A "revelation"(called apocalypse, from the Greek term) is a distinct literary form: apocalyptic writing was very popular in some Jewish circles in the beginning of the Christian era. The framework of a Revelation is always a vision of hidden,...