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A Very Mysterious Letter by Dr. Ivan Panin to the New
York Sun
For some months preceding Sunday, November 19, 1899 the New York Sun had
been devoting the better part of a page of its Sunday edition to the discussion
of the truth of Christianity. On that date it printed a letter from one W.R.L.,
in which he denounced Christianity, using the old oft-refuted "arguments"
and challenged "some champion of orthodoxy to come into the arena of
the Sun" and give its readers some "facts" in defence of the
Christian religion. The writer had not seen the N.Y. Sun for years; but on his
way from South Framingham to Grafton, Massachusetts, a copy of the Sun of that
date, left on a vacant seat in the train, "fell into his hands.'" The following
letter met that challenge.
The letter was reprinted by the writer himself in a pamphlet of some fifty
pages with the Greek text of Matthew 1:1-17, and the vocabularies thereto,
enabling the scholarly reader to verify his statements for himself. But first, a
brief introduction to the letter writer:
Ivan Nikolayevitsh Panin was born in Russia on December 12, 1855. As a
young man he participated in plots against the Czar; as a result he was exiled
from Russia. After studying in Germany, he emigrated to the United States, where
he entered Harvard University in 1878 and graduated four years later with a
Bachelor of Arts. After graduation, he became a lecturer on Russian literature.
He was also a firm agnostic, so much so that when
he became a Christian, newspapers carried headlines about his conversion. In
1890 Dr. Panin made his discovery of what he believed to be the mathematical
substructure of the Greek New Testament. He was casually reading the first verse
of the gospel of John in the Greek: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word
was with the God and the Word was God." Panin became curious as to why the Greek
word for "the"' preceded the word "God"' in one case and not the other. In
examining the text he became aware of a numeric relationship. This was the first
of the discoveries that led to his conversion. Imagine: being saved by math!
Talk about God moving in mysterious ways! Panin went on to devote 50 years to
the exploration of the mathematical properties of the Bible. For more
information on Panin's work, please see Is God
a Mathematician, by Keith Newman.
One of the most interesting of many interesting things about Panin's work is his
discovery that the first verse of Genesis and the first verse of Matthew reveal
similar patterns of sevens. Since the first book of the Old Testament was
written well over a thousand years before the first book of the New Testament,
there are implications of a single Author ...
Dr. Ivan Panin's
Letter to the New York Sun:
Click
here to see it, .......wow;
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