 Welcome back to Paranormal. We have with us most of our usual cadre, we have Trey Strickland and Doug Overmire. Doug Van Dorn, DVD is with us and Brian Goddawa. Unfortunately, Natalina was not able to make it. She's not feeling well, but I think we can handle the topic. We're going to be talking about Bible Codes today. And for this episode, I sent four articles. Again, this is Paranormal. We try to read peer-reviewed literature on things. And there's actually a decent amount on Bible Codes. So two of the articles that we were reading come from a statistics journal, Statistical Science. There's sort of the original article that kind of started this ball rolling back in 1994. And that was an article entitled Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis. The authors were Whitsam and Rips and Rosenberg. And that was soon followed by another article in the same journal, Statistical Science, in 1995. So five years later, kind of tells you how slow these things can work, entitled Solving the Bible Code Puzzle. And the authors were Brendan McKay, Dror, Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Calli. There were four authors on that one. And we also read two articles from Biblical Studies journals in that area. So one was by Richard Taylor, entitled the Bible Code Subtitle Teaching Them Wrong Things. That was from the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society back in December of 2000. And then lastly was an article by Paul Tanner in Bibliotheca Sacra back in 2000 called Decoding the Bible Code. So I guess we'll just start off here by really, in the most simple terms, introducing the idea. And in the first Statistical Science journal, you sort of get a hint at it, even though you may not know it, just listening to the title, Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis. Now, what the Bible Code presumed alleged phenomenon is about is that these statisticians back in this initial article in Statistical Science took the text, the Hebrew text, in their case, Genesis, but it has since ballooned to the whole Hebrew Bible. But they took the text, and if you can think of Hebrew text as you're used to seeing it, you got the Hebrew characters obviously in rows. They took out the spaces. They took out the vowel pointing, the little dots and dashes for vowels. They took out the accent mark so that you just had a, just the letters, again with no spaces. Imagine a continuous string of letters, all the letters of the words in Genesis, at least in the particular specific Hebrew text of Genesis that they decided to use. And we'll get back to that point. But they took that string of letters, they fed it into a computer, and then they were able to sort of, you know, type in parameters so that the computer would arrange the text in certain, in blocks, blocks of letters that were a certain number of letters across, a certain number of letters vertically. And then they would take those blocks and look to see if the letters assembled meaningful words in those blocks. So this idea of equidistant letter sequences, the equidistant letters, again, is this string arranged in boxes with no spaces between the letters. There's your equidistant letter sequences. And what they would do is they would pick a particular letter in the box, as it were. And then they would count a certain number of other letters. Let's say we pick the one we start with, which is arbitrary. If you have a computer software program, you can tell it where to start and where to stop. But you pick a letter as a starting point, then you count a certain number of letters. Let's just say seven. So you got one letter, then you count seven letters, and then your next letter, again, is the one that matters. And then you go seven more, you pick that letter, you go seven more, pick that letter. Are the letters you're picking at these equidistant letter sequences, these spacing, these equidistant spaces, are those letters forming words? Now they would count, in some cases, I've seen kind of an abuse of this, where they'll count letters in the text, and then they'll do equidistant letter sequencing and combine things for hits. In other words, it's an inconsistent method. But at the heart of it, this is where the Bible code stuff started. And this is why they would be selling software. People still do sell software to enable people to get the letters of the text in a string, have the computer, again, change these intervals at will, and change the sample size of the box, you just sort of tinker with it and experiment, and it will spit out, again, these words that are formed from the letters that fall at this equidistant spacing. And the idea was that there was encrypted information in the letter string, in the letter sequence. And when you gave the computer a certain number of spaces to be your hit sequence, that you could pull back and it would produce meaningful words that were supposed to inform you of something. Again, it was delivering you information that you couldn't with the human eye normally see. And so this, you know, article appeared in the statistics journal, they were looking for names of rabbis, they were looking for dates of death and birth for these rabbis, they were looking, again, for not necessary, they weren't doing prophecy, but they just wanted to see in their article, they attempt to show that this equidistant letter idea actually does account for information that ostensibly would have nothing to do with the book of Genesis. But yet we have all these names in there. How does that happen? It's like it's magic. Well, Michael Drozden picked this up and he was the one who wrote the popular book, the Bible code that sort of, it literally became a bestseller, really exploded on the scene. And Drozden took this and was kind of making it out like you could use this code software and this code idea to predict things and to show that the Bible secretly had encrypted information that was really important in the future. In other words, it was like a prophetic tool. And so that in a nutshell was the enterprise. And it then, if you want to say blossomed, I would say, unfortunately, it expanded into the Christian world where you had certain Christian writers pick up the idea, Grant Jeffery, Yachov Ramseller or two names that come to mind, I guess Chuck Misler to some extent, even though I'm not sure if he's doing the exact same thing. But they would use the approach to sort of encrypt information in the Hebrew Bible using Bible code software programs to say, well, the Hebrew Bible secretly encrypted information about Jesus, about the Messiah. And it sort of just took off from there and it just emerged and nobody's really been able to get that genie back in the bottle because it's become essentially, and I'll just use this term, it's become a tool of divination, which is what disturbs me. But rather than be critical of it, we want to discuss, can we point objectively, not just in terms of an opinion, can we point objectively to any flaws in the idea or the method, the process? So this is why we read not only the initial article, but these three other articles about the Bible code. So I'm going to open it up and ask, what you guys thought of McKay's, we'll just use his name because we don't want to keep repeating four authors, McKay's statistics article that followed the initial one with some rips in Rosenberg by five years, his critique on a statistical basis and also these other two in biblical studies journals. What did you think of the material? Well, this is Brian. Unfortunately, I didn't get all the articles, so I only had like three out of the four. But I can say, trying to read the original Whitstom article was near impossible. Because it was very heavily mathematical and that's not my forte. So that was a real difficult one to even follow. But one of the things that even just as I was reading the other articles and just trying to catch what they're saying and understand it, even though it was difficult on the mathematical side, my initial reaction, just knowing what little I do know about textual criticism, which is something that a lot of more fundamentalist Christians don't know much about and the more fundamental believers don't tend to look at that because it frightens them. The more you know about textual criticism, the more you realize how many true variations there are of the texts and we don't have any single original one and there's so many variations that that's what immediately came to my mind was how can they what version are that, you know, they're picking this one Hebrew version, but there's all kinds of variations. And I think even after the Dead Sea Scrolls, it makes it even bigger variations. So my immediate reaction was just that's not even possible because they don't there's so many versions that what version are they using? And so how can you say that's the right version? You know, so that was the biggest thing that from a non-mathematical person, that's the biggest thing that stuck out to me that was instantly telling me, well, this is arbitrary. There's no foundation for saying this particular Hebrew version that we chose is the true version of the Word of God or of the Bible or whatever, you know. Yeah, it's interesting you point that out right away because I kind of agree with you. If there's anything that's sort of the wider Christian community I would hope would know or would have run into, it is the notion that, hey, not all manuscripts of the Bible are identical. They don't all agree, but you know, I again, I've just been sadly re-informed just by interacting with people in a variety of ways that, you know, a lot of Christians don't know that. They don't understand it. We have this notion and Drozden unfortunately plays on the notion in his popular Bible code book. A lot of Christians believe the myth that the Hebrew text has been like unaltered. There is no variation. It was perfectly or near perfectly transmitted from the time of original composition all the way to now. And since they believe in something that is demonstrably contrary to reality, again, this notion of 99.99999 percent, all the letters are the same from the moment that the biblical person, the biblical figure, put words to papyrus or words to an animal skin from that moment on that all of the letters and therefore the sequence of the letters has never changed or changed only in one or two places. That's a myth that a lot of believers, a lot of people that we would call believers Christians, they believe that. And even they just don't know otherwise. And that if you're talking about translation, again, the differences in manuscripts don't matter so much because it's true. You'll hear this repeated. And again, I'm a biblical scholar and I'm going to be honest with you here. It's true that in most cases, the fundamental meaning of the text is not terribly affected by manuscript differences, but that's a translation issue and an exegesis issue. I mean, there are cases where it is, but for the most part, it doesn't matter. But when you're talking about a sequence of letters, an equidistant letter sequence, what you're describing, Brian, what you brought up about manuscript differences, that is the death knell to the Bible code issue because you have to just decide to pick one version, one Hebrew text. And I think in the, as I recall in the Bible code material we read, I think it was the Koran edition of 1966 or something. It's an edition of the Maseridic text. You have to decide this is the one we're going to use. This is the one we feed into the computer, the one that the computer is going to spit back out to us. And that just cuts off, it shuts off all of the other possibilities from the manuscripts that affect a sequence, a string of letters. And we're not just talking three or four. We are literally talking about when you bring in the Septuagint, which is the, the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. And the translators that produced that Greek translation were using a base text. They were, they were operating with a Hebrew text that is different in many respects from the Maseridic text. If you factor that in, you're not talking about three or four misplaced letters. You're literally talking about tens of thousands. And people don't realize any of this. And they, they're just easy prey to this idea. Yeah. As an, as an example, you said that if 99.999% of all manuscripts were the same, then, well, even if they were, just even if they're one letter off, it's going to mess up the code. And so as an example for listeners, Hebrew, and I didn't, I guess I didn't realize this, but I knew Hebrew, original Hebrew, didn't use vowels. But over time, as vowels were introduced, they're sort of introduced, sort of ad hoc. So sometimes some words will have a vowels included, but other times they won't, I guess, Mike, you may be going to expand on that. So it's like you have, I think Drozden's, the version he uses is a thousand years old. This is the oldest, most perfect Hebrew Bible, but it turns out there was an older one, the Leningrad codex, I think. And there's older ones than that. Yeah. And so, and there are hundreds of letters off. So it's, but even so the Hebrew texts we have a lot, some of it didn't originate in Paleo-Hebrew. So I mean, it even goes back further. Yeah. You have a number of issues that just again, this is why I say the Bible. I mean, I wrote a book called the Bible, you know, what was my own book called? I can't even remember. The Bible Code Myth. Yeah. The Bible Code Myth. Yeah. Which you can still get on Kindle on Amazon. And what I was trying to get into in that book is all the things that you actually need to think about and therefore all the things that just kill the Bible code. It's just dead on arrival. And let's just start from the beginning. If you're talking about the biblical period, let's just say, you know, prior to the exile, we'll have a big chunk of time before the sixth century BC, before, you know, the Jews, what's left of the 12 tribes are taken into captivity in Babylon. Prior to that time, they're using what scholars would call the epigraphic Hebrew script or Paleo-Hebrew script, the Paleo lettering forms, okay? Because that's what Hebrew, that's how it was written. We have texts outside the Bible from the same periods that show, again, just a dramatic difference in the way the letters appeared. And that this changes over time. And eventually during the exile, it gets adapted to what we think of as Hebrew today, what we call the block letter script or the block letter style. But that wasn't original. So during the exile and thereafter, at some point, we don't know when, texts that were written in the Paleo script were transformed, they were changed into the new script. So you have problems, you know, because some of the old Paleo letters look similar, just like the Hebrew letters that we think of now, some of them look similar. So you'd have mistakes, you know, come in. But when they started to do this, that was also the period when it really picked up to use consonants, use some of the consonants as vowels. And you're right, there was no systematic rule book for, okay, here's where you add a consonant to make a vowel sound and here's where you don't. It was ad hoc. They're not consistent. They're doing it where they think it needs to be done or where it's a verbal help. Because think of the biblical story, like in the book of Ezra, they come back from the exile and Ezra has to translate the text. He's reading them Torah. He has to translate the text into Aramaic because they're there for 70 years, for roughly two generations. And many of the people have lost Hebrew. Now, the priestly class, like Ezra, they still can read Hebrew and understand it. But Aramaic has taken over. And so, you know, it's a big issue when we transform, when we update our text into the new script that people can recognize, that we insert vowels so that they know how to say these words. So they get the pronunciation correct. And in Hebrew, the pronunciation is, in many cases, directly linked to what kind of verb it is, how you would understand that verb form, like is it active or passive, you know, all these sorts of things that they're affected by vocalization. And so they're beginning to use letters to preserve a vocalization so that their own Bible can be understood. I mean, it's an important task, but not every scribe did it the same way, like used inserted vowels in the same words as the next scribe. I mean, there's a lot of consistency, but it's not systematic. And that produces different versions, if you will, different editions of the Hebrew text because of just these decisions. And then just with the next person down, who am I copying scribe A or scribe B, their text, well, both of them got copied by different people. And so these differences would creep in. And, you know, over time, you get lots and lots of variety. And here's the important point in the letter sequence. The meaning of the words isn't going to change, whether you sort of know what's a vowel here to add one or not. If you're a priest and you can read Hebrew, you can figure that out. And eventually in the Middle Ages, when they start using the little dots and dashes that we know, and they start removing some of the consonants that preserve vocalization and putting substituting their little dots and dashes system for the extra consonant letters, that was another phase of giving us the Hebrew Bible we have today. Not only did the script change, not only were consonants added to perform as vowels, but when they came up with what they thought was a better system, the dots and dashes, well, we're going to take out the extra consonants now because we've got this new system. And that affects letter sequences invariably. But the average person reading these Bible code books, they don't know any of that zero. And again, I don't fault people for not being into textual criticism in the text transmission, because who's going to be interested in that unless you're geeks, okay? I get that. The people I fault are the people writing these books that they're either ignorant or they don't want people to know how shaky, how real, how tenuous this whole idea is. Think a good example maybe to help people think about this would be like if you have a five-year-old and you have a King James Bible and you want to read the King James Bible of your kid. And after a paragraph, they get so frustrated because they can't understand the English in it. They don't know what to do. So you decide, all right, I've got it here in my hand, but I'm going to make this language more modern. So you just change the vowel to a U, and all of a sudden the kid can make sense of it. But what you've done, even though you haven't changed the English meaning of the word, vowel and U are the same thing, one's more formal, but you've changed the number of letters from four letters to three letters. And you've changed the letters. Yeah, that's right. You've changed the letters too. T-H becomes a Y. That's right. And I think what you're pointing out is that we're not even talking about translation. We're just talking about the normal evolution of a way one language works over a period of time. And if you're going to be creating an algorithm, a computational algorithm that analyzes letters than everything you guys just said, it dashes it when it comes to translations. And as well as transmission. But I think that something else, Michael, that you said sort of quickly, but I think it's very important is, now this isn't applicable to the Jews who might believe in the code, but for the Christians who do, since they are the ones who usually tend to promote this stuff the most. Well, when you have the apostles and Jesus, our ultimate authorities quoting the Septuagint, then what that means is, so I'm speaking to Christians who have a high view of Scripture, if those guys are quoting Septuagint, then that means they are implicitly giving the authority of the Word of God to the Septuagint. Exactly, to a translation that is not the Hebrew. And that doesn't fit. That doesn't fit in the paradigm. Which of course just supports what you're saying, Mike, which is the message is the important thing. And I would almost call it a totemic idolatry, or we've heard the term Bibliolatry, where people are so obsessively worshiping the Bible as a totem, rather than seeing it for what it is. It's the message that is what's important, not these Jots and Titles that they think is what the Word of God is. It's the message that is the Word of God more than anything. Well, Ryan, obviously Jesus and the apostles didn't have as high view of Scripture as we do. Because we're so invested in the Bible code. I don't know what Jesus and Paul and other guys were doing, but they just didn't really care about the Word of God. Well, it's even worse than just going through the Hebrew text and trying to find some hidden code that is encrypted according to the Tanner article, decoding the Bible code, this is one of the theological journals. People did this with the King James text. Like they inserted the King James, and I read that thinking, well, which King James text, the 1611 one or the one from the 18th century or the 19th century? Because I have one from the 19th century, and it's different than the one from the 20th century. People don't realize. It's just an example. Language is, spellings change over time, and there's editing that goes on over time. And I think the idea, one of the ideas was, well, when it was originally written, it was there was so much information encoded, and over time, because of textual errors, some of the information is lost. No, no, if you change a letter here and there, all the information is off. But it's just not just that. It's the math. It was like confirmation bias in the original article when they inserted important rabbis. And there's some theological messaging going on in that journal article. No, that they have, it's a Jewish article, and so they're promoting that theology that, hey, the rabbis have figured out the text, not you Christians. I mean, there's an underlying message there. But how the original article went to find the names of these rabbis and their birth dates, it's like they use every possible way of referring to someone. So it'd be like, if we wanted to find you, Mike, it'd be like, if you insert into the program, Mike Heiser, Michael Heiser, Dr. Heiser, the husband of, you know, it's like, there's every potential way, your initials, your, and because of Hebrew is a unique characteristic of it, it's easy to find all sorts of, you take three consonants and you can make all sorts of words from it. You would think if God is the mind behind this encrypted information that God would have settled on a spelling. He would have settled on, like the other, another thing, this is, we're talking about the McKay article for those who want to want to read it. The McKay article points out all these different biases, you know, how our rabbis name was spelled, how the date formulas, because the one of the original article talked about like, that the Bible code found the dates of their death and birth. Well, there, there, you know, three, four, five different ways of citing a date, a date formula. Like, you know, listeners might be familiar with, there's a way that we write a date out in America and the way they do it in Europe is different. Well, it's the same thing, you know, with, with the Hebrew material, but they didn't care about any of that. So you would think that, again, if God encrypted this information, he would have picked one date formula, or one way of citing a name. You know, he wouldn't count initials. It's either the full name or it isn't. But there's all these different things that they, again, I'll use the word, they, they just cheat. They cheated. They cheated. Apparently they warned pieces. Plus it's like, it's like, I think they said, you could, you could read the words backwards or forwards, right? So they didn't even have a strict limitation around that. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes the words were backwards. And I'm like, well, come on. The more you increase those ways, those possibilities, you're just increases the increasing the odds of being able to find whatever you want to find. Apparently, Warren pieces divine in hindsight. Apparently, Warren pieces divinely inspired because they got better results with one was using one piece to find some of these rabbis. So maybe it is, I just wanted to pull my hand. Oh, it was a Hebrew translation of Warren piece two, by the way, Russian. So I don't know. I, I remember when that, that draws in a book came out, I was working in a bookstore at the time and I remember thinking, oh, that's really interesting. But I was really troubled by because that book tried to find the assassination of JFK, for instance, and I'm thinking, well, why would I mean, that is so ethnocentric, you know, like an American authors go say, what's important in America? Oh, that's actually JFK. Maybe that's in the Bible. Like, no, no, that's not what the Bible is given for. But that book just sold like crazy. And then, and then also in that draws in book, and I think one of the articles referenced it, it tried to predict the assassination of the prime minister of Israel after visiting Jordan or whatever, in this particular date. Well, it turns out the prime minister didn't go to Jordan. So he wasn't assassinated. So apparently, it's not really set in stone. I mean, that's what the, that's what the author of the book said. I'm like, what, what, what use of it, what, what use is it of trying to use it as divination? If you can just, you can just mold the data points. You know, it's like saying to a, to a baseball player, like saying a baseball player hits batting average of 900. But, you know, that's, that's, if you take out the strikeouts and the pop flies, you know, then you get, you know, it's like you're massaging the confirmation bias is so great. It's just outrageous that this is a thing and that there's a whole, like, there's a whole websites devoted to this. I mean, you can find anything in there. And I guess my question is why, why do people need this? Why is this a thing? Yeah, well, let's, let's come back to that because that, that is a place I want to park for a while. But I want to say one other thing just so again, listeners, because I can't assume a lot of familiarity with this, you know, we, we're not talking again, you got to think of the Hebrew text, just a string of letters. And if you alter the sequence, you alter the code, you know, you alter what you get. And that's, that's a big issue because the people who are selling you the software on their websites, the people who are writing these books about these amazing discoveries they found using Bible codes, they're using one version, whatever one they picked, they're using one version of the Hebrew text to do this work. If you altered their sequence of the version they picked in any meaningful way, it destroys everything. And listeners might be thinking, okay, well, all right, there's three or four of these, you know, differences. And, you know, we'll just, okay, okay, Mike, put in the one, the three or four differences you think are legit, then we'll read, just read you the Bible code. Look, we're not talking about three or four. I want to get, just give you a, just a real short, you know, list of the kinds of things that you run into with this. The Septuagint, again, is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It's used roughly 70 or 80% of the time by New Testament figures and New Testament writers when they quote the Old Testament. So the Septuagint is a big deal. Whoever produced the Septuagint was using a Hebrew text. They're translating a Hebrew text that in a number of respects is different than the Masoretic Hebrew text. You have, you know, more than one text tradition. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls there were at least three major text traditions. And there were actually more because you have biblical scrolls from Qumran that scholars refer to as quote, unaffiliated, you know, end of quote. In other words, we have texts of the Bible that don't match either of the big three, the big three are the Masoretic, the Septuagint, and then the Samaritan Pentateuch. So there's even more than three editions, and they all hit the same chronological wall, the Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, 300, 200 BC. They're all as old as each of the other ones, because they're there in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that's the oldest stuff we have. So we've got different versions, different editions, and it's not just three or four. I'll give you some examples. In Esther, the Septuagint text that underlies, the Hebrew text that underlies the Septuagint translation of Esther, almost half of the verses in the Septuagint text that, you know, the text that was used to produce the Septuagint of Esther, almost half the verses are not found in the Masoretic text. Half the verses. There's an even bigger problem. In the Book of Job, the Hebrew text that underlies the Septuagint of Job is one sixth smaller, shorter, than the Masoretic text of Job. And it doesn't even, it actually has an ending. Again, the Hebrew text that underlies the Septuagint, it has an ending that doesn't exist in any Hebrew manuscript. The worst one, though, is Jeremiah. The Jeremiah problem, as it's known in discussions of the transmission of the Hebrew text, Jeremiah is the second longest book in the Hebrew Bible. It's 52 chapters. It's 1364 verses, which is roughly 42,000 words. Here's the kicker. There's a dramatic difference between the Masoretic text of Jeremiah used by all Bible code researchers, and the Hebrew text that was used to create the Septuagint of Jeremiah. The Masoretic text of Jeremiah is 15% longer than the Septuagint text. Again, that's roughly 6,000 words, or 24,000 letter displacements. And even worse, there are sections of Jeremiah, the oracles of the nations, that are in a different order in the text used to create the Septuagint than in the Masoretic text. You're literally talking about tens of thousands of letter differences, letter disruptions, disruptions of a sequence. What your Bible code researchers are doing is they're picking one text, and they're pretending to be omniscient, or they just don't care, and saying, well, this is the Hebrew Bible. Forget all that other stuff that exists that goes into producing our translations. Forget all that. We're going to pick this one, and we're going to pretend to be omniscient and say, this is the one that God encrypted information into. It's just patently absurd, and it's demonstrably false. And this is why I tend to be pretty blunt when it comes to Bible code stuff. If you are building any doctrine on Bible code material, if you're building any belief on Bible code material, you are believing false teaching. You are used nation to produce ideas, and the whole enterprise is just so deeply flawed that it has zero chance of being accurate. So you really need to examine what it is you're thinking when it comes to this. Now, let's go back to the issue of why. What do you guys think? I'm going to have some opinions here, too, but why do you think people are not only care about it, but are into it? What do you guys think? So I think that there's this desire, it's a good desire, probably, that it wants to uphold the word of God as true and infallible. And you can maybe be generous and say that that's with most everyone who's trying to do this. And I think that this is kind of related. It's a thought about that first article that kind of is pro the Bible code that started the whole thing off and how Brian was saying that he gets lost in all the mathematics. And I did, too. I don't know how you couldn't. You read that and you just kind of get blown away. And so it really feels like there's got to be something that's really important here, because there's so much smarter than me. Who am I to argue with them? Right. We're just going to bow to your authority. Exactly. And I thought that the McKay article, the way that it started, it gave this eight by 18 rectangle from the manifesto that was written by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, back in 1995. I thought this was really fascinating, because what it shows to me is that really these guys have created this incredibly complex mathematical, non-fice, falsifiable science. And that little graph shows very clearly in a simple way what I'm talking about. And they take this little manifesto that the Unabomber writes and they find a Bible code in it. And there's two words, bombs and mail. And so the Unabomber is encoding a secret code in his own manifesto that he's going to be the mail bomber. I mean, it's non-falsifiable because you can find this anywhere that you want to. If your text is long enough, you can find it. And again, back to the, we're using hindsight. See, none of these Bible code folks are doing the software spit out and picking their letter sequence and they're saying, okay, I'm finding words in here and I'm going to predict the future. They're all looking back into history in the past. And that means by definition, you're manipulating the circumstances of the evidence to find what you want to see. That's the enterprise. Again, it's just so deeply flawed. And so the other thing I was thinking about with this is that I can imagine someone saying, and I think this kind of gets to the answer, at least one, I think there's probably a lot of answers to this question of why. But people, my assumption is people want to uphold the integrity of God's word, that it's really his word. And they believe this really, in a lot of cases, just on faith without any reason at all. In fact, reason becomes a bad thing. Logic and science, these are evil things that work against God's word. And you guys are trying to destroy the God's word. So I can imagine somebody saying that something like this, as I was reading the thing I was saying in this comment in my PDF there, that, all right, so you guys are saying that there's different manuscripts of the Hebrew. But we still have codes. And therefore, can you imagine how many more codes there would be if it wasn't corrupted? Some sort of a thought like that, where it's like, it's just not possible to break out of this idea that there has to be Bible codes there. Yeah, they don't understand that the other manuscripts destroy the code because the equidestinal letter sequence would just keep changing and shifting. Okay, we have our hits. We have our codes here. Now we're going to change the sequence. We're going to incorporate this other data. Well, that breaks what you just found. But it adds new ones you see. And so that's all that matters. And so on and so on. So we keep breaking. We keep invalidating what we just found to now look at something new that we believe in. And we're going to invalidate that tomorrow when we change the sequence again. Again, I look at it, and I think I do think you're onto something that we have a reflex of faith that is deeply misguided, that doesn't care about coherent thought at all. And it's easy for me to look at that and say, that's the definition of absurdity. Oh, I was just saying, another example of that, because I think it helps to hear the examples, especially if the audience hasn't read the articles. But another example of that is Drosnin, so-called discovered Yitzhak Rabin's assassination by Amir. But here's one of the things. You mentioned in the very beginning program, like how it's finding words that have letters that are equidistant. But those equidistants are arbitrary. It could be 10 letters, it could be 20. The computer searches for whatever equidistance it can find. And so in order to find Yitzhak Rabin's name, the letters that are equidistant were 4772 letters apart, which tells you like, well, you know, look, if you've got 100,000 words or a million words, you could literally find any word by doing an infinite amount of equidistant possibilities, right? And the other thing was the Amir, the name of his assassin, I guess, was in terms of its proximity. It was like 14,000 letters. And the distance from Yitzhak was 9,000. It was just so crazy that it's like, well, of course you can find that when you're dealing with thousands and thousands, you know. So that was another, I think, expression of why, well, let's put it this way, the power of the power of lots of time or lots of numbers or lots of letters, you know, connected with finding an algorithm to connect things, you can pretty much connect everything. Yeah, you can. You can find whatever you want to find if you make, if you keep adjusting the sequence distances, and the distances can be crazy. Like you just said, 14,000 letters apart. I mean, it would be hard to find something or it would be hard to postulate something that you couldn't find, you know, if you're constantly shifting the sequence number and you can include these absurdly large sequence numbers. I mean, I could find, you know, my dog assassinating somebody, you know, it's ridiculous. It's the ultimate. It's the ultimate eegesis, reading your ideas into the text. It's a great horoscope sort of a thing. Man, and imagine what's going to happen whenever someone writes a software program to make it like a 3D element, you know, we go three-dimensionals with the text, and then you'll be able to find all sorts of things you want to find. Well, and in Tanner, the very first sentence of the background says that the Bible code had a truce and Jewish mysticism going all the way back to the medieval era. So I found that really interesting and it seems like what were they trying to accomplish with their trying to find secret messages? And is that kind of what goes on today with people's fascination with this? I mean, I don't think it's a high view of text. If you want a high view of text, just believe what it says about Jesus. I mean, you don't need, here's the thing, you don't need to go with super secret messages about America or whatever. It is what it is. It tells us who Jesus is in the way of salvation and that's kind of the point. It's the opposite of the secret religion. It's not Gnostic. It's not secret. It's in the open public. It's in front of everybody. It's here. Here's what I am. Here's who I am. I'm right here in your face. Everybody can see me. I'm telling you straightforward. That's what Christianity is. This is the opposite of Christianity. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. You know, there's a couple more examples that he gave that this was in a Tanner article. I thought this might be worth mentioning where he was bringing out, I think it was something in Isaiah 53 and some Christian guy was trying to do a Bible. Yeah, I forget who he was. Oh, that's right. It was Jeffrey. I think Tanner pointed out differences in the Septuagint, so you could take that direction, but the other direction you could take it is that a Jew who doesn't believe in Jesus would see the very same code and go, no, that's not a Bible code. So it's like, here you can show supposedly objective mathematical Bible code and two people with very different worldviews would only one of them would see it. No, I do think there is something. You guys use the word Gnostic and I agree with that. I think that the people who are using Bible code stuff, it's very hard for me to look at that and not conclude that they want to portray themselves as purveyors of secret elite knowledge that you're not going to go out and buy this software and if you do, you're not going to be able to learn it. Let me handle that for you. I'm the expert here and here's what you ought to believe and the way they're massaging their searches, I think in many cases they intentionally find hits in a code to reinforce very idiosyncratic and in some cases heretical ideas they believe and then they're going to use this method of divination to convince people to follow them to adopt their ideas or to recognize them as some sort of elite master teacher that they have knowledge that you just can't have this knowledge. It's encrypted. I've been able to tap into it and so you need to listen to me. It's really hard for me not to look at this in fairly sinister ways. Now, I don't think a guy like Jeffrey was there. Honestly, I just don't think he understood what he was doing and I say that because I debated him on Coast to Coast AM when it was the old Art Bell show and it was a great illustration of why how some topics just do not translate well to radio at all. For people who are interested in that, I reproduced it. What I was trying to talk about with Jeffrey, I've reproduced the content of that in my book, The Bible Code Myth and what I was trying to zero in on is he produced this book where he took Isaiah 53 and he uses the Bible code stuff on Isaiah 53, the Hebrew letter sequence. Again, picking an arbitrary modern, you know, Masoretic edition for doing his work and he finds all these references to Jesus or things in the New Testament about Jesus and he's like, wow, you know, Isaiah 53, the suffering servant passage encrypts all these things about Jesus. That's proof that Jesus was actually the Messiah. Well, I believe Jesus was the Messiah, but what I did was I took every line of the Hebrew text of Isaiah 53 of the version he used and then underneath it, I put the Dead Sea Scrolls of the same passage and then I highlighted with colors all of the letter sequence differences because I knew and Jeffrey just didn't know that the scribes at Qumran used what's called full spelling. This was the period where they're putting vowel signs or, you know, they're using consonants to preserve vocalization. They're using consonants to function as vowels, whereas his text didn't do that because it was a later text when they took that stuff out. And in just 13, I think, yeah, it was, how many, you know, so 52, 11 through, you know, 53, 12 or something like that, in just that span of verses, a dozen verses or so, there were 100, over 100 letter sequence differences. Wow. Over 100 letters different in just that small number of verses. And if you picked any two or three, they would destroy the codes that he found. Again, in his case, I don't think he was trying to purvey himself as a teacher of secret knowledge, but I think some do. I think he was just ignorant of what the problem was with what he's doing. But see, it's not necessary to try to find. It isn't necessary. We know that Jesus is the Messiah because of the New Testament. Just read your New Testament. And it quotes the Hebrew Bible. It quotes all the time as proof. We don't need to find a secret code. And, yeah, to that point, again, in the Tanner article, he quotes a pro-Bible code site. I'm just going to read a portion of it. A 3,000-year-old tradition states that God dictated the Torah. What? You know, first of all, what? You know, in a precise letter by letter sequence. Okay. And then it goes on and says, well, the apostles may refer to this when they stayed in Matthew 5.18 until the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen. You know, the whole Dottin-Tittle thing will disappear from the law until everything's accomplished. So people lay on that verse and go, see? See? Like, no, no, that is over-literalizing. That is ripping a scripture out of the passage and over-literalizing it in a way the author did not intend. Well, I'll be astray. It's lying to people. That whole idea of the letter for letter, you know, God whispering in the ear of the biblical writers, the Bible itself defies that sort of description. So I think, don't you guys think that a view of inspiration that's out there, quite prominent, is really a kind of a chronic, a dictophone sort of thing. And that that kind of a view of inspiration, you know, first of all, I don't know how it holds up even, even not only the scrutiny of just the Bible itself, but of anything that we've talked about today, you know, in terms of text transmission, how does that hold up? But what happens when you start building entire doctrines on that kind of a view of inspiration? No? You can go some pretty crazy places. I mean, some of the biblical authors, their personality really comes through, Paul comes to mind. When he was writing, you want to tell me that God dictated to Paul exactly what the text, Paul even says, you know, such and such, that's from God, but this text pieces from me. It doesn't mean he wasn't inspired when he wrote it, but it's like, oh, I have a passion in Torah. It doesn't even have it's not even consistent in Torah, because you compare Exodus and Deuteronomy. There are obvious differences. People don't realize that there are parts of the Torah that repurpose other parts of the Torah. And they don't, again, the words, the spellings, right, Chronicles and Samuel and Kings, again, they repurpose material that is in the Hebrew Bible in other parts of the Hebrew Bible. And so the Hebrew Bible itself defies this notion of God dictating the letters. I mean, I don't care if you get a rabbi somewhere that believed that he's wrong, that he's not acquainted with the Hebrew Bible. So it might sound like sacrilege, but that's true. Go ahead. I have a specific question for you on this. I've always wanted to ask you this. It's the spelling of Nephilim. And I ask it because both of these are in the Torah, right? One is in Numbers 13. One is in Genesis 6. And you point out how there's two different spellings in Numbers 1333 for the word Nephilim. And it seems to me that you could use that as a good kind of a way to explain some of this, you know, the text using the text. What's your view of why there's that different spelling and how would it fit into this discussion? Yeah, I think that what's going on here, because you do have two different spellings there in Numbers 1333. I think that one of them is there to preserve the correct, not only the vocalization, but also the correct form in that the fuller spelling is more of an indication as to where the word comes from, you know, how the root was modified, where the word comes from, and therefore alert readers to what it actually means. And then the other one is drawing specifically on, you know, Genesis 6-4. So the fuller spelling tells us, well, it eliminates possibilities as to what the word means. You know, it doesn't mean those who fall upon like soldiers, you know, like fall upon their victims in battle, because you would have no philim in that case, and you never have you never have the word pointed that way, even after the fact, but it also doesn't mean fallen, because then you would have a different set of letters. Instead of the little yod in Numbers 13 3233, you would have a vov to preserve a different vocalization. So I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to disambiguate where it, you know, what we're talking about, where it comes from, etymologically, and then also link back specifically to Genesis 6-4, like to make the point, okay, we're spelling it a little differently here, but we want you to make, we want to make sure that we're referring to the same group back here in Genesis 6-4, but, you know, look at what we're doing here, because that'll tell you where this word derives from in your vocabulary. It's a little hard to explain that if people have never had Hebrew, but most of your Hebrew words have a three-letter root, in this case, noon, pay, and then lamin, and then how that root is modified, either with endings or prefixes or infixes, you know, letters, you know, put in between the other letters, that will tell it, that will produce, you know, something that's meaningful in the Hebrew language, but if you know where it started, if you know what the original three consonants were, and, you know, sort of your starting point, you will be able to tell where it derives from based on the form you're looking at, the final form you're looking at. So, I think that that's a little bit what's going on here, and I don't know if you remember, but I argue in unseen realm, I suggest that because of the morphology, because we have this middle yod preserved in Numbers 13, and also because of the way the Septuagint translator understood the term, it's always going to be either, you know, refa'im, sometimes they'll transliterate it, other times they'll use, you know, they'll use gigantes for giants. It's very clear that they didn't, you know, that they did understand this as having something to do with giants or race associated with giants, and that tells me, again, that the term probably originally comes from Aramaic, in other words, it's an exilic, you know, kind of thing, and that factors into my view of Genesis 1 through 11, that the text is being worked on, you know, during the exile, and that, of course, the Torah, Numbers as a book is part of that. I think they're trying to telegraph what this word means by virtue of the way they're altering the spelling in that one verse, but then linking it back to Genesis 6 as well. And the reason why I thought of that is kind of an example, is because what possible sense could having this second spelling for Nephilim even make an addictophone sort of a view of inspiration? Why would God do that? Right, yeah, why would God do that? I can't even think of any kind of possible answer for that. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense. It turns the Holy Spirit into some sort of impish deity that just wants to play with us, play with our minds, confuse us, you know. Puppets. It's just, it's so deeply flawed. I mean, that's the nicest way I can put it. It's bad theology. And I think that this also reflects one of my repeated mantras, which is I think that one of the biggest problems in the Christian church is what I call hyperliteralism. It's this desire to make the Bible into science, you know. And that's all this is, is the Bible codes, is basically trying to use science to validate God's word is true, you know. See, we can believe it because it's scientific now, lots of math. Yeah, and I think you guys know that Isaac Newton was big time into, he spent his whole life trying to find a Bible code that would kind of show to the whole world that his science was true. And Brian, you'll love this. He's especially focused on Revelation. Yeah, I mean, David Flynn sort of revived that discussion in his temple at the center of time where he's trying to. Oh, that's Mark wrote that. Mark, okay. Yeah, okay, one of the Flynn's anyway. But again, trying to solve this, you know, what Newton was doing and so on and so forth. But, but again, Newton does the same thing that modern Bible coders were doing. He doesn't account for manuscript differences. He doesn't account for fuller spelling, you know, using consonants as vowels. He of course didn't know about the Dead Sea Scrolls. He doesn't, he's not worried about the sub two agent. He commits all of the, all the same blunders because it's not his field. He's not either aware of this other stuff. Or he just makes an arbitrary decision. This is the text I'm going to use and that's the one I'm going to, you don't like it. You know, I'm just going to use this one to do my work, you know. Well, what's interesting to me about it is that he is an incredibly brilliant man and he's a scientist. And, you know, I thought about, because what you were saying there, Brian, that you've got people trying to use these Bible codes to prove science. Or to scientifically prove God. Or to scientifically prove the Bible. Yeah. Yeah. It was either way. Yeah. To me as a malady of modernism, you know, we've just been, you know, we, we've accepted. Saw what you did there. That was good. That was good. I like that. I don't know. What? Malady of modernism. That was good. That's a nice ring to it. That is true. That's good. But yeah. So I mean, just this, this notion that we've sort of bought into and accepted the secular sort of authority of a scientific culture. And, you know, so we feel that we have to recast our faith in those terms to legitimize it, you know. And, but, you know, the downside of that would be, would, would be, you know, like the Flat Earth Controversy, which, you know, not, not that we want to talk about that, but those, it's got that same sort of concept involved where everything, you, they, they're so obsessed with taking the Bible hyperliterally that they're taking the cosmological view that's in there. And they're demanding that that has to be the scientific picture of the universe, you know. And so it's just, again, another, in a way, another form of narcissism, the secret knowledge about the way things really are. Yeah. We're the real science, you know, the science that the world accepts, i.e., that every thinking person accepts. The science that the world accepts doesn't, you know, we don't like that. So we're going to have, we're going to invent our own science, and then we're going to use that to prove the Bible, our reading of the Bible here. Yeah. Yeah. It, it's, it's divination. Divination. It's divination. You know, it's, it's really sad. No, you mentioned Flat Earth. Have we, have we seen Bible codes specifically used in such damaging ways, like, like other ways, because I would agree that it goes back to, you know, hyperliteralism, this, this suspicion that, oh, we need something, science, to convince people that the Bible's true, you know. And again, that might have a good motivation, but it's this reflex. It's, to me, it says lack of faith. It says it separates faith from reason, which, you know, I've read the Bible through a number of times. I don't, I don't see God telling us to not think well, to exercise faith. You know, faith is just where our understanding ends. You know, it, we, we have to, you know, make, make certain presumptions, but they don't, they're not irrational presumptions. We just don't have a complete body of knowledge, you know, to tie everything down or make it completely explainable to us. But the, the conclusions that, that faith asks us to make are not irrational ones. You know, when you, when you have the power of God involved, it's just, we don't know everything to the same extent of the same, in the same way. You know, so we're, we're, can you think of any others that, you know, where you've seen the, the Bible code kind of just really misused, it's hard to use it correctly because it's just a bunch of nonsense, but you know. There's a lot of eschat, you know, a lot of end times, people who are focused on different end times models, and that's their gospel. And so they're, they're finding, they're trying to unlock, you know, that President Trump was predicted in the Bible code. Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's right. In, or, you know, it's just, I've never seen that. I didn't, I don't know. What's the book? Okay. It's on Amazon. It was, it was bestselling for a while here. Let's see, Donald Trump prophecy. I'm pretty sure it was one or he just, I don't know. I can see people weaponizing this. Is that Trump apocalypse thing or Trump? There's some, there's some war, some book that has Trump an apocalypse, I think in the title or yeah, yeah. Kind of burge the two or. Oh, here it is. Here it is. The Trump prophecies, the astonishing true story of the man who saw tomorrow when he saw it's coming next. And if, if I'm, I don't know if it's still high up there. Oh, so it's number two. It's up there. Number three in evangelism, church and state categories in, in Amazon, which is not, those aren't huge categories. This isn't going anyway. This isn't going away, is it? That's a Bible code book. No. Or is it? The Trump prophecies, you know, what led to the miracle of the 26? I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to, I'm going to Google it here. Trump Bible code prophecy. There you go. Let's see if we, if we get, well, there's an Amazon link here. Rabbi predicts Trump will win using the Bible code and usher in the second coming using the Bible code. That was an article in Charisma magazine, Jewish Rabbi, who by the way wouldn't believe in the second coming. But anyway, he used the Bible code to predict that was back a year, a couple of years ago. I get, no, that was two days before the election. Of course, I don't know. Oh, here it is. Here, I found a book. It looks like a goofy self published book, but Donald Trump in the Bible code, New Testament echoes of America's future leader. And it's done. It's in the numerology category. Number nine in the numerology category of Amazon. Yeah. Here's the things that are outselling it. Christian shouldn't be in the numerology. I'm just going to throw that out there. Let's step back for a second and ask the scholar. Okay, Mike. So, you know, we're harping on the narcissism of secret knowledge and this obsession with, you know, dictation and numerology. But what isn't there, you know, isn't there some kind of importance and symbolic importance of numbers in the Bible? Isn't there a kind of numerology going on there? What's the difference there? Yeah. The difference I would say is, you have in Revelation, you know, you have the famous 666 or 616, you know, the whole Gamatria thing going on there, which, again, interestingly enough, you know, there's nothing that tells us that a Gamatria approach is the correct approach. Okay. In other words, there's no, there's a footnote on those verses that says, oh, by the way, use Gamatria to figure out what the difference is. Okay. I mean, it's a possibility because Gamatria, you know, existed in, you know, at the time. So there are a handful of these, you know, the incident with Jesus' baptism, you know, with the Spirit descends as a dove, again, that might be Gamatria. The 153, to me, the better one is actually the 153 fish, you know, with, you know, Jesus after the resurrection with that whole scene about capturing the fish there. So it shows up. I mean, there is, you know, encrypted knowledge, but it's not giving you anything that actually isn't in the text. If we take the 153, if that is Gamatria for Bene Elohim, the sons of God, well, okay, Jesus says in the passage, you know, feed my sheep, you know, it just, you know, you don't need it for anything. It's just, you know, either a tweak of something, maybe a literary tweak. There are people who would say that in that example, the writer is sort of tweaking, you know, Pythagorean thought, you know, to kind of say that what, you know, the gospel message is superior to Pythagoras or whatever. I mean, who knows, you know, that that's possible, you know, that John could have been doing something like that. But you don't, you're not dependent on it to produce the knowledge, even in the very passage, you know, that the writer wants to communicate. It might be sort of an added inside kind of layer, you know, to what's there. Right, a double entendre, some people are going to catch it, others won't, but the communication isn't going to be dependent on it. That's a little different. So it reinforces the explicit meaning rather than creating a secret secondary meaning that's not already there. It's another way of enforcing the idea to those in the know, or specifically to people that you suspect will catch it. Again, maybe a little poke in the eye there or something like that. You know, you can have that kind of thing going on. That's a little different than patterning though, like the number 40 or the number seven, you know, in the Bible. That's not Dematria. It's not divination. It's just patterning that, you know, really dips into, in those cases, dips into concepts of calendar and sacred time and the cycles of time, you know. So it's not divination. It's something that would have been sort of culturally more familiar to people in case, you know, listeners are not familiar. If you really want to like get into the 40 and the seven and the 12 and multiples thereof, I'd recommend Rachel Eleor's book, The Three Temples. Now, her book is about Jewish mysticism, but the first chapter basically notes that where these numbers come from is a certain concept of sacred time. And that is you start on day four because that's, you know, when God created the time, you know, indicators, you know, the celestial bodies that indicate time. That becomes the day, you know, the first day that matters in the calendar. And then it's just math after that. You know, 30, you have, you have a 360 day calendar. You have 12 months of 30 days. They obviously knew because there was precedent for knowing that the exact year wasn't that, but they didn't care. At least the people at Qumran, for instance, which her book is about a lot, they, they viewed that they viewed the cycles more important, the mathematical recurring cycles more important than the actual astronomy because you could use the cycles without regard to the true astronomy and you could wind up at the same place eventually anyway. And you don't have to, if you're using the 12 times 30, you don't have to fiddle with the Sabbath. You don't have to fiddle, you know, with the Passover. You don't have to fiddle with Jubilee cycles. They all work out mathematically in perfect precision. And so the people at Qumran, this is why they separated from the Pharisees and the temple because they objected to the human tampering of the 12 by 30 system to, to situate the date of the Passover. They said, you're substituting the calendar that was, that reveals the mind of God. It works in perfect precision and never has to be touched. According to our priestly courses, the festivals, the Sabbaths, the Passover, everything works perfectly. You're fiddling with that. And you're substituting a divine way of thinking about time for a human one. And they left. They actually left the Pharisees behind. They went out in the desert, you know, and did their own thing. That's how the Qumran community was formed. They were so offended that human measurement of time, human alteration of a cycle that, you know, they believe that, that God had given it and that is reflected in creation. That was an abomination to them. And so when you get numbers like seven and 40 and 12, you know, used in scripture, you know, biblical writers, again, this is, this is just the assumption of why these numbers matter. They are, they are dipping into the concept of God ordained generations, God ordained units of time, God ordained cycles of time, and, and they can be understood as occurring in real time. But, but their meaning is deeper because this is again reflecting God's providential hand in history, you know, that these, these abstract theological ideas. So it's not divination. You're not predicting anything by it. You're just, you're just looking at the way events play out. And you're, you're, you're assigning these numbers to events to communicate the idea that God is in control of events and time and cycles and so on and so forth. That's cool. It is cool. You know, and it's comprehensible. It's understandable. It takes something as boring as numbers and attaches theology to them. But I can see, I can see the transition though that has occurred because, you know, even as you're explaining this, and, you know, I mean, obviously any of us who study the Bible, you know, we're going to see these, these typological patterns and 40 and seven, and they are fascinating and they, you know, they sort of reinforce, you know, the, the, the meanings that we're, we're reading, but I can see a lot of people who get into the numerology stuff, the Christians, they start with the pre, this appreciation of what you just described. And it's like they start to see, well, then there, there must be more to it. It's not just these, this theological messaging of numbers. I'll be a little less, I'll be a little less charitable than you. I don't think they're starting with the Bible. I think they're starting with neoplatonic thought and platonic thought and don't even know it. Right. Right. And don't even know it. I think they're starting with post biblical fiddling with numbers that gets its start in the, in the, in the first few centuries of the early church era. That's when you get numbers like, you know, seven, seven, seven, eight, eight, eight, you know, being significant. You get a theology of arithmetic, not that's linked back into, you know, cycles of time that, that we can sort of link to astronomy. It's, it's a lunar calendar. Basically, it's just 12 times 30 instead of the solar. So that, that is linked into the heavens. All right. In the Genesis creation account, what's going on with some of this other stuff, a lot of it is, is secular mysticism. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's theologizing how mathematicians and philosophers played with numbers. Well, we're going to baptize that and make it a Christian thing now. And that is the, is the body of material that a lot of these people are tapping into. So I'll just be less charitable and say, I think that that's what they're thinking about. They're not thinking about what the people at Kumeran are doing, you know, and, and Genesis, you know, the Genesis chapter one. But again, maybe I'm just predisposed to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion here, you know, when it comes to this. Now I get to tell my, now I get to tell my wife when she's complaining, hey, Mike said, I'm more charitable than he is. I kept reading this, I kept thinking of that. Carl's, I think it was Carl Sagan movie. The first is a book, Contact, where they get some message and numbers, I think, or letters or something. And then they decipher it by putting it inside a sphere or something. I, it's like, people want to say, look, look, this Bible code proves the Bible is from extraterrestrial sources. And I think Michael Drozden, he wasn't even a believer. He said, I don't believe it has anything to do with salvation. I just think it has information for us to use. Like, well, that, I mean, obviously a lot of Christians who are Bible coders aren't, don't take that tack with it. But it's, it is this idea. We, we, we don't, I'm right. We don't need secret codes to know like, like the Trinity is not, the Bible is not part of the Trinity. You know, it's, it, it reveals what we need to know. And, you know, I know people want to say, I think at end of day, no seven, when it talks about the increase of knowledge, and that's where we're at. And so, you know, we have computers that can really help us increase our knowledge about the Bible. Like, yeah, well, start with the Bible software program first and like study the Bible. You don't need to come up with a code program to unlock secret quantum data or whatever you're trying, people are trying to do. Like you're, that misses the point of what the scriptures are for. Yeah. And even, even if the assumption was valid in it, it's not. Right. The, the data that are being used, you know, in connection with the assumption is, again, this is the nicest way I can put it. It's just terribly incomplete because you're making an arbitrary decision to use one form of one text family, one text, you know, tradition, and then running with it. You are, you are by choice. You are, you are by intentional decision excluding the oldest material we have. You're excluding what the scribes actually did. So don't talk to me about honoring the work of the scribes. You're rejecting what they did. Okay. They, they, they use again, this other, the spelling technique, you know, using the consonants for vowels. You're rejecting that material. You're making an arbitrary decision. If this is really from God, then shouldn't we be using the oldest form of the text? And, and even if they agreed to that, then they're trapped because we don't have the entire Torah in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We only have fragments. You know, we just know what they did because of what we have. So it, it just, it's, it's an idea that fails at every turn. And it makes people money. So, you know, I guess capitalism there. And it, and it gets people a following. Yeah. It gets people to, you know, perceive the promoter of these kinds of ideas as something special. It's not that secret knowledge, you know, it's a pursuit of secret knowledge. It is, it is almost an anti Christ belief system. Well, it does show it is it's bad theology. It has a low, it reflects a low view of providence. It reflects a low view of, of what God gave us in, in, in the Bible. And it subordinates the clear information of the text of scripture that we can just read to something that's hidden. It actually subordinates the product of inspiration for the masses. Again, which is, that's just terrible theology. It's a good wrap up to, I think, the way you put that. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm glad we had sort of this, was this a downer? I did find it, I get kind of upset reading these articles because of how you probably maybe heard it. Just how terrible. I know, terrible. I don't know what, I don't have a great word for it. Just how wrong head, disconcerting. Yeah, this is a huge thing people follow and it is wrong on every level and it fails on every level. And people still buy it, they buy it, they buy into it and they get their theology from it. I mean, Jesus is so awesome. I don't know why this is necessary. So I know this, this is a paranormal. This isn't really a, you know, anyway, I, there's nothing paranormal here. You know, there's nothing paranormal going on here, but there is something, you know, supernatural, you know, going on with, again, this thing we call the Bible because, again, we're, you know, at least on this show, we're theists. The, this, this producing this thing called the Bible should be a relatively simple task for God. You know, we, we think theism is coherent, you know, for all sorts of reasons that it's an idea that has been tested for millennia and it's still here and doing really well. It's coherent. And if we do have a God, God is perfectly capable of influencing people to write something down and using them for who they are, you know, providentially preparing their lives so that they are the right person for the right task at the right time. And, and, and what they produce is, is something that God, you know, approves of and, and finds, you know, sufficient and adequate and, and they therefore assigns authority to it. You know, these are very simple ideas, very philosophically, logically rational and defensible. We do not need a secret code. We just don't. It, it again, it subordinates what God has done in real time with real people to divination. You know, you might link in the show notes the naked Bible episodes about where the Old Testament and the New Testament came, came, came from. That might be helpful that people got new, newer to the material. Those are really two great episodes. Well, again, even though I think we're all admitting that it is disconcerting and a bit of a downer, I'm glad we had the discussion. I hope that it'll be useful to somebody and even more that it disabuses people of just a terrible idea. So, you know, thanks for participating.