Three Gospel Number Puzzles (You've Probably Never Noticed)

I am not good at maths. Despite my wonderful teachers, I gave up the subject as quickly as I could; which, in England, meant at sixteen (or was it fifteen?..)

But if there is anything that would compel me to dust off my calculator, it is the Gospels. So I now go where theologians fear to tread – and write about numbers.

Not another ‘Bible Code’

When talking about numbers in the Bible, it is not difficult to sound like a nutcase.

In 1997, the journalist Michael Drosnin popularised an idea that secret messages have been hidden in the Bible, and that a variety of techniques – such as skipping every fifth word – allow us to crack the code. He called it ‘The Bible Code’.

By way of throat-clearing, the Gospel ‘number puzzles’ I am about to present have nothing to do with Dronsin’s methods.

They do have something to do, however, with the tendency of ancient cultures to assign numerical values to letters – and to use those values to make a point. In Hebrew, for example, the letter aleph denoted one, bet two, and so on. This numerology was called gematria (גמטריא) and was widely employed in literature.¹

As we turn to our first puzzle, then, we will keep this numerology in mind.

#1. Generations of Twelve (Matthew’s Genealogy)

Opening up the New Testament, it is not long until we stumble upon a numerical riddle. The Gospel of Matthew opens: ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham’ (1:1) and the lineage closes off:

‘So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations’ (1:17).

What is Matthew’s obsession with the number fourteen?

It is not something we find in Luke’s genealogy. In fact, Luke has a much longer and very different set of names. So it looks like fourteen is a distinct emphasis of Matthew. This is confirmed by the fact that Matthew does not actually have fourteen generations in his first or last set. So if we take him literally, he has made a blunder.

As it happens, there is a very good reason for Matthew’s emphasis on fourteen. Namely, that fourteen is the numerical value of the name ‘David’. In gematria, only the Hebrew consonants are counted. The equation is therefore, d (4) + v (6) + d (4) = 14.

The Messiah was believed to be the descendent of the ancient King, David.

In Matthew’s time, it was thought that the coming King would be the Son of David. It makes total sense, then, that Matthew would structure his genealogy around him.

There are two factors which support this judgement:

First, gematria is attested in another biblical genealogy. It is therefore not only Matthew who made these connections. Dale Allison and William Davies find gematria in in Genesis 46:16, where Gad, whose name totals seven (3+4 = גד) is listed seventh in the genealogy, and has seven sons.² This is surely not a coincidence.

Second, Matthew makes David very explicit. He opens by describing Jesus as ‘the Messiah, the Son of David’ (1:1) and then draws our attention to David twice at the end (1:17). Moreover, not only does he three sets of fourteen generations – the gematric value of David – he also lists David’s name as fourteenth in the list.

Woven into the structure of his genealogy, Matthew is crying out: David, David, David! The only figure marked out as ‘King’, Matthew points now to the arrival of the Davidic Messiah, Jesus.