I am not really sure where to post this, but I was curious if there was anything in the history of Christianity regarding numerology or "seeing numbers" and ascribing meaning to them.
Numerology? No. Number symbolism? Yes.
Numerology can be described as "number magic", seeing something inherently mystical about numbers and attempting to use numbers to decode secrets and mysteries. Numerology is to numbers what astrology is to stars and the other celestial bodies.
Number symbolism, however, is very different. Using numbers for symbolic purposes is a common cultural phenomenon. So, for example, the number 12 had symbolic meaning in the context of the New Testament. It's not an accident that Jesus chose twelve apostles. That significance was probably somewhat obvious to the disciples themselves as they chose to keep that number of apostles at 12 when Matthias replaced Judas Iscariot.
That symbolism is used extensively in St. John's Apocalypse. In one of John's visions he sees 144,000 sealed by God. That's 12x12x1000. It's almost certainly not intended to be a literal number of people sealed, but a symbolic one. Possibly two 12's to represent the Twelve Tribes/Patriarchs and also the Twelve Apostles, multipled by 1,000, a number that frequently is used to just mean "a lot" or "an uncountable number". We see this use of 1,000 in, for example, the Psalms where it says God owns the cattle on a thousand hills; that doesn't mean God only owns a thousand hills' worth of cattle, it means He owns it all. This is also why many Christians don't believe the 1,000 years of the Apocalypse should be taken literally, but that it instead means "a very long period of time", hence Amillennialism, i.e. "No [literal] Millennium".
Early Christians found the number 8 to be important symbolically. Circumcision was commanded in the Old Testament for male infants of 8 days of age; as circumcision was viewed as a shadow pointing toward the greater reality of new birth, regeneration, new life from God in Christ (see Colossians 2:11-14). Early Christians spoke of the day Jesus rose from the dead as the new eighth day of creation, new creation, new life. God made the earth in six days, on the seventh He rested, and then in Jesus there is new creation. Thus the number 8 gains symbolic meaning, it's why baptismal fonts were historically usually octogonal, and this applied even to how church buildings were often built with eight sides. It's not mystical or magical, it's symbolic. The point of having a baptismal font with an octogonal design is symbolic, it points to new life, regeneration, in Jesus, that we are a new creation in Him.
Number symbolism is common. But that's not numerology. Numerology would be trying to find magical or occult-like connections between numbers. It would be numerology to try and use numbers in the Bible to divine the future (using the Bible for divination is still divination and therefore wrong, even though it's the Bible).
In addition to this, there was also something known as Gematria. In both the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds there wasn't a distinction between letters and numerals. Numerical values were written using characters from the writing system. We are most commonly in the modern West familiar with Roman Numerals, letters of the Roman alphabet used to carry numerical information. However Roman Numerals are pretty light, only a handful of alphabetical characters are used (I, V, X, L, C, D, and M). However in Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic each character of the writing system was assigned a numerical value. This meant that words and names could have their own numerical values.
This process of looking at a word/name's numerical value is called Gematria. This allowed for interesting word/number play. I would have to look it up, but I've read that archeologist's have found graffiti where people have written things like "the one I love's number is xxx", giving a numerical value rather than the name as a kind of puzzle. Working backward one could figure out the name by seeing what name combinations could give that same numerical value.
This is probably what we see in John's Apocalypse when he speaks of how the name of the beast has a number, and that number is six hundred and sixty-six (some old manuscripts use a variant reading of six hundred and sixteen instead). The text implies that the reader "let the one who has understanding" could crack the code by figuring out what name is intended by the numerical value. It's a puzzle, or a cipher.
It isn't, as some in very modern times have thought, that the number 6 is bad, and thus three sixes are even more bad. It's actually not three sixes, when written using Greek Numerals it is three distinct characters that represent the values for 600, 60, and 6 respectively. For comparison, imagine if we assigned three letters in the English alphabet some numerical value:
Let
A = 1
B = 2
C = 3
D = 4
E = 5
F = 6
G = 7
H = 8
I = 9
J = 10
K = 20
L = 30
...
O = 60
...
S = 100
...
X = 600
So doing this FOX is how one would write the number 666 (six hundred and sixty-six or 600+60+6) in such a numeric system. However, English doesn't do that, Which is why it doesn't work using English words/names.
However, using that cipher we could try to figure out words/names which have a numeric value.
Adam = 1+4+1+40 = 46
Bob = 2+60+2 = 64
Giraffe = 7+10+90+1+6+6+5 = 125
Again, however, English doesn't work like this. But that is how Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic worked. Which is why Gematria was a useful tool in the ancient world, and probably why St. John employs it in the Apocalypse.
It's important to remember, here, that Gematria isn't numerology either. It's not mystical or magical or anything.
-CryptoLutheran
