Biography
Ivan Nikolayevitsh Panin was born in Russia on 12 December 1855. Having participated in plots against the Czar at an early age, he was exiled and emigrated first to Germany and then to the United States. Professing to be "self taught", in 1878 he entered Harvard University. After 4 years, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. During the first year of his university studies he took a few mathematics courses but didn't excel. After graduation in 1882 he became known for his lectures on Russian literature.
He also converted from Agnosticism and Nihilism to Christianity. His work embraces the concept of the omnipresence of God.
In 1890, Panin claimed to have discovered numerical patterns in the Hebrew text of the Psalms, and soon afterwards in the Greek text of the New Testament. In 1899 Panin sent a letter to the New York Sun challenging his audience to disprove his thesis that the numerical structure of scripture showed its divine origin.
Thereafter, until his death in 1942, he devoted over 50 years of his life to painstakingly exploring the numerical structure of the Scriptures, generating over 43,000 hand-penned pages of analysis. A sampling of his discoveries was published, and is still being published today.
Critics of his work doubt the value of some of his findings and dismiss more evident numerical patterns as random chance. Panin's claims, that the existence of such statistical anomalies is proof of divine inspiration, are still sharply debated by skeptics of his work today. Panin used the edition of Westcott and Hort of the New Testament, as the basis for his work, but made selective use of alternative readings that those authors suggested. He even published his own version of the Greek text, claiming to have reconstructed the lost original version by his techniques; critics see this as circular reasoning, and state that it only shows that he was capable of producing patterns himself. Another criticism is that the same kind of numeric patterns can be found in any text.
Proponents of his work include well-known authors such as Chuck Missler.
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