What do you think?
Rate this book
The Winging Word
153 fish are recorded in the twenty-first chapter of John's gospel as being caught in a net on the third occasion Jesus appeared to his disciples after the resurrection.
What is the mathematical significance of 153 to the concept of resurrection?
This is a book about numerical literary technique as its use as a mathematical design principle in ancient literature, including the Bible.
What is the mathematical significance of 153 to the concept of resurrection?
This is a book about numerical literary technique as its use as a mathematical design principle in ancient literature, including the Bible.
59 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2008
14 people want to read
About the author
Anne Hamilton
56 books186 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
For twenty years, I was the coordinator of an annual camp for children based around The Chronicles of Narnia. That experience shaped a lot of my thinking about how readers enjoy fantasy.
Like CS Lewis, my fantasy story Many-Coloured Realm began with a picture in my mind's eye: a boy without arms floating in a field of stars and faced with an impossible choice.
My non-fiction series beginning with God's Poetry can be traced back to the observation that Lewis comes from the Welsh word for lion. The discovery of name covenants led to the discovery of threshold covenants, as well as many other long-forgotten aspects of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
I love exploring words, mathematics and names. All of these combine in my books, whether they are fiction or non-fiction, or whether they're for adults or children, whether they're academic in tone or primarily devotional. I hope my readers always come away from my books with a renewed delight for the world around us and a child-like wonder for its awesome aspects.
For twenty years, I was the coordinator of an annual camp for children based around The Chronicles of Narnia. That experience shaped a lot of my thinking about how readers enjoy fantasy.
Like CS Lewis, my fantasy story Many-Coloured Realm began with a picture in my mind's eye: a boy without arms floating in a field of stars and faced with an impossible choice.
My non-fiction series beginning with God's Poetry can be traced back to the observation that Lewis comes from the Welsh word for lion. The discovery of name covenants led to the discovery of threshold covenants, as well as many other long-forgotten aspects of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
I love exploring words, mathematics and names. All of these combine in my books, whether they are fiction or non-fiction, or whether they're for adults or children, whether they're academic in tone or primarily devotional. I hope my readers always come away from my books with a renewed delight for the world around us and a child-like wonder for its awesome aspects.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 1, 2013
From our CALEB reviewers:
Anne Hamilton is not always an easy author to read, but is always interesting if one accepts the challenge to open one’s mind to her persuasive arguments. This little book, like The Singing Silence: What the Design of the Universe Tells Us about God with its explanation of the golden ratio, explores seemingly simple things in such a way as to uncover their complexity.
Bookseller’s Choice – reviewer CALEB Prize
Anne Hamilton is not always an easy author to read, but is always interesting if one accepts the challenge to open one’s mind to her persuasive arguments. This little book, like The Singing Silence: What the Design of the Universe Tells Us about God with its explanation of the golden ratio, explores seemingly simple things in such a way as to uncover their complexity.
Bookseller’s Choice – reviewer CALEB Prize
April 7, 2013
Another beautifully presented little book from an author who combines her expertise as a mathematician with profound theological insights.
Read
November 17, 2015It was just after Easter in 2007 when my minister said to me on the way out of church, ‘That number in today’s gospel reading must be significant.’
‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think anything is there by accident. There are no coincidences in God’s kingdom.’
When I went home, I looked on the internet and came across a lot of interesting explanations for what is clearly a number so important to John that he thought it necessary to record it——there were 153 fish caught in the net on the day that the disciples saw Jesus for the third time after the Resurrection.
Now some of the interpretations were creative and some were esoteric and some were far too numerological for my tastes. None of them, however, had that certain ‘ring of truth’ about them that convinced me it was the answer.
It’s doubtful that, several years later, I have the whole of the answer either. But, in the interim, I have discovered that there is some incredibly cool mathematics wrapped up in that number 153. So awe-some, in fact, that I just had to share it in this book.
To begin to understand the significance of 153, it’s important to realise the writers of the New Testament didn’t think about mathematics in the way we do. Their understanding of the world——and of knowledge itself——was an integrated one.
Mathematics was frequently described in the twentieth century as the ‘handmaid of science’, but for over two millennia previously——from before the time of Plato until in the sixteenth century——mathematics and literature were like husband and wife.
It was inconceivable for a writer to plan a literary work——whether it was a poem or a letter——without the utmost attention to the mathematics. That would have been like planning a wedding without inviting the groom! Although the whole idea behind the combined concept was one of literary aesthetics, it had a very practical purpose as well.
A manuscript designed according to these well-established numerical literary techniques was effectively ‘sealed’ to ensure it would be accurately transmitted. It was an artform which has been discovered in many and diverse places: the pastoral letters of St. Patrick, the correspondence of medieval lords, inscriptions on Celtic memorial stones, poetry from classical Greek times to the early Renaissance.
The addition or deletion of a single syllable could be detected by anyone who knew the system well. And the gospel writers knew it so well and used it so frequently that it is also known commonly as ‘Biblical style.’ Maarten Menken, one of the New Testament scholars who has undertaken a numerical analysis of John’s gospel makes the point at one stage that he disagrees with those who believe that particular wordings are not ‘original’ but have been altered by later redactors.
He himself goes so far as to cautiously suggest at one point that a single syllable may have been lost, but that is all.
‘Biblical style’ can be quite simple or very complex. An easy example is: On the third day there were seven of us gathered in the middle of town for Bob’s seventieth birthday celebration. The third word is ‘third’ and the seventh word is ‘seven’, the centre of the sentence (in terms of syllable count) is in the middle of ‘mid-dle’ and the seventieth letter is half way through the word ‘seventieth’. A particularly adept practitioner of this artform could even encode his name as a signature within the sentence.
The gospel writers had a variant of this technique. For example, the story of the man who sat at the Pool of Siloam is dominated by syllable and word sets which are multiples of 38. Since the man had sat by the Pool for 38 years, the text ‘advertises’ the number by which that passage is sealed. Sometimes the text doesn’t advertise so obviously. Sometimes it has to be worked out. For instance, at the beginning of John’s gospel, the story of the Baptist is told in either 8 or 9 sets of 17 units. 9 lots of 17 happen to be 153. This means that 153 isn’t just at the end of John’s gospel in the story of the miraculous catch of fish, it’s likely also at the beginning. In fact, 153 forms a numerical frame for the gospel. Whatever it symbolises must be really important!
So what was that important to John? Why did he write his uniquely different gospel? Could his motivation give us any clue as to what the number means? Or is it just a bit of fishy humour on Jesus’ part?
So you think Jesus was above a practical joke?
153 had a special name two thousand years ago. It was called ‘the measure of the fish.’ It had been known as that since the time of Archimedes because it was part of a well-known approximation for the square root of three: 265/153. The reason it was called ‘the measure of the fish’ was because the square root of three was an aspect of two intersecting circles. In the overlap, some imaginative ancients saw a fish shape. (Considerably easier to recognise in my view than many of the constellations they saw!)
Yes, indeed, this was the ichthys——that earliest of Christian symbols——and it encodes the number 153. So, how much did the fact that Jesus directed his disciples to a catch of 153 fish at his third (note third!) post-Resurrection appearance influence the choice of symbol for the first followers of The Way? I suspect rather a lot. I suspect it was a much bigger influence than the Greek acronym for ‘Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour.’
Especially since 153 has some other special aspects. First, it is a triangular number. Triangular numbers are built up by increasing the number in the last row by one more each time. 153 is the 17th triangular number. Is 17 of any significance?
Maarten Menken’s colleague, Joost Smit Sibinga, has analysed sections of the gospel of Matthew and notes that 17 is a really important number in its construction, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. He cannot account for this and has only one tentative suggestion to make: that it has some bearing on the fact that 17 was considered an abomination by the followers of Pythagorean mysticism.
The Pythagoreans were, in fact, extraordinarily keen on triangular numbers——they considered the fourth triangular number, the tetract, the triangle of 10 dots shown last in the diagram above——to be nothing less than Manifest Deity, God incarnate, the Logos, the Meaning of meaning, the creator and sustainer of the cosmos. It was a symbol of Apollo and the Delphic Oracle. They were also enamoured of the number six which they regarded as a symbol of Trinity, the refolding of two threes being a connotation of cosmic light and dark, positive and negative universal forces.
Pythagorean mysticism is a major component of Gnosticism.
Old manuscripts preface the Gospel of John with this statement: ‘The apostle John, whom the Lord Jesus loved most, last of all wrote this gospel, at the request of the bishops of Asia, against Cerinthus and other heretics.’ Cerinthus was a famous Gnostic and perhaps, therefore, a Pythagorean. Certainly mathematics is far more important in the gospels than is generally recognised. John started his gospel with what some people understand as a hymn to the Logos. This hymn is constructed mathematically using the golden ratio and three triangular numbers.
Much as I would like to ignore the most famous of all triangular numbers, the 36th one——666——perhaps it’s worth noting that any attempt to decode it using numerology is, in fact, more Gnostic/Pythagorean than Christian. But, regardless of the numerology, the symbolism is quite apparent. The powers of 6 were considered by the Pythagoreans to be ‘circular numbers’ and understood by them to be about reincarnation.
And this is exactly what John wanted to ensure his readers understood was not what the Christian faith was about. The resurrection of the body (and not, as some people think, the immortality of the soul) is the cardinal belief that separated early Christianity from every other religion.
So, for the symbol of the Resurrection, the ichthys which encoded 153——the number of fish in the miraculous catch which occurred on the occasion of Jesus’ third appearance after he’d been raised from the dead——was a great idea. Moreover as a triangular number, it was a perfect antithesis to that other triangular number, 666. However it is not sufficient to simply think of 153 in terms of its opposite, because that tells us what God is not, rather than what God actually is.
Remember that ‘Biblical Style’ provides clues via numbers. That reference to the third appearance is vital to a wondrous mathematical function. (I’m not going to even begin to try to explain it because it involves six pages of mathematics, sent to me by Bristol mathematician John Andrews who read The Singing Silence: What the Design of the Universe Tells Us about God and said, ‘There’s another way of looking at this.’ I was so excited by his work because it not only covers a gap in my own and finishes with beehives, snowflakes and Clifton Cathedral (!) but it fitted perfectly with this book and showed how important the cube root of 1 is in nature’s design.
I’m sure you know one of the cube roots of 1, but there are two others you might miss unless you are adept with an Argand diagram and that’s what those six pages were about!) Now even though there is some very complex mathematics here, it boils down to some very simple things anyone can grasp. John the gospel writer might have chosen to record 153 as a symbol of the Resurrection because it was the number of fish in the net, but the question is: why did God choose to put 153 fish in the net in the first place?
Consider the digits of 153 under what James Harrison calls a ‘trinity function’, that is, the third power of each digit added together:
1 1 x 1 x 1 = 1
5 5 x 5 x 5 = 125
3 3 x 3 x 3 = 27
Total = 1 + 125 + 27 = 153
Now try the ‘trinity function’ with other numbers. It doesn’t often work: 153 is one of only a very few that can be ‘resurrected’ from its skeleton. (The others are 1, 370, 371 and 407 but 153 is the only one with fishy connotations built in!) Isn’t that just so stunning that it’s almost beyond awesome? Even the number of fish caught that day so long ago on the Sea of Galilee testify that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life. Wow! Sooooooo cool!
Even more fantastic is this: the things in nature that show up ‘in-your-face’ mathematically cubic functions are bulb plants——tulips and daffodils, irises and snowdrops——the very flowers traditionally used (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) as symbols of the Resurrection. I’m very fond of saying ‘no coincidences in God’s kingdom’, but I’ll say it again. No coincidences in God’s kingdom!
And now to finish up, here’s a blast from the past in ‘Biblical Style’ so tightly numerically ‘sealed’ that I really wonder if the composer knew what he was doing or whether this song was just inspired to be so ‘resurrection’ in word and number:
‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think anything is there by accident. There are no coincidences in God’s kingdom.’
When I went home, I looked on the internet and came across a lot of interesting explanations for what is clearly a number so important to John that he thought it necessary to record it——there were 153 fish caught in the net on the day that the disciples saw Jesus for the third time after the Resurrection.
Now some of the interpretations were creative and some were esoteric and some were far too numerological for my tastes. None of them, however, had that certain ‘ring of truth’ about them that convinced me it was the answer.
It’s doubtful that, several years later, I have the whole of the answer either. But, in the interim, I have discovered that there is some incredibly cool mathematics wrapped up in that number 153. So awe-some, in fact, that I just had to share it in this book.
To begin to understand the significance of 153, it’s important to realise the writers of the New Testament didn’t think about mathematics in the way we do. Their understanding of the world——and of knowledge itself——was an integrated one.
Mathematics was frequently described in the twentieth century as the ‘handmaid of science’, but for over two millennia previously——from before the time of Plato until in the sixteenth century——mathematics and literature were like husband and wife.
It was inconceivable for a writer to plan a literary work——whether it was a poem or a letter——without the utmost attention to the mathematics. That would have been like planning a wedding without inviting the groom! Although the whole idea behind the combined concept was one of literary aesthetics, it had a very practical purpose as well.
A manuscript designed according to these well-established numerical literary techniques was effectively ‘sealed’ to ensure it would be accurately transmitted. It was an artform which has been discovered in many and diverse places: the pastoral letters of St. Patrick, the correspondence of medieval lords, inscriptions on Celtic memorial stones, poetry from classical Greek times to the early Renaissance.
The addition or deletion of a single syllable could be detected by anyone who knew the system well. And the gospel writers knew it so well and used it so frequently that it is also known commonly as ‘Biblical style.’ Maarten Menken, one of the New Testament scholars who has undertaken a numerical analysis of John’s gospel makes the point at one stage that he disagrees with those who believe that particular wordings are not ‘original’ but have been altered by later redactors.
He himself goes so far as to cautiously suggest at one point that a single syllable may have been lost, but that is all.
‘Biblical style’ can be quite simple or very complex. An easy example is: On the third day there were seven of us gathered in the middle of town for Bob’s seventieth birthday celebration. The third word is ‘third’ and the seventh word is ‘seven’, the centre of the sentence (in terms of syllable count) is in the middle of ‘mid-dle’ and the seventieth letter is half way through the word ‘seventieth’. A particularly adept practitioner of this artform could even encode his name as a signature within the sentence.
The gospel writers had a variant of this technique. For example, the story of the man who sat at the Pool of Siloam is dominated by syllable and word sets which are multiples of 38. Since the man had sat by the Pool for 38 years, the text ‘advertises’ the number by which that passage is sealed. Sometimes the text doesn’t advertise so obviously. Sometimes it has to be worked out. For instance, at the beginning of John’s gospel, the story of the Baptist is told in either 8 or 9 sets of 17 units. 9 lots of 17 happen to be 153. This means that 153 isn’t just at the end of John’s gospel in the story of the miraculous catch of fish, it’s likely also at the beginning. In fact, 153 forms a numerical frame for the gospel. Whatever it symbolises must be really important!
So what was that important to John? Why did he write his uniquely different gospel? Could his motivation give us any clue as to what the number means? Or is it just a bit of fishy humour on Jesus’ part?
So you think Jesus was above a practical joke?
153 had a special name two thousand years ago. It was called ‘the measure of the fish.’ It had been known as that since the time of Archimedes because it was part of a well-known approximation for the square root of three: 265/153. The reason it was called ‘the measure of the fish’ was because the square root of three was an aspect of two intersecting circles. In the overlap, some imaginative ancients saw a fish shape. (Considerably easier to recognise in my view than many of the constellations they saw!)
Yes, indeed, this was the ichthys——that earliest of Christian symbols——and it encodes the number 153. So, how much did the fact that Jesus directed his disciples to a catch of 153 fish at his third (note third!) post-Resurrection appearance influence the choice of symbol for the first followers of The Way? I suspect rather a lot. I suspect it was a much bigger influence than the Greek acronym for ‘Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour.’
Especially since 153 has some other special aspects. First, it is a triangular number. Triangular numbers are built up by increasing the number in the last row by one more each time. 153 is the 17th triangular number. Is 17 of any significance?
Maarten Menken’s colleague, Joost Smit Sibinga, has analysed sections of the gospel of Matthew and notes that 17 is a really important number in its construction, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. He cannot account for this and has only one tentative suggestion to make: that it has some bearing on the fact that 17 was considered an abomination by the followers of Pythagorean mysticism.
The Pythagoreans were, in fact, extraordinarily keen on triangular numbers——they considered the fourth triangular number, the tetract, the triangle of 10 dots shown last in the diagram above——to be nothing less than Manifest Deity, God incarnate, the Logos, the Meaning of meaning, the creator and sustainer of the cosmos. It was a symbol of Apollo and the Delphic Oracle. They were also enamoured of the number six which they regarded as a symbol of Trinity, the refolding of two threes being a connotation of cosmic light and dark, positive and negative universal forces.
Pythagorean mysticism is a major component of Gnosticism.
Old manuscripts preface the Gospel of John with this statement: ‘The apostle John, whom the Lord Jesus loved most, last of all wrote this gospel, at the request of the bishops of Asia, against Cerinthus and other heretics.’ Cerinthus was a famous Gnostic and perhaps, therefore, a Pythagorean. Certainly mathematics is far more important in the gospels than is generally recognised. John started his gospel with what some people understand as a hymn to the Logos. This hymn is constructed mathematically using the golden ratio and three triangular numbers.
Much as I would like to ignore the most famous of all triangular numbers, the 36th one——666——perhaps it’s worth noting that any attempt to decode it using numerology is, in fact, more Gnostic/Pythagorean than Christian. But, regardless of the numerology, the symbolism is quite apparent. The powers of 6 were considered by the Pythagoreans to be ‘circular numbers’ and understood by them to be about reincarnation.
And this is exactly what John wanted to ensure his readers understood was not what the Christian faith was about. The resurrection of the body (and not, as some people think, the immortality of the soul) is the cardinal belief that separated early Christianity from every other religion.
So, for the symbol of the Resurrection, the ichthys which encoded 153——the number of fish in the miraculous catch which occurred on the occasion of Jesus’ third appearance after he’d been raised from the dead——was a great idea. Moreover as a triangular number, it was a perfect antithesis to that other triangular number, 666. However it is not sufficient to simply think of 153 in terms of its opposite, because that tells us what God is not, rather than what God actually is.
Remember that ‘Biblical Style’ provides clues via numbers. That reference to the third appearance is vital to a wondrous mathematical function. (I’m not going to even begin to try to explain it because it involves six pages of mathematics, sent to me by Bristol mathematician John Andrews who read The Singing Silence: What the Design of the Universe Tells Us about God and said, ‘There’s another way of looking at this.’ I was so excited by his work because it not only covers a gap in my own and finishes with beehives, snowflakes and Clifton Cathedral (!) but it fitted perfectly with this book and showed how important the cube root of 1 is in nature’s design.
I’m sure you know one of the cube roots of 1, but there are two others you might miss unless you are adept with an Argand diagram and that’s what those six pages were about!) Now even though there is some very complex mathematics here, it boils down to some very simple things anyone can grasp. John the gospel writer might have chosen to record 153 as a symbol of the Resurrection because it was the number of fish in the net, but the question is: why did God choose to put 153 fish in the net in the first place?
Consider the digits of 153 under what James Harrison calls a ‘trinity function’, that is, the third power of each digit added together:
1 1 x 1 x 1 = 1
5 5 x 5 x 5 = 125
3 3 x 3 x 3 = 27
Total = 1 + 125 + 27 = 153
Now try the ‘trinity function’ with other numbers. It doesn’t often work: 153 is one of only a very few that can be ‘resurrected’ from its skeleton. (The others are 1, 370, 371 and 407 but 153 is the only one with fishy connotations built in!) Isn’t that just so stunning that it’s almost beyond awesome? Even the number of fish caught that day so long ago on the Sea of Galilee testify that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life. Wow! Sooooooo cool!
Even more fantastic is this: the things in nature that show up ‘in-your-face’ mathematically cubic functions are bulb plants——tulips and daffodils, irises and snowdrops——the very flowers traditionally used (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) as symbols of the Resurrection. I’m very fond of saying ‘no coincidences in God’s kingdom’, but I’ll say it again. No coincidences in God’s kingdom!
And now to finish up, here’s a blast from the past in ‘Biblical Style’ so tightly numerically ‘sealed’ that I really wonder if the composer knew what he was doing or whether this song was just inspired to be so ‘resurrection’ in word and number:
Ezekiel cried, "Dem dry bones!"
Ezekiel cried, "Dem dry bones!"
Ezekiel cried, "Dem dry bones!"
"Oh, hear the word of the Lord."
The foot bone connected to the leg bone,
The leg bone connected to the knee bone,
The knee bone connected to the thigh bone,
The thigh bone connected to the back bone,
The back bone connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone connected to the head bone,
Oh, hear the word of the Lord!
Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk aroun'
Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun'
Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun'
Oh, hear the word of the Lord!
The head bone connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone connected to the back bone,
The back bone connected to the thigh bone,
The thigh bone connected to the knee bone,
The knee bone connected to the leg bone,
The leg bone connected to the foot bone:
OH, HEAR THE WORD OF THE LORD!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews