Ivan Panin and the Gospel of Mark
Perhaps the most impressive work of Ivan Panin concerned
the passage Mark 16:9-20 in the Greek New Testament. Modern scholars
are almost unanimous in judging this passage an interpolation, but Panin,
in his pamphet "The Last Twelve Verses of Mark" provides a dazzling array
of numerical patterns. In his view, these patterns appeared by design,
not by accident, and of course the designer must have been God.
Therefore, the passage is authentic.
As we shall see, this example provides an important lesson
about Panin's work.
Accident or Design?
As we have adequately demonstrated elsewhere,
any piece of text contains a large number of numerical "patterns" by chance.
All that is needed is the skill to present them in a way that makes them
appear extraordinary. However, some of the patterns presented by
Panin were indeed the result of deliberate design: Panin designed them!
Textual analysis or Cheating?
Everyone familiar with the history of the Greek New Testament
knows that there are very many editions. The primary reason for this
is that they follow the decisions of editors who have different degrees
of access to early manuscripts and different opinions on how discrepancies
between them should be resolved. The result of this subjectivity
is that, apart from intentional reprintings, all the editions differ
from one another. Sometimes the differences are small, and sometimes
they are large, but almost any difference is harmful to Panin's
results. That is because many of Panin's patterns rely on the exact
words, or even the exact letters, that appear in the text.
Panin used the edition of Westcott and Hort as the "basis"
for his work, but very often made use of the many alternative readings
that those authors suggested. He was prepared to pick and choose
almost arbitrarily from the variations, meaning that in fact he was really
working with a huge number of texts, few of them corresponding to any real
manuscript. After this deliberate tweaking of the text to make his
patterns work, he then calculated "probabilities" without taking that tweaking
into account. Panin even published his own Greek text, carefully
tweaked to provide the patterns that he most liked.
Panin believed that he was reconstructing the original
text, but his logic was circular. By deliberately designing the patterns
himself by tweaking the text, he eliminated his own argument that the patterns
proved an original design. The very most he could logically conclude
was that his attempt to produce patterns had been successful.
Incidentally, the edition of Westcott and Hort is today
regarded as poor scholarship.
Ken Smith's investigation
Ken Smith of Brisbane did an investigation which proves our
point forcefully. Panin's report on the last twelve verse of Mark
begins with the observation that there are 175 = 25x7 words in the Greek
text. If that much is wrong, it is obvious that many other things
will be wrong also. So Ken collected a large number of editions and
counted the words in that passage. Here are his findings.
Edition |
Words
|
Elzevir's edition of Textus Receptus (1624)
|
166
|
Wilson (1864)
|
165
|
Alford (1874)
|
166
|
Westcott and Hort (1881)
|
172
|
Weymouth (1886)
|
167
|
Nestle (1898)
|
168
|
Souter (1902) for Accepted Version
|
166
|
ditto, for Revised Version
|
168
|
Nestle (1904)
|
168
|
Souter (1910)
|
168
|
Huck (1936)
|
167
|
Souter (1947)
|
169
|
British and Foreign Bible Society (1958)
|
168
|
Tasker (1961)
|
165
|
Nestle/Aland (1975)
|
170
|
Huck/Greeven (1981)
|
168
|
More bibliographic details for these editions are available
on request.
We see that none of these editions has even the right
number of words for Panin's claims. What chance do they have for
Panin's claims concerning letter counts or numerical values? We conclude
that Panin himself designed the patterns he found.
Another example
A poorly known article of Panin actually describes the process of cooking
the data to fit the desired outcome. The following scans were once
available at
ftp://tanana.iarc.uaf.edu/panin
but that site appears dead:
page1 page2
page3 page4
page5 page6.
Back to the Ivan Panin page
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page
Creator: Brendan McKay,
bdm@cs.anu.edu.au.