Gematria Explained

Gematria (or isopsephy) is a historical quirk of several ancient languages.  Prior to the rise of the modern Hindu-Arabic numerals, introduced to the West by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, the letters of a language would often serve as their de-facto numerals.  This can still be seen in the Roman Numerals, in use today (mostly for listing the year of a movie). Roman numerals were very limited in their aspect and created a burden on anyone attempting to employ them in arithmetic, hence the vast improvement of our modern numerals (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0).

However all during the classical age of the ancient world and beyond, gematria (where letters are numbers) was employed, especially all throughout the Greek speaking world and Roman Empire. So too did the Hebrews during this period employ their own Hebrew letters as their numbers. Many believe the Hebrews developed this prior to the Greeks, though the historical record appears to show otherwise.  Either way gematria was in full bloom during large parts of the writing of the Old Testament and all throughout the composing of the New Testament.

What this meant of course was that the sacred writing of the Bible could be retroactively mathematically analyzed. This was and is common practice amongst the Jewish communities then and now and is still referenced by Rabbis during services. A lesser known fact was that Greek gematria was also a popular historical practice amongst the Christian communities, as testified by writings of the Church elders and the archaeological record. Moreover, several passages of the New Testament were purposely encoded with an understanding that the reader had a passing knowledge of basic gematria. Indeed the New Testament actually begins with a reference to gematria. 

Modern gematria or biblical mathematics has gone far beyond what either the ancient Jewish and/or Christian authorities ever imagined. Largely this is due to the moderns access of information over the internet as well as the tremendous advances in the realms of science and particularly mathematics. Neither the ancient authorities who commentated on the matter, nor the ancient authors who wrote the Scriptures had any access to the advanced mathematics just a click away available to the average layman. 

For instance, some of the most prominent discoveries have been made in the decimal expansion of pi, out to well over a thousand places. Such data has only been known for the last few decades. Similarly, any discoveries made in the patterns of the primes are entirely dependent on the mathematics of the last century or so.