Response to "Negative Codes"
Found and reported by Lori Eldridge and Dr. James Price
Response by the Webmaster
Last Updated: March 19, 2000
I would first like to make it clear that I appreciate the hard work of both Lori Eldridge, and Dr. James Price, and they each have fabulous websites with a lot to offer, and I am in full support of them. Lori has "Prophezine" going really well, and James has a great site with many proofs that the Bible is the truth. I disagree not with their research on the "Negative Codes," but with the conclusions they have drawn from them. The negative codes Dr. Price has found are encoded phrases that say negative things about God, such as "God is dead" and "Jehovah is a liar". The supposition is that if God did encode ELS's into the text, He would have avoided such obviously false ELS's from existing. Since such negative ELS's do exist, they then conclude that all the codes found in the Bible are by chance.
The problem is in the initial supposition. Most ELS's that are formed will not be part of valid code arrays and can be considered to be chance ELS's. Therefore, the existence of such negative ELS's by themselves do not prove that there are not other ELS's which have been deliberately encoded.
People can find all the negative
phrases they want encoded, and it will never do any harm to the Bible Codes
phenomenon. Somebody finds "Yeshua is God," encoded, and then
somebody else finds the phrase "Yeshua is not God" also encoded. What
does this prove? If there are contradicting encoded phrases at equal
significance, then that proves only that both of those phrases are
in there by chance. It does not come anywhere close to proving
that all the complex code matrixes found in the Tanach are by chance. Remember,
only negative phrases have been found, so that means that positive phrases
are not significant by themselves.
Many Christians mistakenly claim that finding a single phrase, like "Yeshua
is Messiah," encoded all by itself is significant*.
These claims are disproved by Lori and Dr. Price's work. However, if they would
like to prove that all of the codes are by chance using negative codes, they're
going to need to make and find entire complex negative code matrixes.
Lori has attempted this, but she has nothing so far (as of 8-19-99). All she has, is the following
"matrix":
The encoded phrase in green reads, "There is
no deliverance," and the other three phrases say "In Yeshua." All
three of those phrases are in the surface text, which means that the only encoded
word is the green phrase, which means that this "matrix" is no
different than her negative phrases. This is not anywhere close to a complex
negative code matrix, it is just a negative phrase, which is obviously just by
chance. Lori has stated herself that codes found in the surface text, at a skip
of +1 are not real codes, and she goes as far to say that the researchers are
intentionally deceiving people by including them in the code.
The truth about surface text words, is that they can add to a code, but
they don't make the code. You have to have many related words encoded,
and then related surface text words nearby can add to the code. But when
most of your code consists of surface text words, you don't have a code. This
reminds me of the types of codes people find in "Moby Dick." They
find a single encoded word like "Titanic," and they find it near a
surface text word like "ship," or "water". Moby Dick is full
of those words, given what the book is about. See http://thebiblecodes.com/faq/where_found.htm
for more on words in the surface text.
Other Views
Some people argue that the negative codes may
not be
by chance, and God may have put them in there. They may each be part of a larger
matrix. For example, a matrix about Jehovah's Witnesses may have it's central
term as, "Jesus is a god." Then there may be descriptive words that
describe how and why Jehovah's Witnesses are scripturally wrong. Another theory
is that those long negative phrases usually can be made positive by eliminating
a few letters. Many believe that those phrases were meant to be positive, but
those few extra letters were just found in the sequence by chance.
I personally believe that the negative codes are simply by chance, but the above
theories are certainly a possibility. There are two logical ways to disprove the
codes, and finding single negative phrases is not one of them. One is to find complex negative code
matrixes, and the other is to find complex code matrixes in other texts. The
bottom line is, negative phrases found encoded in the Bible, cannot and will
not prove or disprove anything.
*Finding phrases can be significant, but only if they are found at minimal intervals in relevant areas, and/or they are found with multiple related words encoded nearby.
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