Numerology in John's Gospel

The prologue [of John] consists of 496 syllables, appropriately since 496 is both a triangular number (It is a triangle of 31, i.e., the sum of all integers from 1 to 31.) and a perfect number (I.e., it is equal to the sum of its divisors. 496 is third in the series of perfect numbers, following 6 and 28.) and is also the numerical value of the Greek word monogenes (meaning "only son" and used in 1:14, 18). Odd though these considerations may seem to us, people in the New Testament period were fascinated by certain special sorts of numbers, including triangular and perfect numbers, and were used to the idea that words had numerical values, which were easily calculated because all the letters of the Greek alphabet were also used as numerals. But the importance of the number 496 for our immediate purpose is that it links the Prologue and the Epilogue together. For, while the Prologue has 496 syllables, the Epilogue (a considerably longer passage) has 496 words. That the correspondence should be between the number of syllables in the Prologue and the number of words in the Epilogue is quite appropriate, because the Prologue is a poetic composition, in which one might expect the number of syllables to be important, whereas the Epilogue is a narrative. Further evidence of numerical composition can be found int he fact that the two stages of the conclusion to the Gospel (20:30-31 and 21:24-25), framing the epilogue, each consists of 43 words. This provides an initial indication that they should be read together and in parallel.

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 364-365.

Imagination and Hermeneutics

Hope is an imaginative enterprise. Especially is this the case when hope’s great gift is its power to negate the negatives of present experience. Only the capacity of the human imagination to transcend the given enables us to escape the constraints of the present and to suppose that things might be otherwise. This kind of imaginative or visionary hope is intimately related to transcendence. It takes us beyond the mere extrapolation of the future from the present and the calculation of the future on the basis of past and present. It envisages the genuinely new. Of course, this raises the specter of mere fantasy and the questions of the ground of hope and the sources of hopeful imagining. The more we envisage the category of the eschatologically new—a future reality that breaks the bounds of the immanent capacities of nature and history—the more important it is to distinguish imagination from fantasy. Christian hopeful imagining is grounded in the promise of God and resourced by the images of the scriptural revelation. As Moltmann’s theology of hope has always insisted, it is inspired and directed by the event of eschatological promise: the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. It is characterized also by its relevance to the way Christian life now is lived in the direction of the coming of God’s kingdom and its impact on present reality. In these ways, eschatological imagination is Christologically and scripturally disciplined imagination, not free-floating speculation.


Consequently, human imagination does not function in Christian eschatology as an alternative to God’s revelation. Rather, the revelatory promise of God in Christ and scripture appeals to the human imagination; seizes, transforms, and expands the imagination; makes the imagination the locus and vehicle of its reception. It is the imagination transfigured by God’s promise that is able to envisage in hope the promised transfiguration of reality. It is this Christian imagination that can envision the coming kingdom sufficiently for it to empower Christian living without reducing the kingdom to a reality that can be all too easily perfected already.

It is vital to insist that, when statements of eschatological expectation are said to be imaginative, this does not mean that they are not truth bearing, as an overly rationalistic view of human understanding might suggest. Christian hope is imaginative but not imaginary. In reckoning with the imaginative character of eschatological images and stories, we recognize that they refer to a reality that, because it lies beyond present experience, cannot be literally described. Christian eschatology must speak of a new creation that is both transcendently new and yet in continuity with this creation, since it is the renewal of this world. Of something that were wholly discontinuous with present reality we could hardly speak at all, but of the transcendent future of this world, we can speak in images that point beyond the limits of their literal reference.



Richard Bauckham, “Conclusion: Emerging Issues in Eschatology in the Twenty-First Century,” Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, 681-682.