Google-Library Challenge Winner

Apr 29, 2009

We have a winner!!!  Congrats to Cassie Jackson for correctly answering this weeks Google-Library question.  For the curious, you can see her answer below.  Cassie found the answer through Miller Library's e-book collection.  While Brodie's commentary on John is on Google Books, many of the pages are blocked, including the pages covering this area.  Not very practical for doing using it on a expository series, right?

Thanks to all who joined in the Challenge this semester, we look forward to a new round of questions this fall!

-Eric

Here is Cassie's complete answer:

  1. Found in John 21: 1-14
  2. 153
  3. The number is probably both. The author wouldn’t write it if it didn’t mean something, and because the number is so specific, it could be a literal counting
  4. Thomas Brodie interpretations are
    • Allegory, Cyril of Alexandria, for instance, sees 153 as comprising 100 (fullness of the Gentiles), plus 50 (remnant of Israel), plus 3 (the Trinity).
    • Gematria. Since in Hebrew and Greek each letter of the alphabet is associated with a specific number, a large number like 153 can represent the sum of several letters and thus can represent a word or phrase. There are, in fact, several words or combinations of words which give a total of 153
    • A mathematical symbol. The essence of this view, founded on Augustine and developed particularly in Hoskyns, si that 153 forms a perfect triangle. In other words, it is one of those numbers which are the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 3. There is a great connection to the number 17
    • He subscribes to the Mathematical symbol interpretation
Found this by looking up the author’s name in the library catalog and then went to the e-book to look up the table of contents and read the book