catholicintl.com/catholicissues/New_Discoveries_on_the_Tilma.pdf
In the above article on p9 it says that the number 23 is symbolizes God’s judgment for Christians. I was wondering if that was an official teaching of the Church or if there’s any other references to back this claim up.
Also, what is this 23,000 that Paul is referring to? Is this in the old testament?
12^2 * 10^3 = 144,000 :shrug:
“those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand” (Num 25:9).
Paul gives us the additional information that twenty-three thousand of these died on a single day.
May God bless you!
1 Corinthians 10:8 (King James Version)
Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand.
I also don’t see 23 as a common number in the bible. I’m not sure how the constellations are derived in the PDF.
hrrm … well it is the 9th prime number … and according to
agapebiblestudy.com/documents/The%20Significance%20of%20Numbers%20in%20Scripture.htm
9 is the number of judgment.
But I don’t think our good and loyal Jews could give a flying leap about what a prime number was.
well i’m mentioning b/c it talks about thirteen as being the sixth prime number and seventeen is the seventh prime number and how this is also significant in their interpretation / symbolism.
Sometimes a number is just a number–No hidden meaning.
As for 23: the Church does not go in for numerology. Certain numbers are significant - 3, 4, 7, 12 - not in themselves, but because there is such-and-such a number of Persons, gospels, sacraments, Apostles, or whatever it may be; the numbers are used as a device to aid the memory. They have no significance apart from that.Some numbers in the Bible are significant: 7, 12, 40, 70, 1,000 are obvious examples. They aren’t symbolic in the late mediaeval fashion, in which 150 was manipulated to yield not only numbers of Psalms, & was also reduced to its factors - 1, 3, 5, 10, & so on - in order to produce connections between 15 virtues of the BVM, 10 Commandments, & so on. That use of 23 is close to this - numbers are treated as coded messages. Only in some books of the Bible are numbers used as coded messages: Revelation for example. And that’s because Revelation belongs to a type of writing which is full of symbols; the reason for *that *being, that it is “underground” literature, writing which is not meant to be understood by unfriendly eyes.