In recent days much ado happened on the TheologyWeb forum over an allegedly "invincible" apologetic called the "Bible Wheel". The creator of this Bible Wheel (BW for short) touted it as a be-all and end-all apologegtic for the divine origin of the Protestant canon (notice I did not say, the Bible per se) of 66 books. While of course we're not the sort here to pretend that there's a wall around the canon (contextual information, anyone?), apparently the creator is "evangelizing" his BW and promoting it in the sense that I once heard someone say that the US Constitution was incomplete without the ACLU. The following is derived from an evaluation I made of the BW on TheologyWeb, which it seemed good to copy here given that I'll inevitably get questions about it.

What this BW project amounts to is this:

1. The creator has aligned the books of the Bible on a wheel, in concentric circles, based on the premise that there is some great significance to there being 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and 66 (multiple of 22) Bible books in the Protestant canon. Of course I may as well find some great significance in there being 26 letters in the English alphabet and 13 (1/2 of 26) American colonies; and of course it ignores that some books (like 1 and 2 Samuel) were originally one book. Again, the claim is made for some divine intervention causing the Protestant canon -- as well as, apparently, even chapter divisions added in the medieval period.
2. The creator next strains (often mightily) to find some connections between the books aligned on each "spoke" of the wheel by his arrangement. For example, he ends up with Ecclesiastes, John and Jude on the same spoke of the BW. An example of such a strain in this case is that he notes how often "sun" appears in Ecclesiastes and then connects it to the use of "light" in John.

Techniques like this are no different than those I have seen countless times from Skeptics, ranging from MacDonald's Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark to Randel Helms' Gospel Fictions to Acharya S' pagan copycat theories. Connections like the one above are meaningless statistical nonsense because the BW has no controls in terms of how associations are made. "Sun" can be connected to innumerable concepts like round, light, heat, fire, burning, stars, etc. and so there is no problem of being able to find one in any other work one wishes to make a connection to -- especially with works as long as John and Ecclesiastes.

As a demonstration, I put together a "Presidential Wheel" based on the premise of there being 13 colonies and 26 letters. The number of Presidents isn't a multiple of 13 right now, but so what? My wheel can keep growing. In any event these people are on the first spoke:

• Washington
• Pierce
• Taft
• Reagan

look, there's a correspondence! Washington was our first president, at the "dawn" of our nation; and Reagan declared a "morning in America." Taft was our heaviest President; he was rotund and beamed like the sun. And, rays of sun PIERCE the darkness. Isn't it amazing how God has worked things out in our Presidency?

Another spoke on my wheel has these guys on it:

• William Henry Harrison
• Grover Cleveland
• John F. Kennedy

WHOA! Two of these guys died in office, and the other was President twice! It's God's way of showing that anyone who tries to destroy our nation's leaders can't do it.

It's pretty clear what the problem is here. The BW system is completely without discipline. One is free to make any connections one wants based on tenouous threads of common word usages and thematic associations (which the creator of the BW decides on, in terms of how they are fulfilled), both of which revolve on frequent themes of the sort that we would always find in an ancient collectivist society of the ANE (eg, "love" which is the community spirit of a collectivist society) and so would be found and repeated continually in works of the Bible's genre.

There's no need to debate or question the data itself (which does not mean it is all accurate; it may not be). However genuine it is, the critical flaw in the system is the way the BW creator assigns MEANING to the data. If BW's creator wants any credence, he should submit his material to intelligent design theorists (which even a Skeptic on TWeb agreed was a good idea), to people who know how to recognize the validity of statistics (as I do, from an information science and a literary perspective, though not to the depth of an ID specialist). I suspect though that they would never give BW an ounce of credibility as anything more than a homiletic tool.