Cryptograms

I recently picked up The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms before heading out for summer vacation.  The book contains over 600 mind-bending cryptograms based upon quotations from famous people.  All of the quips impart some kind of wisdom or good advice.  There are quotes from Benjamin Franklin, Mahatma Gandhi, the Tumult and the Quran, but none from the Bible.  How could a book full of such diverse wisdom not quote the source of all wisdom? Well, I don’t know the reason, but it did inspire me to put together my own collection of Bible verses in cryptogram form. 

These cryptograms are English sentences—in this case, Bible verses —that have had their letters rearranged to make their meanings non-obvious—they’re in code.  Like any good code, their meaning can be easily recovered with the right tools.  Part of the tool set you will need to recover the meaning of these cryptograms I will give you.  For example, I will give you a hint for each cryptogram, one mapping of letters between the cipher text alphabet and the plain text alphabet.  I will also tell you which version of the Bible the scripture is from.  Other tools you need to supply yourself, for example, your knowledge of the English language (grammar, verb tense, and pronoun usage) and your knowledge of the Scripture.  For example, the NIV spells the word “oh” as “O”.  This can be important information when trying to determine a single-letter word.

If you have never solved a cryptogram in a newspaper or a magazine, let me briefly explain how they work.  A cryptogram is a sentence (or, in some cases, several sentences)  where each letter in the cryptogram has been consistently substituted with another letter to encrypt it and obfuscate its meaning. Think of two parallel alphabets:  a plain text alphabet and a cipher text alphabet written beneath it.  You can visualize it like this:

So, everywhere an A occurs in the plain text, it is written as an M in cipher text; everywhere a B occurs in the plain text, it is written as an O in cipher text, etc.  This process is repeated for each letter until the plain text is completely encrypted.  For example:

Your job is to reverse the process and recover the encrypted text by mapping the encrypted letters in the cipher text alphabet back to the plain text alphabet.

I will periodically publish new cryptograms to this page. I hope that concentrating on these verses as you decrypt them gives you wisdom, greater insight to the Scriptures, and draws you closer to God.  Enjoy….

For more information about cryptograms, see the American Cryptogram Association.