Up until now, I had understood that Gematria is the eons-old Jewish method of assigning a numerical value to a Jewish letter, and thereby assigning a numerical value to words spelled with Jewish letters.

In reading The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine by Margaret Starbird, I find out that these number codes were “hidden in the Greek texts of canonical Scripture” (page 9) and so presumably in Greek rather than Jewish letters. Wikipedia offers Gematria relationship tables for finding these values from Jewish letters, for numbers 1 to 9, 10 to 90, and 100 to 900, i.e. for 27 letters. Starbird on the other hand offers values for numbers 1 to 9 leaving out the number 6, numbers 10 to 80, and 100 to 800, i.e. for 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.

Which system is right?

Can both be right?

Aah! I find that the system Starbird uses of giving values to Greek letters is also called Isopsephy, according to Wikipedia. No, the Wikipedia system assigns transliteration values to 27 letters again. This is intriguing.