Ivan Nikolayevich Panin (12 December 1855 – 30 October 1942) was a Russian emigrant to the United States who achieved fame for claiming to discover numerical patterns in the text of the Hebrew and Greek Bible and for his publications about this.

At the age of 22 he emigrated to the United States and entered Harvard University, where he spent four years, learning Greek and Hebrew, and graduating in 1882 with a Master of Literary Criticism.

In 1899 Panin sent a letter to the New York Sun challenging his audience to disprove his thesis that the numerical structure of scripture showed its divine origin.

[1] Thereafter, until his death in 1942, he devoted over 50 years of his life to painstakingly exploring his ideas about the numerical structure of the Scriptures, generating over 43,000 hand-penned pages of analysis.

[3] Panin's claim that the statistical anomalies are proof of divine inspiration has been dismissed by skeptics, who attribute the phenomenon to random chance, and have produced examples of similar patterns occurring in non-Biblical texts.

[4] Another criticism of Panin's patterns is that both he and another author (R. McCormack) published similar numerical findings concerning the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, yet there were differences in the Greek texts used by the two men.