How To Make Greek Numbers (!)

QUESTION:

Listening to your Great Courses lesson on Greatest Controversies: you say Alpha and Omega adds up to 801. How? Your lessons also refer to the meaning of 666, etc. Could you post something sometime about how the Greek alphabet was used numerically? I get Alpha as 1, but Omega as 800? Some lessons on Biblical numerology would be interesting.

RESPONSE

Ah, good question! And the answer is not one that is widely known. So it works like this.

In English, we have different alphabetic and numer...