I read the book decoding the bible and it scared me. How true is the coding of the bible? and why have so many of the codes been true.
Most definitely not.
Here's why.
First of all, when you go to the bookstore and bye a book named 'the Bible', you're buying a translation of an ancient text. By its very nature, a translation is not the original, thus any ancient codes would be lost by the simple fact that it is translated.
Next, the Bible is very old, and was written before the age of computers, so when you needed a new Bible, it had to be written by hand.
Mistakes were no doubt made, along with mistranslations. Again, more of any ancient code would be lost. Finally, there are today several flavors of the Bible floating around. Do a Yahoo! Search for, say John 3:16 and you'll find at least 4 'versions'.
Essentially the same text and meaning, but one might have a comma, or the other may use an archaic form of spelling as opposed to modern.
Thus, any code that depends on character placement would be lost the instant you insert an extraneous coma or a different spelling.
Last, the reason many of these 'codes' appear to be true, is because people are very open to interpretation. Further, the codes themselves have been found mostly by using powerful computers with complex search algorithms. Given a sufficiently manipulative search pattern, even a desktop computer can cull words and phrases out of a book that are in 'a code'.
Case in point, my friends and I wrote a program in ADA (a computer language) that could find 'codes' in random texts. We even manipulated my college report card to reveal 'you will fail', which was 'hidden'.
Of course we had to run the report card through a dozen algorithms, but as soon as we 'found' one that worked we called it a 'code'.