This is a good example of the kind of tangents the gnostics could go on in twisting scripture
Hippolytus says that the Gnostics also attached specific allegorical symbolism to the letters lambda and mu.29 And with a similar reference to the dodecad [12], they speak of the piece of money which, on losing, a woman, having lit a candle, searched for diligently. And they make a similar application of the loss sustained in the case of one sheep out of the ninety and nine; and adding these one into the other, they give a fabulous account of numbers. And in this way, they affirm, when the eleven is multiplied into nine, that it produces the number ninety and nine; and on this account that it is said that the word Amen embraces the number ninety-nine [AMHN = 99]. And in regard of another number they express themselves in this manner: that the letter Eta along with the remarkable letter [stigma, or episemon, the obsolete sixth letter] constitutes the Ogdoad, as it is situated in the eighth place from Alpha [if the “remarkable letter” stigma is counted]. Then, again, computing the number of these elements without the remarkable letter, and adding them together up to Eta, they exhibit the number thirty. For anyone beginning from the Alpha to the Eta will, after subtracting the remarkable letter, discover the number of the elements to be the number thirty. Since, therefore, the number thirty is unified from the three powers; when multiplied thrice into itself it produced ninety, for thrice thirty is ninety (and this triad when multiplied into itself produced nine). In this way the Ogdoad brought forth the number ninety-nine from the first Ogdoad, and Decad, and Dodecad. . . . Since, however, the twelfth Aeon, having left the eleven (Aeons above), and departing downwards, withdrew, they allege that even this is correlative with the letters. For the figure of the letters teaches us as much. For Λ is placed eleventh of the letters, and this Λ is the number thirty [Λ = 30]. And they say that this is placed according to an image of the dispensation above; since from Alpha, irrespective of the remarkable letter, the number of the letters themselves, added together up to Λ, according to the augmentation of the letters with the Λ itself, produces the number ninety-nine. But that the Λ, situated eleventh in the alphabet, came down to search after the number similar to itself, in order that it might fill up the twelfth number, and that when it was discovered it was filled up, is manifest from the shape itself of the letter. For Lambda, when it attained unto, as it were, the investigation of what is similar to itself, and when it found such and snatched it away, filled up the place of the twelfth, the letter M, which is composed of two Lambdas [in appearance, ΛΛ = M]. And for this reason it was that these adherents of Marcus, through their knowledge, avoid the place of the ninety-nine, that is, the Hysterema [υστερημα, deficiency], a type of the left hand, and follow after the one which, added to ninety-nine, they say was transferred to his own right hand.29 Hippolytus here refers to the custom of the ancients, probably derived from trade between people speaking different languages, of representing the numbers below 100 by various positions of the left hand and its fingers, while numbers of 100 and greater were shown by corresponding gestures of the right hand. Hebrew scripture placed evil-doers on the left hand, and therefore it also symbolized the evil principle of matter in Gnostic theory, an association here carried over to the “left hand” number, ninety-nine.
