John Lyman - House of Acerbi

“I see you’ve been doing your homework, Your Holiness. Most people have no idea that the father of modern physics believed there was a code in the Bible, and that he was obsessed with finding it.” Lev looked up to see the pope’s startling blue eyes staring at him with a piercing gaze, a trait that was slightly unnerving to people when they first met him.

Lev cleared his throat and continued. “Newton’s biographer discovered his obsession with the code when he went through his papers at Cambridge. Newton even learned Hebrew and spent most of his life in a fruitless attempt trying to find it. Apparently, he focused specifically on the Torah … the first five books of the Old Testament. As it turns out, Newton was on to something, because unlike the other books of scripture, the first five books of the Bible were dictated directly by God to Moses in an exact letter-by-letter sequence with strict instructions never to change or alter the sequence of any word, letter, or space.”

The pope stroked his chin and gazed toward the open window. “I don’t remember exactly where it was written, but there is an ancient warning about the Torah. It warned that if a single letter was added or omitted from the Torah, the whole universe would be destroyed.”

“Yes,” Lev continued. “It was a warning to the scribes. Every copy of the Torah since the days of Moses has been copied by hand from its predecessor along with a warning to every new scribe to copy it exactly as it was given to Moses. That’s also the reason the code only exists in Hebrew, because that was the original language of the Bible as it was first written. Translating it into another language would have altered the code, thus rendering it useless.”

Lev could tell by the look on the pope’s face that he was still waiting to hear how he and his team had come to discover something that had remained hidden for so long to so many brilliant thinkers throughout history.

“Evidently, Your Holiness, sixty years ago a rabbi from Eastern Europe, who coincidentally just happened to be a mathematician and fan of Newton, noticed in Genesis that if he skipped fifty letters, then another fifty and then another fifty, the word Torah was spelled out in the beginning of the book. He then used that same skip sequence again and spelled out the word Torah in the Book of Exodus. To his amazement, the word Torah was also embedded at the beginnings of the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. After this surprising discovery, he wrote a paper claiming that Newton was right all along … that the Bible contained some kind of code, but he was never able to unravel the enormity of what he had discovered. That was as far as he got.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. For sixty years this information lay on a dusty shelf at the university until one of my research assistants brought it to my attention. After seeing what this rabbi had stumbled upon, we realized that both he and Newton lacked the one tool that could have helped them unravel the code … a computer. We quickly enlisted the help of several of our colleagues at the University of Jerusalem, and within a few months we had developed a computer program that allowed us to scan literally millions of skip sequences in the Torah to see if we could find any meaningful words or groups of words embedded within the text.”

Lev paused to take a sip of wine as Pope Michael’s eyes narrowed in anticipation.

“Exactly what did you and your team find?”

“We began to see words grouped together on the same page … words and phrases that mentioned historical events that occurred thousands of years after the Bible was written. Both World Wars, the Holocaust, men landing on the moon and the exact date they landed … the horrific events of 9/11, the exact date of the collision of the Shoemaker-Levi comet with Jupiter, the Gulf War, the dates and locations of the assassinations of President Kennedy, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The names of their assassins were spelled out next to theirs, plus much, much more. The things we were finding sent chills up our spines … we all saw the hand of God at work.”

“So, what you’re saying is that this discovery wouldn’t have been possible until now, at this exact point in history … at a time that coincided with the invention of the computer.”

“Exactly. That’s the reason why even a genius like Newton was unable to find any evidence of it. The number of combinations and permutations were just too vast, even for a man of his superior intellect.”

“How much information is there?”

“All of our past and all of our future. The name of every person who has lived before us, who is living now, and who is yet to be born. All of our greatest historical events, plagues, disasters, wars, and future wars … all are encoded in the Bible. There’s no limit to the amount of encoded information the Bible contains.”

“But how is that possible? Are you saying we’re looking at an intelligence that encoded our past, present, and future almost three-thousand years ago using a mathematical model we’re unable to grasp even today?”

“Yes, Your Holiness … and being a man of faith, I’m convinced that intelligence is God. He has given us proof with a modern twist that He exists. He’s sending us a message! Try to think of the Bible as a cryptogram sent to us by God Himself … a cryptogram with a series of time locks that could not be opened until certain events had come to pass. One of these events is the return of the Jews to their homeland after the great Diaspora that lasted almost two-thousand years. The other key is one you just mentioned … the invention of the modern computer. This one leap in technology has finally given scientists and cryptographers the ability to prove what Newton and others believed was there all along. I mean, just think of it. Three-thousand years ago, a code that would be considered complex even by today’s standards was embedded within the Bible, and whoever put it there knew our future. That last part brings up your point about predictions, Your Holiness.”

“How so, Professor?”

“Even though the future is encoded within the Old Testament, I believe the true purpose of the code is to authenticate the Bible as a book of divine and supernatural origin. God, in His infinite wisdom, knew that one day the world would progress to the intellectual point where we would begin to question His existence. How do you convince an enlightened and cynical society that has progressed to our current level of knowledge that God exists? In the modern world, some of our intellectual elite have begun to equate God with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

“I know.” The pope exhaled as he looked up at the ceiling. “I’ve read some of their enlightened theories. But I still believe faith plays a greater part in our belief in God than any tangible scientific proof. I’ve always thought that those prone to intellectual debate about the existence of God have an agenda, although I have to admit that I’m not sure just what that agenda is.”

“I agree, Your Holiness, but the questioning, litigious society we live in today requires proof, and I believe God has provided it by giving us little snippets of our future through a hidden code in the Old Testament. However, it’s still our position that the code itself is not a tool for predicting the future. Humanity was never meant to know or predict its own destiny, for only God can know that.”

“But you’ve uncovered future events before.”

“Yes, but unless one knows exactly what one is looking for, or accidently stumbles upon a hidden phrase predicting a future event while running a random skip sequence, as we have done in the past on a few occasions, the future remains invisible. Nothing will be revealed to us unless God wants it revealed. Through the code, God has provided proof to a modern world that He exists and that the Bible was divinely inspired. Who else could have known our future? God is still talking to us through the code. I like to use the analogy of God talking to Moses thousands of years ago through the medium of a burning bush, but today He’s communicating with modern man using a complex code that can only be unraveled by a computer. Let’s face it, our lives have become dominated by computer technology … technology that was predicted thousands of years ago by whoever inserted the code within the Bible.”