God's Lions: The Secret Chapel Read Online Free Page B

for most of his adult life. “Do you know of my work with Professor Lev Wasserman?”
    Leo had to think for a moment. “The famous mathematician in Jerusalem?”
    “Yes. He’s also one of the world’s leading experts in group theory, a field of mathematics that underlies quantum physics. A few years ago, he was reading about the Genius of Vilna, an eighteenth-century Jewish sage in Lithuania who predicted 9/11 to the day and spoke about the possibility of a code being embedded within the Torah. Lev became fascinated with the idea and learned that, throughout history, many Bible scholars had been trying to prove that there was a secret code in the Old Testament. He convinced a group of scientists at the university in Jerusalem that they could find it using modern code breaking methods, and to their surprise, they did. Their work has been replicated by the code breakers at the National Security Administration in the United States, using their most powerful computers, and Lev Wasserman’s paper on the subject has passed academic peer review and has been published in leading scientific journals.”
    “He’s Jewish, isn’t he? I mean, how did a Catholic priest become involved in all of this? Why not a rabbi?”
    “He was born Jewish but converted to Christianity several years ago, before his American wife died. Believe it or not, Lev’s also an archaeologist, and our paths have crossed many times over the years on various projects. He invited me to spend all of last summer with his team in Israel as their resident expert on biblical prophecy.”
    “Biblical prophecy? Is that what all of this is about? You think this code in the Bible has the power to predict the future?”
    “It’s complicated,” Morelli said. He poured some more wine into Leo’s glass. “Lev said the first evidence of the encoding was discovered in the Pentateuch , the original five books of the Old Testament, otherwise known as the Torah. The code only exists in Hebrew, because that was the original language of the Bible as it was first written. Evidently, sixty years ago, a rabbi from Eastern Europe noticed that, if he skipped fifty letters and then another fifty and then another fifty, the word Torah was spelled out at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. 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 beginning of the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.”
    “That’s interesting, Anthony, but even in biblical times it would have been relatively easy to embed a word in the text of any written work, and it doesn’t predict the future.”
    “That’s what most people thought until modern technology came along. Lev and his team found additional hidden messages by using computers to alter the sequencing and then scanning the pages both horizontally and vertically, like a crossword puzzle. That’s when they found words grouped together on the same page that mentioned historical events that occurred after the Bible was written. For instance, words like airplane and Wright brothers would appear together with sentences like they will fly and first flight at Kitty Hawk .”
    Leo stared across the table at Morelli and breathed in the fresh air washed clean by the recent rain. As a college professor, why hadn’t he heard about any of this before? The whole subject smacked of pop religion.
    Morelli took a piece of crusty bread and broke it in half. “Did you know Sir Isaac Newton believed there was a hidden code in the Bible that would reveal the future?”
    “You’re kidding! I never knew that about him.”
    “When Newton’s biographer went through his papers at Cambridge, he was amazed to find that the father of modern physics was obsessed with the subject. Newton even learned Hebrew and spent most of his life trying to find it. For centuries, many have suspected there was some kind of code in the Bible, but now, Leo, with the