The Star of Bethlehem

Biographie de Michael Hearns

Rather than give a generic description of my profile I will integrate it into my research activities in looking for evidence that a higher form of intelligence influenced the biblical prophets. I was born and reared in rural Ireland and our lives were ruled by religious fervour in which only the hierarchical clergy had a say. We were led to believe that there was a heaven above to ascend too for living in piety and doing what we were told but the burning fires of hell below awaited those who did not obey.
The notion of a heaven in the afterlife seemed to have originated with the biblical prophets and they were considered to have been divinely inspired when they made their predictions. They had alluded to Jacob's ladder reaching up to God and the building of the beguiling tower of Babel together with a fiery chariot ascending out of sight so the aspiration from the prophets was to soar up to the heavens.
But words alone were never going to be sufficient to convince the universal audience that there was a paradise awaiting us. Years went by and I studied telecommunications in college and worked in the national Telecom Company but eventually moved to work in one of the main national newspapers. During that time Ireland underwent major changes with wide scale economic and social transformations. Along the way I drifted from the archaic world of boring Sunday sermons but I retained an interest in biblical history and am fascinated with the archaeology of the Levant.
I was also interested in several of the building projects such as with the tabernacle in the Book of Exodus and other numerical data configurations in the Bible. A door opened for me when I learned that scholars have established that the first five books of the Old Testament had been covertly re-edited around 500 - 700 BCE and the various stories had been dramatized out of all proportions. So preoccupied were investigators with analysing the text to try and identify the re-editors that they seemed to have overlooked that large volumes of numbers had been also inserted including practically the whole Book of Numbers.
Many of those numbers were incredible with men living to be over nine hundred years of age or with exaggerated population sizes in two censuses. It seemed to me that those numbers had to have been of tremendous importance for the re-editors to insert them in scripture. I therefore conducted an analysis and found evidence that some of those nu...