{"id":528,"date":"2021-02-23T09:42:34","date_gmt":"2021-02-23T14:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=528"},"modified":"2021-02-23T09:42:34","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T14:42:34","slug":"true-treasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/23\/true-treasure\/","title":{"rendered":"True Treasure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Throughout Lent, we\u2019re exploring the parables of Jesus \u2013 the two dozen or so stories that were his chief means of describing the reality of God\u2019s rule on earth. <\/strong>

The Beale Cipher is at the center of one of America\u2019s most famous treasure hunts.

It\u2019s estimated that one out of ten of the world\u2019s best cryptanalysts \u2013 experts at solving complex puzzles \u2013 have tried to crack its code.  So far, no one has succeeded.

The story begins early in the 1800s, when a man named Thomas J. Beale and 30 friends supposedly stumbled upon a mine filled with gold, silver, and jewels somewhere north of what is now New Mexico.  After carefully transporting thousands of pounds of precious metals to the East coast, Beale was entrusted with the task of hiding the treasure in a secure location.  He chose to place the valuables in iron pots within a stone-lined vault in Bedford County in his home state of Virginia. 

Beale then produced three pages of numbers, each of them representing a complicated code.  The first page provides the location of the underground vault.  The second page describes the treasure itself.  The third page presents a list of Beale\u2019s associates and their next of kin.

Decades after Beale had left the scene, the second page was deciphered.  The treasure it describes is staggering.  In 1821 it would have been worth about $13,000.  Today its estimated value exceeds $43 million. 

That’s why there has been, to put it mildly, considerable interest in cracking the other two codes \u2013 especially the one on the first page, which allegedly pinpoints the location of the vault.   

Would-be codebreakers are motivated by the fact that the second page is clearly a cipher based on the Declaration of Independence<\/em>.  The third number on the page is 24.  If you search for the 24th<\/sup> word in Thomas Jefferson\u2019s famous document, you find \u201canother.\u201d  Using the first letter of that word, you now have \u201cA\u201d \u2013 and so forth, all the way down the list of numbers, until you assemble the hidden message.

If you\u2019re thinking this might provide the basis for an entertaining Hollywood romp starring someone like Nicholas Cage, you now know the origin of National Treasure<\/em>. 

The challenge of the Beale Cipher is that no one has been able to figure out what documents are coded to pages one and three.  The Constitution?  That\u2019s been tried.  The Magna Carta<\/em>?  Nope.  Particular books of the Bible?  So far, even with the aid of supercomputers, highly committed number-crunchers haven\u2019t been able to crack Mr. Beale\u2019s codes.

In the meantime, virtually every acre of Bedford County, Virginia has been excavated by enthusiastic treasure hunters \u2013 often without the permission of landowners, with subsequent consequences in courts of law.

If you\u2019d like, you can join the Beale Cipher and Treasure Association, which was founded in the 1960s.  Or check out the website that is peddling Beale Cipher decryption software.  One wonders why its creators haven\u2019t solved the mystery themselves \u2013 but perhaps they\u2019re content with the treasure that keeps coming in via VISA transactions. 

Is the whole thing a hoax, as some believe?  Perhaps. 

But somebody sure went to a lot of trouble to create an intriguing puzzle \u2013 one that has kept mathematicians and amateur diggers busy for more than a century now. 

If you\u2019re acquainted with the 13th<\/sup> chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, you\u2019ve already guessed today\u2019s parable.  It\u2019s one of the shortest of Jesus\u2019 short stories:  \u201cThe kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.\u201d (13:44)

There wasn\u2019t anything resembling a trustworthy banking system until more than a thousand years after the time of the New Testament.  If you needed to secure your nest egg, what could you do?

You could hide it in the ground.  The owner of the treasure, unfortunately, might die before revealing its location.  And if someone stumbled upon it, the money reverted not to its finder, but to the new owner of the land. 

That\u2019s why, in Jesus\u2019 story, the digger who makes the discovery of a lifetime knows exactly what he has to do.  He has to buy that property<\/em>.  This would not have been as easy as contacting a local real estate agent and putting an offer on the table.  Ancestral lands were passed from generation to generation.  Families would be exceedingly reluctant to part with the very soil where parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had eked out their existence.   

So the one who has discovered the hidden riches will have to count the cost. 

Is he willing to surrender an astronomical sum \u2013 perhaps his entire net worth \u2013 in order to obtain the greatest treasure he\u2019s ever seen?

That’s what Jesus is asking us<\/em>: \u201cWhat\u2019s it worth to you to have a relationship with me?  What will you put on the table?  Will you turn your back on that habit you simply cannot give up?  Or the prestige you\u2019ve worked your whole life to achieve?  Or your need to be in control of the next 24 hours?  Or the dreams you have for your children, the ones you\u2019re hoping will validate your identity as a good parent?\u201d 

It\u2019s a question that ought to take our breath away. 

We have some options, of course. 

We can pretend that Jesus wasn\u2019t really being serious.  Or we can try to crack the Beale Cipher for ourselves.  All three pages are posted online.  Give it your best shot.  Or we can just go buy a Powerball ticket and hope for the best.

Then again, we can believe that Jesus was being entirely serious.  And we can accept his invitation:

We give up a life we cannot keep in order to gain a life we can never lose.     <\/em>
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Throughout Lent, we\u2019re exploring the parables of Jesus \u2013 the two dozen or so stories that were his chief means of describing the reality of God\u2019s rule on earth.  The Beale Cipher is at the center of one of America\u2019s most famous treasure hunts. It\u2019s estimated that one out of ten of the world\u2019s best cryptanalysts \u2013 experts at solving… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,177],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-commitment","tag-parables"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}