Held over from last week - apologies for any inconvenience caused

This is the tailpiece from last week's discussion of The Bible Code, a new book cracking codes allegedly hidden in the Bible. We had explained how you scarcely needed to venture further than the first verse of Genesis for an exact prediction of New Labour's majority. Now read on:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The first word, "In" has 2 letters. The first two words have a combined 2+3 = 5 letters.

The third word, "beginning", indicates that we must start counting again: "beginning" has 9 letters.

"God" is word number 4, so we go forth and multiply 4 by the number of letters in the fifth word: 4x7 = 28.

The next two words "the" and "heaven" have 3 and 6 letters respectively. The previous word, "created", indicates that we must find a new way of "creating" 3x6, which is clearly 2x9. hence 29.

Finally, the last three words "and the earth" have 3, 3 and 5 letters; 3x3x5 = 45.

So the total prediction of the first verse of the Bible leads to the numbers 2, 5, 9, 28, 29, 45 - which are precisely the winning numbers in last week's lottery.

We are sorry that for reasons of space we were unable to publish this information last Saturday and hope that it did not cause any inconvenience.

The winning numbers this week may, of course, be found in a similar fashion. We leave the details to you.