The story of Hiram Abiff is well documented and you can get the mainstream version of his history with a simple search on WIKI

He is understood to be the architect entrusted by King Solomon to create the Temple of Solomon from the blueprints handed down by God.

Remember, the Temple’s sole purpose was to provide a home for the Ark of the Covenant, which housed the tablets of the 10 Commandments, and rather obscurely, the “Name of God”. It’s been a common theme on The Curse of Oak Island, with many theorists claiming that the Ark is buried on the island and was hidden there by the Knights Templar.

How would we make the connection from the Ark, to the Templars?

It’s actually a question which provides a common and obvious answer, but the answer, when you look more closely at it, has some significant holes.

To get the conspiratorial juices flowing, have a think about this question –

Who would be most likely to want to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy city, and hide it 1000’s miles away on a remote island in Nova Scotia, the Freemasons or the Knights Templar?

Let’s through down a few bullet points for what we know, starting with the Freemasons –

• The central and key figure in Freemasonry is Hiram Abiff, the architect of the Temple of Solomon.
• Freemasons date back further in time than the KT
• Freemasons are active to this day, but were particularly active during the founding years of our nation (several of the founding fathers were Freemasons)

And for the Knights Templar –

• They weren’t formally acknowledged as a group until 1199
• Their mission was to protect pilgrims en route to the Holy Land
• They were forced out of existence by the King of France and the Pope
• We don’t know of any solid connection between the Knights Templar and the Ark of the Covenant, other than it being a religious relic of great value.

I’m going to revisit the above in due course, but for now, I’m making the controversial suggestion that these two groups are essentially one and the same. It’s irrelevant at this stage to this investigation, so let’s insert a bookmark and move on.

What is the significance of Nolan’s Cross pointing to the Holy City of Jerusalem?

The above has been discussed on several threads here and there but it has always remained as an unsubstantiated theory.

To understand more about this we need to consider why the idea hasn’t been more prominent and why it hasn’t been fully substantiated and embraced as the key to everything concerning Oak Island treasure. After all, if we can establish this as a mathematical fact, it becomes difficult to play down the significance of Nolan’s Cross and it places either the Freemasons or the Knights Templar on the island.

The issue with aligning Nolan’s Cross with the Temple of Solomon is that it would have had to happen before the original settlers came to the island, and probably long before. What was the level of knowledge and what tools were available to make this alignment to the precision of a few seconds?

To help visualize, this is what we’re looking at –

Now just imagine, you’re standing on a patch of land on Oak Island and you want to lay down a line by placing rock markers, and the line should point exactly to a point in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

You could perhaps eyeball it. But most of us would be standing there scratching our heads and asking Which Way Is Jerusalem? Which Way Is Mecca?

How accurate could their maps have been? What tools did they have beyond their crude maps and compasses/squares?

Actually, to understand the depth of the problem you need to know that even with today’s technology, the problem still exists.

Determining the direction in which to face another location on the globe is a problem with significant social and religious meaning, and one with a rich and interesting history in the Western world.
A fully satisfying geographic or geometric solution to this problem is hindered by our intuitive perception of the world as a flat surface, where a straight path is the shortest distance, between two points. But on a spherical object like the earth, when you start to travel longer distances you have to take into account the curved surface. But how do you do that mathematically?

Without getting too technical here, there are two approaches, the first lending itself more to the calculation of the distance between two points, and the second being more useful as a navigational tool, as in a compass.

Taking a flat map and drawing a straight line between two points on the map is creating a rhumb line. Taking a globe, standing at one point on the globe and determining which direction I need to start out in to land at my destination, requires calculations based on the ‘Great Circle’.

If you think that the results are probably similar, regardless of which method you use, well it depends on where in the world you’re standing and where you want to go.

Consider this – why would a mosque in New York City face toward the northeast when “everyone knows” that Mecca is south and east of New York? This question is an example of the direction-facing problem in geography: When standing at a particular point on the globe, in what direction is another point elsewhere on the globe?

As in the above example of the New York mosque oriented more or less toward Greenland, the answers can be surprising and as I’ve said, is based on the location of the two points you’re trying to connect. So from the perspective of mathematics and cartography, there isn’t just one scientific answer to the direction-facing problem, but two potentially valid mathematical answers. So which one did the builders of Nolan’s Cross use, and why?

To answer the first part of the questions it’s easier just to work backwards from the two known sets of data. One calculation will fit, the other will be a long way out.

Let’s drop in a diagram so you can see the results rather than have to worry about the complex math involved.

You’ll see on the above that we have two known constants, the Latitude and Longitude of both Nolan’s Cross location and that of the Temple Mount site in Jerusalem. Incidentally, you’ll see that modern methods (satellites for example) have allowed us to pinpoint these two locations to the degree, minute, and second. For whatever ‘society’ to do the initial alignment of Nolan’s Cross with the degree of accuracy found, they must have had these same Lat/Long coordinates, or some method of which we know nothing about.

So on the above, the underlying map is sourced from Google earth, and I’ve used an app which allows me to place a compass overlaying the map and set the point on the compass to the bearing calculated from the coordinates and using a complex formula termed the Haversine formula which looks like this:

a = sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ1 ⋅ cos φ2 ⋅ sin²(Δλ/2)
c = 2 ⋅ atan2( √a, √(1−a) )
d = R ⋅ c
where φ is latitude, λ is longitude, R is earth’s radius (mean radius = 6,371km);
note that angles need to be in radians to pass to trig functions!
JavaScript:
const R = 6371e3; // metres
const φ1 = lat1 * Math.PI/180; // φ, λ in radians
const φ2 = lat2 * Math.PI/180;
const Δφ = (lat2-lat1) * Math.PI/180;
const Δλ = (lon2-lon1) * Math.PI/180;
const a = Math.sin(Δφ/2) * Math.sin(Δφ/2) +
Math.cos(φ1) * Math.cos(φ2) *
Math.sin(Δλ/2) * Math.sin(Δλ/2);
const c = 2 * Math.atan2(Math.sqrt(a), Math.sqrt(1-a));
const d = R * c; // in metres

The exact calculated initial bearing from Nolan’s Cross to Temple Mount is 60 degrees and 3o seconds, and this corresponds to the established ‘Great Circle’ method of calculating how to get from one point to another.

Nolan’s Cross also points 60 degrees and 30 seconds, so we see that the actual line and the calculated line can be overlaid precisely.