Let's say I'm going to write about someone I met in 1994. I'm writing in 2003. In my hypothetical biography I "quote" my subject as saying that the World Trade Center towers will each be hit by an airplane on September 11, 2001. Amazing! How did he know that? Let's further speculate that my biography is quoted by several other authors and eventually it becomes "common knowledge" that my subject prophesied the 9-11 attacks seven years before they happened. I'm sure you see the problem. Since I wrote my biography after the allegedly prophesied events it's obvious that I inserted words into my putative prophets mouth based on my own knowledge of events in my own past.
Or take another scenario. Maybe my subject actually did make a statement that was interpreted as predicting the 9-11 attacks. His prediction was along the lines of: "From the heat of the day the adversary will fly upon the king and humble him, incurring his wrath". Of course "the heat of the day" refers to the Middle Eastern, "desert" origin of the hijackers, the king is obviously the United States and the incurred wrath after being humbled can only refer to the Iraq and Afghan wars...right? Of course not! A statement composed of nonsense is twisted to fit what the listener wants to believe.
Quite Nostradamusesque.
Both scenarios roughly describe prophecy fulfillment in The Bible.
Prophecy in the Gospels is mostly referring to Old Testament prophecies about Jesus that supposedly came true. One prediction that Jesus made about the future was that the Temple would be destroyed. But us it really a prediction when the person who wrote the "prediction" wrote it after the Temple had been destroyed? Even the scattered references that Jesus makes in the Gospels to his own death and resurrection that are very specific as to how long he will be in the grave were written down a generation after the events supposedly happened. Funny how no one focusses on Jesus' prophecy that the world would end and God would initiate the Kingdom of Heaven before the current generation passed away. Which didn't happen. Twenty years later Paul evidently thought the same thing and incrementally adjusted his views on the subject throughout his career.
Scattered throughout the New Testament are references to things that were done "so that the prophecy might be fulfilled". As I've stated before, I believe that a person existed upon whom the Gospels is based, "Jesus", and that there is a core of truth to be found in the four Gospel accounts, but that by the time the Gospels were being written myths and legends had arisen around Jesus' life and message. Some of these came about because early Christians were scouring the Old Testament looking for hints that prefigured Jesus' life in the ancient texts. Sometimes they found something that seemed to match a fact of Jesus' life in greater or lesser detail, in other cases "facts" were invented in order to match a given prophecy. Some of them are based on mistranslations or misunderstandings of what the relevant passage was saying.
One prophecy, from Isaiah, is quoted as saying that the Lord will give a sign, a virgin will give birth and his name will be called Immanuel. There's quite a lot about this passage that debunks the idea that Isaiah was talking about the messiah being born of a virgin or that any of it referred to Jesus. Firstly, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is quoting from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was available during this time period. (Most Old Testament quotes in the New Testament use the Septuagint wording, rather than the Hebrew) The Greek word in Isaiah is parthenos, which means "virgin", but the original Hebrew word is almah, which could refer to a virgin, but simply means "young woman". The second significant issue with using this verse as a prophecy of Jesus' birth is that it does not indicate anywhere in the text that it is referring to the future messiah, let alone specifically to Jesus. The verse says only that the birth of a child will be a sign. A sign of what? Subsequent verses say that before this child is old enough to differentiate good from evil both kingdoms, Judah and Israel, will be "laid waste". It further indicates who the foreign powers that will do the wasting will be. There's a few possibilities for how this verse came to be associated with Jesus. One is that there was by the time Matthew was written stories circulating that Jesus' literal father was God. By the time Matthew was written the idea that Jesus was the Son of God had well established itself. Christians, maybe even "Matthew" himself, dug up this passage in Isaiah to show how this "virgin birth" was predestined. Or, the Isaiah verse was noticed first, and the whole virgin birth scenario was created in order to make it look as if a prophecy had been fulfilled. At the very least, the alleged event, Jesus' virgin birth, was not prophesied, and at worst was cobbled together based on a mistranslation from Hebrew to Greek. Not to mention that he never, in his lifetime, called "Immanuel".
How about the prophecy that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Micah 5:2 mentions that one will go forth from "Bethlehem Ephrathah" and will be a a "ruler in Israel". This one at least has indications that it might be referring to the future messiah. But was Jesus a "ruler in Israel"? Sure, he said (or his biographers said) that he would be, but 2000 years on we're still waiting, aren't we? It's not impossible, or even improbable, that "Matthew" knew about this passage in Micah and created the whole story of Bethlehem, throwing in the census to provide a pretext for Mary and Joseph to be there. (Kind of an implausible pretext - what possible reason would there be for people to return to a village their ancestors had lived in a thousand years previously?) Some commentators speculate that the verse is not referring to the messiah's literal birthplace, but to his descent from King David, who according to the Books of Samuel, was from Bethlehem. And speaking of descent from King David - we all noticed that the two genealogies are different, right?
Some of these prophesies are so generic that they could apply to anyone, here are 47 of the more popular ones. If you're a believer, these will convince you that everything about Jesus was predicted thousands of years before his birth, if you're an agnostic, or a disbeliever, you'll scratch your head wondering how this would convince anyone.
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