In that section, we see the claim that Jesus fulfilled 61 prophecies regarding the messiah, and that the odds of fulfilling just 8 of them are 1 in 10^17. Let's look at the 8 singled-out prophecies:
1) Born in Bethlehem
We have pretty good reason to this "fact" of Jesus' life is a fabrication. Matthew in particular seems to have fabricated a number of prophecy fulfillments, including the virgin birth, which fulfills a mistranslation.
2) Preceded by a Messenger
This is based on Isaiah 40:3, and supposedly fulfilled by John the Baptist. First, assuming all is kosher, preachers are pretty common, so the odds of being preceeded by one can't be that long. I suppose the wilderness part counts for something, but then there was a lot of wilderness in ther area. Furthermore, the passage isn't an unambiguous prophecy of Jesus. Just look at Isaiah 40:4. It says there will be some major re-working of the geography whenever whatever the passage prophecies comes true. This didn't happen when Jesus came. Or maybe it happened figuratively, but if you can get around prophecies by fulfilling them figuratively, it's hard to go wrong. Or, it could be about the second comming, but if unfulfilled prophecies get put off until then, its easy to be a fit.
3) He Was to Enter Jerusalem on a Donkey
The cited passage, Zechariah 9:9, says nothing about Jerusalem, just a donkey, and lots of people rode donkeys in that era. Once again, it is instructive to note nearby passages that went unfulfilled: Zechariah 9:8 says "Never again will an oppressor overrun my people, for now I am keeping watch." The only sense in which this happaened is that for 19 centuries after Jesus' death, the Jews didn't have a nation to overrun. Well, they kinda did when they rebelled agains the Romans, and they got pretty badly overrun then and continued to get screwed for centuries to come.
4) Betrayed.
This is based on a combination of Psalm 41:9, which is the lamments of a depressed Israelite, not a messiah prophecy. Verse 4, for example, mentions talks about, "when I will die, and my name perish." As bad as Jesus' story turned out, his name is still around. Or, take a more famous verse from the Psalms: "The Lord is my shepard, I shall not want." Jesus spent 40 days in the desert without food or water (according to the Gospels, anyway). He likely did a fair amount of wanting at that time, after all, Satan was able to tempt him with the idea of turning stones to bread.
5&6) Sold for 30 silver, money thrown into temple and used for potters field.
This is based on Zechariah 11, where the person getting the money is someone in the position to "revok[e] the covenant I had made with all the nations." Would really fit better if Jesus, rather than Judas, had been the one to get paid 30 silver.
7) Silent before his accusers
This refers to Jesus' trial, supposedly. Here's Matthew 26:
63But Jesus remained silent.Nuf said.
The high priest said to him, "I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ,[a] the Son of God."
64"Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied. "But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."
8) Crucified
This is another Psalm "prophecy," see #4. The particular Psalm is 22, which also includes a bit about being encircled by bulls, which never, to anyone's knowledge, happened to Jesus. To make matters worse, my Bible says that the meaning of the key word is uncertain, translating the sentence as "My hands and feet have shriveled" not "my hands and feet are pierced."
In response to the accusation that the prophecies about Jesus are like those of Nostradamus, McDowell says that Nostradamus' prophecies are vague. His section includes a longer list of 61 prophecies, begining with the fact that Jesus was born of a woman. Where the prophecies are not vague, they've been taken badly out of context and even twisted in ways that contradict the original text. What specific prophecies exist seem to be fabrications, based on the contraditions involved (differing explanations of how he came to be born in Bethlehem, contradicting geneologies to make him a descendent of David, etc.) The most significant similarity between the Jesus prophecies and those of Nostradamus is that they could only be correctly interpreted after the fact. Until Jesus came, the Jews were expecting an earthly ruler who would defeat their enemies in battle, and many passages of the Bible explicitly indicate this is what the Messiah would be. Jesus, rather than defeating the Romans, got killed by them. I think such an implausible post hoc reinterpretation of a prophecy would even many followers of the French astrologer.
(*With appologies to Lucian)
1 comment:
64"Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied. "But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."
I would add that this particular interpretation/translation is not the only one. The KJV and (New) American Standard, among many, use the phrase "You have said so" rather than "it is as you say"; those who support the latter believe that in the conversational style of the time, the literal translation (the former) would have been intended as a confirmation and they paraphrased it to give that impression to a modern audience.
I personally, given how Jesus responds to Simon/Peter to pretty much the same question, disagree with that assumption. If in every other instance Jesus would put the question of his (holy) identity back to the questioner as a matter of faith, why would he, in the face of the biggest skeptics he would face, assert something so directly?
Of course, this is one of those (many) cases where one's interpretation is driven by the translation one is presented with as "official", and the more one reads alternative translations, the more one realizes there is no such thing as a "literal" reading of the book. I see fundementalists reading the book to be reminded of what they've already been told, rather than to find their own meaning in it.
Post a Comment