You need to go through the thread and educate yourself on the discussion. The arguments about prophecy go beyond simply something in a single book is written earlier comes true later.
We are talking about multiple lines of evidence and not a single document by a single author. I already explained this earlier but you simply reverted to you straw-man model.
To engage you need to understand that you and @Puck_Mendelssohn are up against a formidable argument that you cannot take on without a much deeper understanding of the issues. If you start out trying to defeat the argument you will never get there.
I did not mean to imply that we are talking about just a single document from a single author. I understand quite well that you believe it is more complicated than that, but I can see how my comment implied otherwise.
The point still remains. Would my prophesy serve as part of what you see as a complicated web of similar correspondences between things that are written in various parts of scripture?
The Bible is a very complex book with a message that is repeated through out. God makes an agreement with manā¦Man breaks the agreementā¦God judges manā¦God forgives manā¦God promises to send a Messianic King to change peoples hearts. This message starts in the Torah. The Messianic King and his characteristics are described in detail throughout the Tanakh. Such detail includes when he will come, his characteristics, his mission and when and how he will die. This is not a single prophecy but several that are written over many years. Because of the Dead Sea scrolls and carbon dating we know some of them were written before Christ was born. The full book of Isaiah has been preserved.
When Jesus first taught in his home town as described in the Gospel of Luke he read the first 3 versus of Isaiah 61. His final statement after the reading was in your hearing this scripture has been fulfilled.
When Jesus was on the cross he said " my God my God why have you forsaken me". this turns out to be the fulfillment of Psalm 22 attributed to King David the blood line of Jesus. If you read Psalm 22 it is a remarkable prophecy. It talks about hands and feet being pierced hundreds of years before the invention of crucification.
I can start you down this path but there is no turning back When you and I first met I had no idea about any of this.
Yawn. Bill I can clearly read books written before I was born, then go and write my own story that then āconfirmsā what is written in the earlier book. Does that make the earlier book contain a prophecy, and did me writing a story that it came true, make it come true? Of course not. Thereās just zero reason to believe this actually occurred.
You seem to just have bad excuses and vague handwaves in the direction of āa complex bookā. Okay, so the Bible, and the Torah, and the Tanakh, and so on are all part of a complex history of religious ideas and teachings. So what? Does a later author writing that something occurred written about by earlier authors mean we should now believe a prophecy has been fulfilled? No, cāmon.
Yeah, I know. The Bible is a very big book, written by lots of people over thousands of years, with lots of references in the newer books to the oneās written earlier. You can spend a lifetime studying it and never exhaust what is there. I get it.
Thatās all peripheral to the issue we are now discussing. Did I just make a successful prophesy, if only a modest one? Why or why not?
Simple questions. Should requires only a simple answer.
In addition to the possibility that stories were invented to show Jesus fulfilling Old Testament prophecies, there is the deeper issue that there is debate over which verses in Tanakh are Messianic prophecies and how to interpret them. Jewish scholars disagree on both points. There has never been a single view of what the Messiah will look like. Further, many of the verses that Christians like to cite as āfulfilled propheciesā are not considered by Jewish scholars to be Messianic prophecies.
Iām linking one source, but entire books have been written refuting Christian claims. httpss://www.aish.com/jw/s/48892792.html
Your point about complexity says you did not comprehend what I wrote. My point had very little to do with complexity. It had to do with the depth of the description of the Messianic King in the Tanakh. This Tanakh was written by the guys who did not confirm the new testament.
The later authors were describing the life of a man that lived during their lifetime. What some of them observed was the fulfillment of the scriptures about the Messianic King in the line of King David which got their attention.
I actually think this controversy strengthens the case for Jesus fulfilling the prophecy and the accuracy of the Bible. When you read controversial messianic passages like Isiah 53 they become very awkward when you make them about the Jewish people versus the Messiah.
Really? I never found that to be the case and neither does 2500 years of Jewish scholarship.Isaiah 53: The Suffering Servant
Again, entire books have been written about this. Interpreting Messianic prophecy isnāt as clear as you seem to think.
Isaiah 53 was a Messianic prophecy according to Jewish scholars until around 1000 AD. Since we have Jewish scholarship with both opinions lets unpack this. Can we get common ground that the author was the prophet Isaiah?
If so how can the statement āWe like sheep have all gone astrayā not be about the Jewish people?
Nobody is saying it isnāt about the Jewish people. But there is disagreement over whether or not it is about Jesus. All of which is tangential to my point that Messianic prophecy and ideas about what the Messiah would look like is far more complex than you make it out to be. As NT Wright puts it āThere was no uniform and monolithic āmessianic expectationā shared by all first-century Jewsā and āAmong the Jewish authors and groups who did anticipate a Messiah, there were diverse opinions as to what type of figure he would be.ā.
@Faizal_Ali do agree that some so called prophecies will be far more convincing than others? For example, your foretelling of predictable behavior from a regular interlocutor seems entirely within the realm of ordinary experience. Mundane.
Other foretelling could conceivably be far more surprising. What sort of objective criteria would made a particular foretelling more or less surprising?
It is also transparently obvious that one could rationally reject the supernatural in your foretelling of @colewdās actions while simultaneously seeing something surprising about these foretellings.
Knowing your criteria from the question I just asked would be interesting to apply in this case, to see in what ways a mundane foretelling is or is not distinct from the case we are discussing here.
That is one view, it is not the only view. And you are still missing my point. In a post-Easter Jesus world it is easy to read back into the Tanakh and (as I once heard it put) āfind Jesus under every Old Testament rock.ā. This is especially true when there was a diversity of opinion about Messianic prophecies in a pre-Easter Jesus world.
I agree and appreciate your point. That world had very little access to information. I also agree that it is one view however it is pretty convincing to me given the awkwardness the Jewish people being the servant. I think the most convincing point in your citing is that the people of Israel are also referred as my servant in other chapters in Isaiah. On the other hand he is struggling getting around the awkwardness of the Jewish people being the servant.
How is the reconstruction of prophecy to fit Jesus, and the construction of fictitious details of Jesus to fit prophecy, not mundane?
The former we see in such things as the suffering servant. The latter we see in such things as the wholly fictitious birth narratives, wildly at variance with one another, containing the detail of virgin birth which comes not from the original prophecy but from the Septuagintās mistranslation of Isaiah.
This is, for prophecy, garden-variety stuff. The two techniques invariably used are the re-reading of the prophecy to fit things which have happened, and the fitting of the tale of the things which happened to the prophecy. In the virgin birth you have a clear and frank example of this happening. It is very hard to find anything credible in the claim that any part of the OT is actually foretelling the story of Jesus.
There is of course a good deal of emotion and a lot of moolah invested in beliefs and institutions which assert that the OT did foretell the story of Jesus. Consequently there are volumes of apologetic to try to paper this stuff over. But it really adds up to nothing.
Well, at a bare minimum, I would like to know that the thing that supposedly fulfilled the prophecy actually happened.
In that regard, I am already miles ahead of any of the alleged prophecies in the Bible.
Iām surprised that no one seems to raised another objection to my claim of a fulfilled prophecy: How do we know that @Puck_Mendelssohn was no himself aware of the prophecy, and played an active part in its apparent fulfillment? Is there not even some evidence that this was, in fact, the case?
Iām a bit surprised that I seem to be raising reasons for skepticism regarding my own prophetic powers that those who doubt me have not considered.
Iām pretty doubtful of your prophetic powers from the get go. There are so many obvious reasons to be skeptical, Iām not sure entirely the value in being comprehensive.
When you and I first met I had no idea about any of this.