Some guy on YouTube who goes by the name theLogical101 (yeah), who, judging from his YouTube channel, is apparently a big fan of Ray Comfort, sent this video to me:
Ah, yes, the "Jesus fulfilled all these Old Testament messianic prophecies" argument. I have to admit, at first I thought this video was a Ray Comfort parody. As I continued watching, I realized that this guy's serious. I was going to comment on the video, but I think it speaks for itself, so I'll just move on to the topic of messianic prophecies...
A friend of mine wrote a note on Facebook about messianic prophecies in which he wrote that "the Old Testament makes hundreds of claims about the Messiah prophetically, and they are fulfilled in the New Testament." he then posted an enormous list of Old Testament prophecies allegedly fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth. I responded to my friend with the following (well, some of the following. I added more to this entry):
Before we can accept that Jesus fulfilled an Old Testament prophecy, we have to eliminate the possibility that:
1. the authors of the New Testament didn't write their narratives attempting to make them fit the prophecies.
2. certain events in the life of Jesus don't coincidentally match certain prophecies (assuming we've eliminated the possibility that the writers of the Bible just made stuff up, which is part of point #1). I mean, lots of people were raised in Nazareth. Some of them probably were born in Bethlehem too.
3. the prophecies actually describe the events / conditions Jesus allegedly fulfilled. I am certain we could find a Jewish scholar or two who'd disagree with how the New Testament writers interpreted the prophecies. And several Old Testament prophecies suffer from the same level of ambiguity as those of Nostradamus. Is it even possible to nail down a definite, incontrovertible interpretation of the prophecy in question? Isaiah 53 (the passage in question in the above video) is a good example of this. The content is ambiguous enough that it could fit several possible future scenarios, including the execution of a radical rabbi who might have had delusions of grandeur.
What it boils down to is that one must first have solid reason to believe the Bible is what Christians say it is before we can accept their interpretations of the Bible that tell us "the Old Testament makes hundreds of claims about the Messiah prophetically, and they are fulfilled in the New Testament." And that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
Dead-Logic.com
