I just noted the question posed in the OP, and I don't believe I replied to it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by yakfish View Post
I was born to a Christian family and have studied the bible my whole life. After 30 years I find myself questioning everything I have believed. At this point I am only searching for truth, and if that truth turns out to be that God doesn't exist then so be it. The question I have for you in this thread is how do you atheists answer the Biblical Prophesy argument? The Idea that there are Old Testament prophecies foretelling the virgin birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus? This is one aspect I am somewhat hung up on. If this can be disproven it will discredit the whole Bible in my mind. I have lots of other random questions in my mind as well but I just want to address this one right now. I know many of you have been where I am now so I appreciate your time.
Thanks
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After studying the Bible, I am convinced that prophecy is retrospective. In the OT, the prophecies of Tyre, Babylon and Daniel were retrofitted and the date of writing can be identified because they are roughly correct up to that date, and then they fail. Babylon was not destroyed, Tyre did not remain desolate and the predictions about the end of the kings in Daniel (The ptolemies and Seleucids) did not come about.
The same method was applied to Jesus. The prophecies are all passages taken out of OT text that doesn't relate to Jesus at all. The references to struggles with the Assyrians show the context of much of Isaiah.
Thus they are treated as clues to Jesus hidden in a context that was nothing to do with him. The passage in Psalm 22 that was considered to most be a prophecy of Jesus' crucifixion has the passage about his being no man and no better than a worm (22.6) . I believe it also says he is a sinner (King David was, of course, and the Psalms are about him, not Jesus) That does not get mentioned in the prophecy!
Consider the opening of the psalm These words are put into Jesus mouth on the cross, but only in mark and Matthew. Luke and John don't have them at all, yet the Church doesn't worry at all that the last words of Jesus on the cross don't agree. It simply combined them all together. If one tries hard enough, one can explain this, but then, once I found that 'Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani' was a quote from the OT, I wondered why Jesus in a reproachful despair that is quite unlike the obedient acceptance of Luke and divine triumph of John, would quote from an OT passage.
The answer is that Mark and Matthew had a common additional source of material. A source (rather like 'Q' that Matthew Luke used) but which contained material (e.g the feeding of 4,000 and the Syrio -phonecian woman) that we don't find in Luke. nor John.
We find the mocking of 22. 7 and 8 put into the mouths of the Priests at the cross. Also 22.16 with the reference to pierced hands and feet so much fitted the crucifixion that it surely started the writers off searching Psalms for anything that looked like it related to Jesus and the sacrifice they believed the crucifixion was. If they hadn't heard of the casting of lots for jesus' clothes - well, it fitted so well that it must have happened, and so that was added to the Jesus story. In fact John (19.24) actually explains that the gambling for Jesus' clothes was done to fulfill that prophecy. But then John goes overboard with prophecy, as we shall see.
Thus the prophecies were not just taken out of the OT to fit the Jesus story, but they were used to construct it.
John refers to a stabbing in the side connected with the business of leg -breaking, none of which is mentioned in the Synoptic version and Luke pretty much denies it as in John when the resurrected Jesus appears, he shows hands, feet and the wound in the side, but Luke doesn't mention the spear -wound at all.
John sees Zechariah 12. 10 as relating to this stab -wound even though it could just as well relate to the piercing of hands and feet with nails. and he has to go to Psalms (34. 19) again for the passage about bones not being broken or 'lost' which is hard to understand in the context of crucifixion.
Of course (since someone will surely point this out) John says this is eyewitness and the spear and leg -breaking could be true. But if so, then it is odd that Mark, Matthew and Luke know nothing of it and the fulfillment of a prophecy seemed to have escaped them. However, if so, it is still John looking through his OT and finding unrelated lines of text that seem to fit.
John stretches prophetic relevance even more in 12 38 and 40 where the general view of Greek Christians was that the Jews deserved what they got in the Jewish war because they had not believed that Jesus was Messiah and God incarnate and relates it to Isaiah 53 where John changes what has been heard to what has been reported, in order to fit the idea of eyewitness prophecy, and even more of a stretch in Isaiah 6, where Isaiah's vision of an angel becomes related to this nasty idea that God himself arranged it that the Jews would not believe, so as to merit their punishment.
The most striking stretch of John's prophetic detection -work is John 11 50, where Caiaphas of all people is given the gift of prophecy in order to predict the death of Jesus and the gathering of the children of God, which is a lot to read into a pragmatic decision to do away with a troublemaker.
This is a clear example of retrofitted prophecy going too far and betraying itself. And Matthew is just as bad. In two cases, we have events recorded that are quite notableand yet are known neither to histyory nor to the other gospel -writers: the massacre of innocents and the opening of the tombs at the crucifixion. The latter is also an example of using a prophecy to provide screenplay. At the coming of the Kingdom of God (in Christian thought upon the death -sacrifice of Jesus) the 'saints' should be resurrected and so Matthew writes in something that looks like this prophetic requirement being fulfilled.
The massacre of innocents is required by Mathew's nativity -story. Which is also needed to fulfil prophecy. That the messiah should be born in Bethlehem. So far as mark and John know, he wasn't, but in order to fulfill that needed prophecy, two stories were concocted. Luke's using the Roman tax census to jet Jesus from Nazareth into Bethlehem and Matthew's threat from Herod to get Jesus (by way of Egypt, also picking up a bit of prophecy on the way Hosea 11.1 Ex 4.22) into Nazareth. And the Jerimiad 31. 15 which relates to the obliteration of two Jewish tribal states by assyria, but matthew couldn't help being struck by how well it fitted the story of Herod's threat. True, it didn't involve the death of any children, so let him kill some, either in rage or an effort to eliminate anyone of the right age.
Do you now see the trick, Yakfish? Do you now see that the prophecies are proof of nothing but the concoction of a Christian reinvention of the historic Jesus to suit the views of the early Greek Christians?
If we see through the trick, we can sort out and put to be another hotly disputed 'prophecy': the death of Judas described in Matthew around the time of the crucifixion and in Acts 1 where Judas' death is described and a replacement is chosen by lot
'Let his habitation become desolate and let there be no-one to live in it' and 'His office let another take'.
That is also related to a prophecy taken from two Psalms 69. 25 and 109 8. The first relates not to Judas but to the roman soldiers who gave Jesus 'poison' and vinegar on the cross ((69.21) but of course the context doesn't bother prophecy -hunters and Luke cheerfully changes 'May their camp be desolation. let no -one dwell in their tents' to make it fit Judas better and the other is hardly recognizable
'let his prayer be counted as sin, may his days be few, may another seize his goods, may his children be fatherless'. Luke has indeed mangled text in order to extract a prophecy from it.
Matthew is no better. 27 9 has 'And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me.' We also note Judas throwing down the money in the temple, because Matthew also saw that even in prophetic text. Zechariah 11. 12 -1J
Zechariah relates to a shepherd of domed sheep, with whom he is out of patience. While this relates to the fate of Israel at the hands of Assyria, it fits nicely with the Christian view of Jesus, except for the bit about destroying three other shepherds and breaking the staff as a symbolic sundering of the union between the two Jewish states, Israel and Judah. The relevant passage is the shepherd asking for his wages 'thirty shekels of silver, which he casts into the treasury upon the instructions of God.
The similarity to the Judas story is clear, but how the 'Shepherd' who up to then looks like jesus becomes Judas throwing the blood money into the treasury is not clear, quite apart from contradicting Acts (Luke, surely) who says that Judas had already spent the silver on a field, so he couldn't have been throwing it into the treasury.
Matthew mentions Jeremiah but the passages in Jeremiah 32. 6 and 25, which relate to buying a field have little relevance to this story and 18.2relating to the potter spoiling the pot he was making, is little more than finding the odd keyword and taking that as prophecy, rather like Lucy Van Pelt finding the word 'Sister' in the Bible.
This irrelevancy and mangling plus the contradictions, tells us what we need to know about the death of Judas. That Luke has him hung but forgets to mention the spectacular bursting open, which Matthew records, but fails to mention the hanging cannot be explained with an ingenious combining of the two into a breaking hanging rope, but they are (like the nativity and indeed the resurrection accounts) made up stories to explain how Jesus was born born in Bethlehem, how he appeared in the flesh after his crucifixion and how Judas got his punishment.
It is not eyewitness or even reliable report but a concocted story and the snipping and mangling of irrelevant OT text does not give any prophetic support.
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