Argument from Fulfilled Prophecy
Form
As presented by Josh McDowell (Evidence That Demands a Verdict, 1972) and Lee Strobel:
- The Bible contains predictions made centuries before the events: the Messiah born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), suffering and pierced (Isaiah 53, Psalm 22), betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12); the fall of Tyre (Ezekiel 26); Cyrus named as liberator (Isaiah 45:1); the four kingdoms and the seventy weeks of Daniel; the return of the Jews to Israel.
- The chance that one man should fulfil even eight of the messianic prophecies by accident is one in 10^17 (Peter Stoner's calculation, 1958).
- Therefore the Bible is divinely inspired and Jesus is the Messiah.
The Islamic version cites the Qur'an's prediction of a Roman victory over Persia (30:2–4), and the Christian version is also run in reverse by Jews, who note that the prophecies of a restored Davidic kingdom and universal peace were not fulfilled by Jesus at all.
My Positions
- The messianic "prophecies" are not predictions, and the fulfilments were written by people who had read them. Isaiah 7:14's "young woman" (almah) is a sign given to King Ahaz about a child in his own lifetime; "virgin" is the Greek translation Matthew used. Isaiah 53's servant is Israel, named as such in the surrounding chapters. Micah's "Bethlehem Ephrathah" is a clan. Matthew builds his narrative to match the texts, and where no text exists he supplies one: Matthew 2:23 cites a prophecy "he shall be called a Nazarene" that appears nowhere in scripture, and Matthew 21 has Jesus ride two animals at once because its author misread the parallelism of Zechariah 9:9. A fulfilment composed by someone with the prophecy open in front of him is not evidence; it is exegesis (Circular Reasoning).
- The "predictions" are dated by their accuracy. Daniel describes events down to 167 BC in precise detail and gets the death of Antiochus IV, which came next, wrong. That is the signature of a book written in 165 BC during the Maccabean crisis, as critical scholarship has held since Porphyry in the third century. Isaiah 40–55, which names Cyrus, was written during the exile when Cyrus was the news. Prophecy after the event (vaticinium ex eventu) is a known genre and these are its examples.
- The method is the Texas Sharpshooter. The Old Testament has twenty-three thousand verses. A reader looking for matches to a known life will find them, and will not count the verses that fail to match, the matches that would equally fit anyone, or the predictions that did not come true. Nostradamus and the Sibylline oracles yield the same results by the same method, which is how psychics work (Cold reading).
- The failed prophecies are not counted. Tyre was not destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and was never made "a bare rock, never to be rebuilt"; it is a city of sixty thousand people today. Egypt was not left desolate for forty years (Ezekiel 29). Jesus said that "this generation" would not pass before the Son of Man came in glory (Mark 13:30), and it passed. If one counts the misses, the Bible's record as a predictor is what one would expect of any ancient text.
- Stoner's probability is numerology. It multiplies invented probabilities for events that are not independent and were selected after the fact, which is the same trick as the Fine-Tuning Argument's big numbers and the Origin of Life Argument's junkyard.
- The Qur'an's Roman verse is a case in point. Written without vowel marks, 30:2 can be read "the Romans have been defeated" or "have defeated", and the "few years" is as vague as the verse's defenders need it to be.
Sources
- McDowell, J., Evidence That Demands a Verdict (1972); Stoner, P., Science Speaks (1958), for the probability
- Collins, J. J., Daniel: A Commentary (Hermeneia, 1993)
- Ehrman, B., Jesus, Interrupted (2009), on Matthew's use of scripture
- Callahan, T., Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? (1997)
- Porphyry, Against the Christians (c. 270), as preserved in Jerome's commentary on Daniel