Prophecies
The largest page on the source site, and the one this site concedes most completely – the 300+ prophecy lists are proof-texting, and Jewish counter-missionary critics dismantled them long ago. But failed prophecy is an argument against inspiration, and it is quietly an argument *for* a historical Jesus.
Responding to mythicism.web.app/prophecies
At roughly 58,000 characters this is the source site's biggest page: the standard apologetic list of 300-odd "messianic prophecies," each linked to a rebuttal on a Jewish counter-missionary site. The conclusion offered is that Jesus fulfilled no prophecies and the lists are nonsense.
Almost all of this is correct. It is also, in its entirety, an argument about scripture and theology – and it makes the historical case for Jesus stronger rather than weaker, for reasons the page never considers.
"Jesus didn't fulfill any prophecies — the list of 300+ is nonsense"
Mythicist claim: Jesus didn't fulfill any prophecies. The list of 300+ is complete nonsense. [Followed by the full list, each entry linked to a counter-missionary rebuttal.]
Take the concessions in order of how large they are.
The lists are proof-texting, and the method is indefensible. The 300+ compilations (Ankerberg-style tract lists, ultimately descended from nineteenth-century apologetics) are built by scanning the Hebrew Bible for any phrase that can be made to sound like a New Testament event, ignoring context, tense, referent and genre. The page's own examples on the Gospels page are the standard illustrations, and they are correct: Micah 5:2 is about the clan of Bethlehem Ephrathah and its ruler who will "shepherd with the sword" against Assyria; Hosea 11:1's "out of Egypt I called my son" is explicitly Israel, and the next verse has that son sacrificing to Baals; Psalm 22 is a lament, not a prediction, and the "pierced" of v. 16 rests on a disputed Hebrew reading (ka'aru/ka'ari) that the NRSVUE and other critical translations decline to render as piercing. Entries like "Genesis 5:24 — the bodily ascension illustrated" or "Song of Solomon 5:16 — the altogether lovely One" are not prophecy in any sense; they are word-association.
Critical scholarship agrees, and got there first. No academic Hebrew Bible scholar reads Isaiah 7:14 as a virgin-birth prediction – almah means young woman, the sign is given to Ahaz about the Syro-Ephraimite war of the 730s BCE, and its Christian reading depends on the Septuagint's parthenos. Isaiah 53's servant is most naturally corporate Israel (Isa 49:3 says so) or a prophetic figure; Daniel 9's weeks belong to the Antiochene crisis of the 160s BCE. These are the standard conclusions of critical commentaries, produced largely by scholars in Christian institutions, and they are the same conclusions the counter-missionary sites reach from a different direction.
So: the source site, the Jewish counter-missionary tradition and academic biblical scholarship all agree that the prophecy lists fail. This site makes it four. Nothing here defends prophecy – the home page says so in its first paragraph: nothing on this site depends on the Gospels being inspired, or even honest.
What failed prophecy actually implies
Mythicist claim (page description): Jesus didn't fulfill any prophecies.
Now the part the page leaves out. Ask why the Gospels are so full of strained scriptural fits – and notice that the strain runs in a consistent direction.
If a movement were inventing a messiah from scripture, the invention would fit. That is the whole point of inventing: you write the character to match the prophecies, and you stop when they match. Nothing forces you to include a birth in Nazareth, a village that appears nowhere in the Hebrew Bible and required Matthew to fabricate a nonexistent citation ("he shall be called a Nazorean," Matt 2:23 – a "prophecy" found in no book, as the source site correctly notes). Nothing forces you to have your messiah baptised by someone else for the forgiveness of sins. Nothing forces you to have him crucified, when Deuteronomy 21:23 makes the hanged man accursed – a fact Paul concedes and has to theologise around (Gal 3:13), and which Trypho and Celsus both press as the fatal objection. Nothing forces you to have him die without restoring Israel's kingdom, which is the one thing every strand of Jewish messianism actually expected.
What we observe instead is the opposite process, visible in the texts: fixed, awkward facts being retro-fitted to scripture after the event. Matthew hunting for a Bethlehem justification and producing a genealogy that clashes with Luke's; two evangelists constructing incompatible birth narratives to get a known Nazarene born in the right town; Mark draping the crucifixion in Psalm 22 vocabulary because the crucifixion had to be given meaning; Luke re-timing, John re-symbolising. Scholars call this vaticinium ex eventu and midrashic elaboration, and it is exactly what a community does when it has inherited an unalterable life story it did not choose and must reconcile with its scriptures. The prophecy failures the page catalogues are the friction marks of that process. A wholly invented figure leaves no friction marks, because the inventor simply writes a better fit.
The clearest instance is the one the page hands over without comment. Its list includes Zechariah 9:9 – the king on a donkey – and Psalm 22, and Isaiah 53. Those are the passages the tradition could use. It also had to deal with Nazareth, the baptism, the family's unbelief, and Golgotha, for which it had nothing usable and improvised badly. The lists are long because the improvising was extensive; the improvising was extensive because the facts came first.
None of which makes any prophecy true, and this site claims none. It means the page has demonstrated, at great length, that early Christians did bad exegesis on behalf of a man whose career they could not edit.
Full bibliography
- Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39 (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
- John J. Collins, Daniel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
- Bernd Janowski & Peter Stuhlmacher (eds.), The Suffering Servant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
- Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
- Dale C. Allison, The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
- Martin Hengel, Crucifixion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).
- Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, updated ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
Figures
- Fig. 1 · Ezekiel as Michelangelo imagined him, Sistine Chapel ceiling (1510). Wikimedia Commons