Its not about your disagreement with religion, excepting discussion of a lack of prohetic fulfillment might discourage religion.
Its not about promoting religion, except to the extent that discussing prophecy fulfillment might promote it.
It is not about social issues or how good or bad the bible is, except as prophecy is concerned. If it’s a prophecy about slavery, ok. If it turns into how bad the bible is for allowing slavery, it’s outside the O.P.
It is not strictly about religious prophecy. Nostradamus’ prophecies, for instance, is ok.
It is NOT about how dumb or smart prophecy believers or disbelievers are.
Now what the thread IS about:
Whether there have been any legitimately fulfilled prophecies. We will examine whether the original prophecy is vague or concise. We will examine any claims of fulfillment to see how well they match the original prophecy.
In the event of any discrepancies in various English versions of the bible, Blue Letter Bible and its references to the actual Hebrew in the Masoretic and to Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon is the standard. For the purposes of this thread, we will assume Blue Letter Bible is accurate in the Hebrew. The Foregoing also applies to the original Greek.
There will be no quibbling over details too small for anyone in history to keep a record of such details.
To start the thread off, I will proffer Isaiah 45. There, the prophet Isaiah sometime before 687 B.C. named a king of Persia as “Cyrus” and prophesied the liberation of Israel under Cyrus. Cyrus the Great (or Cyrus II) was not born until 600 B.C. or 576 B.C., under differing accounts. His grandfather Cyrus I took the throne of Anshan, but not all of Persia, in 650 B.C. Cyrus the Great did indeed liberate Israel.
The problem is, that part of Isaiah…Isaiah 40-55, is usually called “deutero-Isaiah”. It’s written differently than the rest of Isaiah, and common belief among biblical scholars, at least those who aren’t religious fundamentalists, is that it was written sometime in the 6th century BC, during the Babylonian exile, when Cyrus the Great was around and threatening Babylon. (And actually, it isn’t an accurate prediction. Isaiah 47 says that Babylon will be destroyed, but Cyrus didn’t destroy the city, and took it without much violence.)
So while it contains a prediction, it’s not really a remarkable one. It would be like some French guy in 1941 saying, “Someday the Americans will join us in the fight against the Nazis and help us liberate our country.” That would certainly be a prediction, but it wouldn’t be miraculous. It would be a hopeful extrapolation from existing facts (because in 1941, the US wasn’t in the war, but it was looking like it would be soon, and there were people hoping the US joining the war would stop Hitler.)
Specifically, Isaiah is usually divided into 3 parts. The first section, chapters 1-39 (“Original Isaiah”) is considered to be written sometime in the 8th or 7th centuries BC. The second section, chapters 40-55 (“Deutero-Isaiah”), was probably written near the end of the Babylonian exile, and the third section, Chapters 56-66 (“Trito-Isaiah”), was probably written by a third person after Persia took over Babylon and the Jews were allowed back to Jerusalem.
In the interest of fully covering any prophecies of Isaiah, can you show us a cite that would show the dates Isaiah was written? Showing that it is the majority opinion of bible scholars or other ancient language experts along with at least a brief explanation for their view would be best.
If Isaiah 45 was indeed written during the reign of Cyrus the great, indeed you are correct, in would not be valid prophecy. We all can predict a lot of things in the near future, no supernatural assistance necessary, like your frenchman in 1941.
As far as writing styles, I have noticed my own change over time and believe this possible and reasonable for other writers too, and therefore I seldom agree with a “writing style” alone argument.
The only thing that comes close in my mind are predictions made by science that turn out to be accurate.
The planet Neptune was discovered through mathematical prediction. Uranus was observed to have orbital irregularities that could be explained by a mass of such and such size in a particular place. Sure enough, Neptune was just about exactly where the numbers said it should be when they looked for it.
James Chadwick realized there had to be a subatomic particle to explain certain observations. This fit the conceptual idea of a neutron (which had been earlier proposed by Rutherford), and he designed a successful experiment to find it.
That type of prediction is amazingly powerful, and to me suggests the finest use of man’s intelligence. And I think this sort of discovery shows just how week the idea of “prophecy” is by contrast. People writing in vague generalities about future events or gazing into crystal balls never sent spacecraft out to photograph planets or developed atomic power.
I think you missed the point. Given a large number of prophecies, some of them will come true: especially when you interpret them after the fact.
So sifting through all the prophecies ever made to find ones that matched actual history does not tell you much other than the fact that someone guessed correctly or was so vague as to allow someone to fit the facts to the prediction.
There was a time when a fortune cookie company printed up cookies with a number that matched the lottery. What are the chances of that, 100,000 to one? But that doesn’t mean they predicted the future.
Nostradamus never predicted anything. I call him a postdicter. For me to believe someone can see into the future I have to be able to read his writings and say “At such and such a time this or that is going to happen”
With Nostradamus something happens and then all the believers pour over his writings and say “See, see, here he wrote about it, he can see the future.”
Doesn’t work that way. If someone had said the day before 9/11 that Nostradamus said it was going to happen I would be glad to jump on the bandwagon.
In researching this, I am coming across an alternative view that is supported in part by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence for the unity of Isaiah.
Professor Box wrote his book in 1911, and did not have the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
As an aside–if “they later changed the text to match events” is the answer, why would they change the text of Isaiah 45 and not also change the text of Isaiah 47 as well? Why not also change 47 to read that Babylon was “destroyed?”
We’re trying to look at specific examples, here folks, not broad generalizations of why prophecy is or isn’t valid. Please stick to the O.P. Thank You.
In Isaiah ch. 65, the author is talking about the recreation of Jerusalem, he mentions that “No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; for the child shall die one hundred years old.” At the time that this was written, assuming that the facts in ancient Israel were similar to those in other ancient civilizations, infant mortality would be close to fifty percent and average lifespan in the range of forty years. Today in Israel infant mortality is down to three per thousand and average lifespan is 81.6 years. While these may not match exactly what the prophecy in Isaiah says, the trends in both cases are clear and it’s reasonable to think that infant mortality will reach zero and average lifespan 100 in the near future. (Also while the prophecy specifically references Jerusalem, the ancient Jews always understood such references to Jerusalem as encompassing the whole nation.)
Can you apply this principle to the prophecy of Isaiah 45? I would agree if Isaiah made five hundred different prophecies about the (differing) name of a future King of Persia who would liberate Israel, but the fact is he only said it about one name, Cyrus.
His ratio for correct “guesses” to attempts is 1:1. Your reasoning that its just guesses is not persuasive to me at this point, (examining Isaiah 45) because your theory requires a large number to one, like, 100 guesses to 1 hit.