Only utter fail when a date is given. If this happens tomorrow, I will be utterly astounded. Until that day, I call it extremely weak.
Perhaps not. I still have plenty of unanswered questions, though.
While I am trying to be disinterested, having neither a presumption that it can or can’t happen, I am having to do some devil’s advocate work here due to under-representation. But I’m not trying to advocate that viewpoint necessarily in the O.P.
the O.P. is of a disinterested observer looking to both sides.
Sorry if I mischaracterized your argument. Didn’t mean to.
But are you arguing that Cyrus did not read his name in Isaiah? I mean either he did or he didn’t. If he didn’t actually do this and Josephus says he did, isn’t that the same as saying he made it up? Would you prefer softening it to “overactive imagination?”
I’d like to see support for the argument that Josephus recorded something he did not have factual information on.
First, I will add my voice to Cptain Amazing in saying that the consensus among Biblical scholars is that the internal evidence of Isaiah 40-55 shows it was written during the Exile, by a prophet in “the school of Isaiah,” i.e., one who followed in his footsteps, perhaps himself also named Isaiah. His writings were included in the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, leading those who tend to see the Bible as a unit given by God, and not as a collection of inspired writings assembled over centuries, to believe it to be the work of Isaiah ben Amoz, who wrote (most of) the first 39 chapters. Some of the latter get nasty about their comments, claiming that rejecting Isaiah ben Amoz’s authorship of the whole 66-chapter book is rejecting God, as if He only works through people who tack their name into the text or who have books named after them.
Second is the issue of what the term prophecy means. Contrary to everyday use, it does not mean “psychic prediction about the future, alleged to come from a divine revelation.” It means that the prophet speaks, or claims to speak, with God’s voice, to be the appointed spokesperson He uses to get a message across.
Distinguish between the following two passages:
In the first of these, I am merely quoting a Bible passage in which God is claimed to speak. But in the second, I am claiming to myself be speaking with God’s authority, much as an attorney or an appointed spokesman may deliver the words of the principal for whom they are acting as agents.
How these two meanings fit together is that very often the prophets would issue monitory prophecies, of the form “Unless you repent and return to the Lord, this evil will befall you.” And often these are practical, non-theological warnings. If a coterie of wealthy men surrounding the king are supported in ease and luxury by the labor of a mass of poor peons with little hope to better their own lot, this may survive as long as there is not sufficient unrest to produce a successful rebellion and those who flee their peonage are a relatively small percentage of the mass of peons. But if tht kingdom is attacked, how likely is it that the peons will put their life on the line to defend the small coterie, who themselves are not in any shape to fight. Or, every child sacrificed to Moloch does not grow up to be a man contributing his labor and/or warrior defending his land, or a fertile mother bringing forth more children so anoither generation may continue the realm. And so on.
Too, people tend to interpret prophecies as predictive. A case in point is Isaiah 7:10-17. No less an authority than Matthew’s Gospel holds this up as a prediction of Jesus, but the actual content speaks of a son being born at that time and place, to a girl there in the court, who will not reach the age where he knows right from wrong before the two kings threatening Ahaz are already dead. That’s a symbolic prophecy – it’s not predicting a virgin birth, it’s predicting that a girl will marry and have a baby, and the name Isaiah says she’ll give the child (itself a self-fulfilling prophecy!) is the message Ahaz needs to hear: God is with us, you need not fear those kings, because they’ll be dead before a toddler due to be born knows right from wrong.
Any document? No. Modern documents that are verified by modern authorities I pretty much take at face value. Ancient prophesies? Yeah, I’m a little more credulous. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that.
Josephus wrote at about the same time as Luke is believed to. His report on how a Persian king 600 years before may or may not have reacted is about as reliable as asking a random man on the street what Henry VI and VII of England did during their reigns.
I am refering to whether the document is what it says it is, in the manner of a driver’s license being a driver’s license.
I am talking more about the identity of the author and the date he wrote, not the nature of the content other than identifying itself.
An old document that says it was written by A in the year X gets a presumption, until the content or reliable evidence proves otherwise, that indeed it is a document written by A in the year X. I’m talking the self-identifying characteristics here, and not the nature of any other content.
I think this is very well put. The assumption “predictive prophecy never happens” is as a priori as is “God prophesied [historical event X] through prophet Y before the fact.” But I believe we need to approach any such claim with a fairly high degree of skepticism. If I say “Mount Rainier will erupt on a Friday late in 2012,” that is testable – as of December 29, 2012, if it hasn’t gone up, I’m flat out wrong. But if I say “A volcano on the Pacific Rim will erupt, causing red skies and cooler weather,” well, sooner or later one of the hundreds of volcanoes lining the Pacific Rim is going to go up, and will probably have those results omewhere. The point is that Isaiah ben Amoz wrote in Jerusalem, at the court of Kings Ahaz and Hezekiah (and presumably at the end of Uzziah’s reign and during Jotham’s, though Jotham is not mentioned by name AFAIK), while chapters 40-55 presume a people in exile from their homeland, and elements of 56-66 a people who have returned from exile. The Hezekiah-era Isaiah would have had to immure himself in the “by the waters of Babylon” feelings of the exiles in his own future and write prophetically as if one of them – a not impossible task, as Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory” shows with regard to the nuclear stalemate of the Cold War years. But as between someone writing in a similar style to Isaiah during the Exile and Isaiah himself predictively assuming that sense of desolation and abandonment, Occam’s Razor suggests the existence of Deutero-Isaiah to be the lesser hypothesis.
If I had to encapsulate the principle here, it would be “Don’t rule out the highly improbable – but presume the more probable until really strong evidence for the highly improbable alternative surfaces.”
Okay, but the oldest (fragmentary) copy we have of Isaiah is 500 years after the author wrote – 500 years when things might have been added, deleted, revised – and we’d never know.
Take for example the Bible itself – the 66-book Bible available in any bookstore or hotel room. How old is that book? Not the physical book itself, or that particular translation, but its contents as a collection of works including those 66 books and excluding anything else? You’d be very surprised – the oldest 66-book Bible dates from 1647. Everything before that was either (a) a Jewish Bible (Tanakh) without the New Testament, (b) a Bible with the deuterocanonical books included in the Old Testament, or (c) a Bible with the deuterocanonical books included as “The Apocrypha” either between the two Testaments (KJV) or following the New Testament (Luther’s Bible).
You are presuming that the 66-chapter Isaiah we have today is, like the 66-book Bible, a single entity – and I’m pointing out that, like the Bible, it may have been put together from earlier sources – someone taking the 39-chapter scroll of Isaiah and attaching the work of the two prophets who wrote “in his school” just as the New Testament was added to the Old.
Yes, I am aware of the different versions and inclusions and exclusions of various bibles over the centuries.
The New Testament, however, claims a separate identity. No new identity is introduced in Isaiah. A difference in style can be explained by Isaiah writing in different periods in his life. Besides the differences, there are consistencies in style, too. I don’t get very far with consistency/inconsistency in proving that there was a different author at a different time. Avoiding the bias of it-can’t-be-true-because-it-is-prophecy I am left with nothing to rebut the presumption that the document is what it says it is. What else is there?
The problem is that the “consensus” actually appears controversial. Specifically to my O.P., these scholars use as part of their reasoning that Isaiah must be younger than it claims to be is because of their presumption that prophecy cannot exist.
This is mostly correct, most of the job of a prophet is simply repeating what has gone before and stating the obvious. But it can also include predicting the future too. Examples are plentiful, what the “bible” considers prophets do indeed talk about the future. Think of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnazzer’s dreams. Daniel plainly explains the interpretation and says they are kingdoms of the future. “Being a prophet” is mostly what you said but sometimes also it does means predicting the future.
There is also evidence in the “bible” of two classes of prophets–one class skilled in singing and instruments who recite the will of God–and then the Major sort who might also predict the future.
To the OP, prophecy goes on today, just as it did in scriptures, it is very common, it is simply God telling His children things He wants to let us know, usually in a way of things going to happen, though it could be things that have happened but you don’t know yet.
I’m arguing that Josephus had no idea what Cyrus did. The problem with “made it up” is the connotations. Historians back then were different than modern historians are, because modern historians try for a level of objectivity. They cite their sources, and they try, whatever spin they put on the actions, to report what historical figures actually said or did.
Ancient historians didn’t do that. Ancient historians tended to paint in broad strokes, and they weren’t afraid to invent motives or conversations if it made for a better story. That’s because ancient historians really weren’t concerned about reporting things the way it happened. Their main goal was to teach moral lessons, as Plutarch admits in his Life of Alexander:
In Josephus’s case, he was trying, in his Antiquities, to make the Jews seem sympathetic, and part of the way he did that was by having Cyrus owe his victories to the Jewish God. It was Josephus’s way of saying, “See, you shouldn’t mock us Jews, because our God raises up great empires”, and stuff like that. And as part of that, he had Cyrus claim that he read the book of Isaiah which told him to let the Jews rebuild the temple.
Now did this “actually” happen? Probably not, especially because Cyrus lived 600-700 years before Josephus, and who knows where Josephus got his information from. But like Josephus said about his motivation for writing the work:
Ray Kurzweil extrapolated trends in internet usage back in the mid 1980s, he said at current rates of exponential growth the internet would explode in the public scene in the mid 1990s.
I made a post about this a while back.
Either way, with newtonian physics you can make accurate predictions all the time. People know when the next full moon will occur, etc.