I think “which is generally accepted by scholars…” means “generally accepted by scholars to be accurate/fulfilled”.
Ok. So does that mean that there are NO prophesies from the Old Testament that are generally accepted by scholars to be accurate/fulfilled?
Christian scholars that already believe because of their faith, or impartial scholars?
I would assume Christian scholars would accept it. Any impartial ones?
I honestly want to know, I’m not pushing an opinion any way.
I would like to know the answer to that, too. It would be interesting to hear from an impartial scholar.
Additionally, how much that he supposedly fulfilled is actually true? The whole Bethlehem sequence, for example, is pretty clearly a later addition to the text, and none of the specifics check out.
Dude, it’s their book. You would think they would have some insight on their own language and the intents of their Jewish writers.
I’m not, but every instance of a prophecy being referenced in anything I have ever read had used it as one mechanism for dating the text. And I’ve definitely never encountered anything in the Bible like, “One day, mankind will walk on the Moon!”
Wanna bet? Welcome to the wonderful world of Christian scholarship, where the whole damn history of the world has been predicted in the Bible! :rolleyes:
Well, I sort of thought you meant prophesies that were depicted as being fulfilled IN the Bible, not 2000 years later.
I see the distinction, but I don’t see an opposition. I’d say my points up thread about how the certainty of death plays a role in describing how we talk about these things, but, that said, I see nothing strange about talking about someone giving and taking their life beyond the rarity of the word choice. And that doesn’t change definitions, it’s just what people commonly say.
I’d also point out the bomber issue; a suicide bomber gives their life for a cause. Yet we don’t seem to have any problem calling them “suicide” bombers.
Yes. He took his own life.
This seems like another situation in which I see a difference but not opposition. Being a martyr doesn’t mean you’re therefore not also a suicide, if the definition fits.
I don’t know about this. The section I quoted from the Bible in the OP reads to me that Jesus knew/believed something pretty big was going down, to the extent he wouldn’t be sitting eating and drinking with the apostles again as he was at the Last Supper. It doesn’t seem like a “Hey, guys, just in case…” situation; he reads as expecting the worst.
Whoops, this isn’t a post.
I forgot about the Messiah prophecies. And perhaps there are some others that I’m not aware of where the prophecy and the event were written at separate times.
But so far as I am aware, on the whole, Jesus doesn’t match most of the Messiah prophecies - he didn’t become the King of Israel, he didn’t rebuild the temple, etc. - and to the extent that he does match them, those all seem to be fictions. (Technically, I’ll grant that he probably was a descendant of David, but probably every Israelite of his time was, through some path or another.)
But minus something like “Mankind will walk on the Moon”, there’s a large potential for deceit. Once something has already “happened”, regardless of whether the prophecy was written previous to the event or not, you’re writing after the event. It’s very easy, at that point, to massage the event to match the prophecy. Or, for some cases, go back in and change the text of the original prophecy to match the later event. I know there’s at least one such example, but it might take me a bit to track it down again. I’ll do so later today.
But you choked when you said that this meant all prophecies were written after Jesus. That isn’t implied in the quoted statement.
e.g., when an OT prophet said that Jerusalem would be destroyed, that wasn’t written after Jesus, but it might have been written after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians.
You left out a whole bunch of middle ground.
This is the one I was thinking of. It’s not so much that they changed the prophecy as the prophet:
Balaam, according to our 9-8th century source, was a prophet in a polytheistic religion. In our 6th century (Biblical) source, he has turned into a prophet for Yahweh. How much are we supposed to trust that the “prophecies” given to him have survived, unchanged?
I’m not sure how I “choked” by asking a question? Perhaps you could explain it?
It wasn’t my point to make anyway, nor was I attempting to make a point. You can read whatever you want into someone asking a sincere question, but that is what it was, a sincere question. One that has since be discussed with all parties, except you I guess, on the same page.
It is a guy that claimed to have a talking donkey. I think that all of his prophesies should be considered suspect.
Cool, thanks for looking for that.
Well yes, but on that basis we should ignore the Bible in its totality. (Which, granted, we should - but apparently talking donkeys and orders to rape women don’t seem to be sufficient evidence of that for many.)