Christ and prophecy

Dan,

Thank you for your post.  Considering it's your first one, welcome to joining our forum.

I generally try to keep my arguments as religion neutral as possible.  Not because it's not valid, but because none of us is an expert in every religion, especially when it is not our own religion.  I couldn't tell you anything about the prophecies of the Hindus, Muslims, Raeilians, Scientologists, etc.. and someone could argue a point of theirs that I just don't know enough about to make an informed rebuttal.

Of course, there are times when staying neutral just isn't going to happen, especially when talking about prophecies.  I'm hoping in the future to make some posts directly questioning Christianity and some more specifically questioning the LDS religion. In turn, I hope you guys will question my beliefs as well.

Luckily, I probably know most about Christianity, so I'll try to address your post here.

I agree, your statistics are staggering.  If Jesus fulfilled all of those prophecies, it would be very compelling evidence.  Unfortunately, I have a few problems with your arguments.

1. You are using the Bible to prove the validity of itself.  This is circular reasoning.  You are basically saying, "Jesus of the Bible is true, because the Bible says so."  It's not proving anything. Your entire argument gets thrown out the window if it turns out that the Bible happens to be inaccurate.

2.  As I posted in a previous post, the fallibility of human recollection dictates that human testimony, however earnest, is not a valid form of proof that something happened the way that they said it did.  This being said, and considering the Gospels of Jesus weren't written until decades after his death, I have a hard time believing the accuracies of their claims.

3. The Gnostic Text, Apocrypha, and the convening of the Council of Nicaea, are just a few pieces of evidence that we have that in the first few hundred years after Jesus' death, early Christians were still debating what was true, what wasn't, what was going to be considered dogma, what was going to be in the Bible, and what was going to be left out and forgotten.  This is obvious evidence that what is in the New Testament is not necessarily accurate to what actually happened.

4. As in my previous post, the stories of Jesus are very similar to many Messiah-gods of older religions. The stories of Jesus are most likely amalgamations of the stories of the older gods as a series of "one-upmanship" stories told as if to say, "My God is better than your god" to those of differing beliefs.  Case in point is the story of Jesus' "Harrowing of Hell" to release all of the old dead spirits.  (Eluded to in Ephesians 4:9 but also in the Apocryphal: Gospel of Nicodemus) Originally, this was Jesus' descent into Hades (the afterlife of Greek mythology).  This story isn't literal so much as it was a way for the early Christian's to claim their God has dominion over even the Gods of other religions.

5. Considering the amount of time it took for the Christian church to become organized, and the amount of arguing within the early Church about what stories were true and what weren't, I find it far more likely that the stories of Jesus were written to make him sound like the one foretold in the prophecies, and not that he actually fulfilled the prophecies.  If that is the case (which I believe it is) then it makes perfect sense that Jesus would fulfill such a staggeringly impossible amount of foretold events.  He fulfills the prophecies because the stories we have of him wrote of him to specifically fulfill those prophecies.

Case in point #10 from your list: The messiah is born in Bethlehem. Jesus was from Nazareth.  It seems terribly convenient to me that Joseph and Mary traveled many days to go to Bethlehem at the time Jesus was born.  The reasoning behind this is because there was to be a census.  We have enough documentation from the Roman records at that time to know that they would not have required people to go to the town of their ancestors for a census. In fact, that doesn't even make any sense.  Sending people elsewhere to take a census ruins the results of the census and is in direct opposition to the whole reason the census is used. This is clearly a band-aid answer to cover up the fact that Jesus is a Nazarene and yet still supposedly the foretold Messiah.

Case in point #9 from your list: Jesus is from the house of David: Is Jesus the son of God?  If so, he's not descended from Joseph.  Is he descended from Joseph?  If so.... Is Joseph from the house of David?  He apparently has two fathers: Jacob (Matthew 1:16) and Heli (Luke 3:23).  This two-fathers example alone shows the fallibility of the claims by the New Testament.  Now that we've established that the New Testament could be wrong... we have no way of knowing what ELSE could be wrong. Yet again, another reason that I can't accept the Bible as accurate proof of anything.

I could go on and on.

I'm sure that you will definitely disagree, and I'm looking forward to your arguments.  Thanks for your post Dan!

-Mike