Since we're on the topic of prophecy as evidence for God's existence, I'd like to throw my $0.02 into the ring. The Old Testament is rife with specific prophesies concerning the birth, life, death and resurrection of the Messiah promised to the world. I'll enumerate some of the big ones below and follow up with a statistical analysis of their coming to fruition in one person.
I'm pulling this information from chapter 8 of Christian apologist Josh McDowell's tome The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (1999).
To keep the list of prophesies manageable, I'm going to skip a whole bunch of them. I apologize in advance for not linking these verses to an online Bible (e.g. biblegateway.com), but just doing the markup for this list was quite a task in and of itself!
According to the OT, the Messiah must be…
- Seed of Abraham
- Prophesied: Genesis 22:18, 12:2,3
- Fulfilled: Matthew 1:1; Galatians 3:16
- Son of Isaac
- Prophesied: Genesis 21:12
- Fulfilled: Luke 3:23,34; Matthew 1:2
- Son of Jacob
- P: Genesis 35:10-12; Numbers 24:17
- F: Matthew 1:2; Luke 1:33
- From the Tribe of Judah
- P: Genesis 49:10; Micah 5:2
- F: Luke 3:23,33; Matt. 1:2; Hebrews 7:14
- From the Family Line of Jesse
- P: Isaiah 11:1
- F: Luke 3:23,32; Matt. 1:6
- Of the House of David
- P: Jeremiah 23:5
- F: Luke 3:23,31; Matt. 1:1, 9:27, 15:22; 20:30, etc.
- Born at Bethlehem
- P: Micah 5:2
- F: Matt. 2:1, 4; Luke 2:4-7; John 7:42
- Presented with Gifts
- P: Psalm 72:10; Isaiah 60:6
- F: Matt. 2:1,11
- Herod Kills Children
- P: Jeremiah 31:15
- F: Matt. 2:16
- Preceded by a Messenger
- P: Isaiah 40:3; Malachi 3:1
- F: Matt. 3:1,2, 3:3, 11:10; John 1:23; Luke 1:17
- He Was to Enter Jerusalem on a Donkey
- P: Zechariah 9:9
- F: Luke j19:35-37; Matt. 21:6-11
- Betrayed by a Friend
- P: Psalm 41:9, 55:12-14
- F: Matt. 10:4, 26:49,50; John 13:21
- Sold for 30 Pieces of Silver
- P: Zechariah 11:12
- F: Matthew 26:15, 27:3
- Money to be Thrown Into God's House
- P: Zechariah 11:13
- F: Matthew 27:5
- Price Given for Potter's Field
- P: Zechariah 11:13
- F: Matthew 27:7
- Silent before Accusers
- P: Isaiah 53:7
- F: Matthew 27:12
- Hands and Feet Pierced
- P: Psalm 22:16 (Psalm 22 is a vivid portrayal of crucifixion c. 1,000 years before it was invented)
- F: Luke 23:33; John 20:25
- Crucified with Thieves
- P: Isaiah 53:12
- F: Matthew 27:38; Mark 15:27,28
- Bones Not Broken
- P: Psalm 34:20
- F: John 19:33
- His Side Pierced
- P: Zechariah 12:10
- F: John 19:34
- Darkness over the Land (at Noon)
- P: Amos 8:9
- F: Matthew 27:45
- Buried in a Rich Man's Tomb
- P: Isaiah 53:9
- F: Matthew 27:57-60
Now for the fun part.
In his book Science Speaks, Peter Stoner takes just eight of these prophesies (the ones I've highlighted in yellow. There are ten, actually, but a couple of prophesies were combined for reasons not explained in McDowell's book; #33 + #44 are treated as one, as are #44 + #45) and calculates the statistical probability that one man fulfilled them all (again...this is just eight of them). I now quote McDowell who quotes from Stoner's book:
We find that the chance that any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophesies is 1 in 10^17...[In order to help us comprehend this staggering probability, Stoner illustrates it by supposing that we take 10^17 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas.] They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, form their day to the present time, providing they wrote them according to their own wisdom.
Now these prophesies were either given by inspiration of God or the prophets just wrote them as they thought they should be. In such a case the prophets had just one chance in 10^17 of having them come true in any man, but they all came true in Christ. This means that the fulfillment of these eight prophecies alone proves that God inspired the writing of those prophesies to a definiteness which lacks only one chance in 10^17 of being absolute. (Stoner, Science Speaks, 100-107)
Perhaps 1:10^17 isn't good enough. Stoner then goes on to consider forty-eight prophesies...
We find the chance that any one man fulfilled all 48 prophecies to be 1 in 10^157. this is really a large number and it represents an extremely small chance. Let us try to visualize it. The silver dollar, which we have been using, is entirely too large. We must select a smaller object. The electron is about as small an object as we know of. It is so small that it will take 2.5 x 10^15 of them laid side by side to make a line, single file, one inch long. If we were going to count the electrons in this line one inch long, and counted 250 each minute, and if we counted day and night, it would take us 19,000,000 years to count just the one-inch line of electrons. If we had a cubic inch of these electrons and we tried to count them it would take us, counting steadily 250 each minute, 19,000,000 times 19,000,000 times 19,000,000 years or 6.9 x 10^21 years.
With this introduction, let us go back to our chance of 1 in 10^157. Let us suppose that we are taking this number of electrons, marking one, and thoroughly stirring it into the whole mass, then blindfolding a man and letting him try to find the right one. What chance has he of finding the right one? What kind of a pile will this number of electrons make? They make an inconceivably large volume. (Stoner, Science Speaks, 109, 110)
There are many other attestations of the divine origin of the Bible both in terms of the things it reports and the specific prophesies it makes that we can go into if need be, but the convergence of 60+ prophesies made by multiple authors over the course of a couple of thousand years in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth cannot be easily ignored.
-dan
Hmm, there are a few major problems with this entire line of reasoning:
ReplyDelete1 - People at the time of Christ were well aware of the prophecies of the Old Testament, and anyone wishing to establish Jesus as the Messiah would likely seek to draw as many parallels between the prophecies and Jesus' life as possible. This is a problem because the literal truth of the New Testament has not been established. How are we to know that the authors of the New Testament didn't exaggerate things, twist facts, or even make things up completely?
2 - The passages indicated in the Old Testament are almost universally vague. For example, the prophecy that was supposedly fulfilled when Herod ordered the slaughter of the infants is found within a larger passage which is clearly poetic. If we take the entire passage as literal, it was clearly either speaking of some other time, or was never fulfilled. If we take the entire passage as allegorical, what justification is there for claiming it as prophesying Herod's order? If we single out the verse you indicate as literal, while taking the rest of the passage as allegorical, we're being intellectually inconsistent. There is no clear justification for taking just one small section as literally; other than the hindsight of having access to the narrative of Jesus' life.
3 - Even if we grant that the narrative of Jesus fulfills prophecies made in the Old Testament, we haven't presented evidence that those portions of the Bible are actually true. To do so requires evidence outside the Bible. For example, I believe the New Testament references cities and locations that literally existed because there are many, many records of those same place names in external sources. Further, archaeology supports the existence of those locations very, very well.
4 - To perform statistical analysis on vague prophecies for which there is no external evidence for having been fulfilled is meaningless. Yes, you can come up with a large number, but if the assumptions underlying the number are not justified, neither is the number.