Trends Toward Underestimating Prophecy

Something I just posted on Facebook:

Christians often overestimate the evidence for prophecy fulfillment, but other Christians overreact by going too far in the other direction or go too far in that direction for some other reason. Some fulfillments are of a typological or secondary nature, which diminishes their evidential value. Some fulfillments, like Jesus' riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, could easily be fulfilled by normal rather than paranormal means. It's often suggested that a fulfillment is impossible or too difficult to demonstrate, which means it has little or no apologetic value. For these and whatever other reasons, prophecy has much less of a role in Christian apologetics today than it had in the past. But there are fulfillments that withstand those objections and should get more attention than they do.

For example, let's say somebody dismisses the alignment between the timing of Jesus' death and Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy on the basis that Jesus may have intentionally arranged for his execution at the time required. That only explains a portion of what needs to be explained. For one thing, it just pushes the question back to the likelihood that there would be somebody in the right time, in the right place, with the right reputation among other people, etc. who would have the willingness to undergo something as miserable as crucifixion in order to line his life up with the timing of Daniel's prophecy. Keep in mind that Jesus would need to simultaneously have a series of unusual attributes to do all of what's needed to fulfill all of the relevant material in Daniel and elsewhere (the willingness to die by crucifixion in the relevant circumstances; the skills needed to get the sort of following he had; the skills needed to persuade the Twelve, Joseph of Arimathea, and other relevant figures to go along with him as much as they did; etc.). And there's a series of other difficulties involved in such a scenario, which I've discussed elsewhere (http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/07/principles-for-evaluating-prophecy.html). Some of the issues that come up here are Jesus' sincerity and who he perceived himself to be and claimed to be. Those are major issues. If the skeptic is going to try to dismiss a portion of Jesus' fulfillment of a prophecy by saying that he was willing to get himself crucified in order to fulfill it, then that's an important line of evidence for Jesus' sincerity and for his identifying himself as the figure in that prophecy. Keep such facts in mind when those same skeptics or others appeal in other contexts to arguments that deny Jesus' sincerity or deny his identifying himself as the figure in that prophecy.

Part of what Jesus didn't have control over (by normal means) was whether both Jerusalem and the temple would later be destroyed and other relevant factors, such as whether his movement would still exist in any significant form when such a destruction of Jerusalem and the temple would occur, if it would ever happen. Don't forget, one of the issues involved here is the fact that there was a city and temple in place to destroy to begin with. As the destruction of the first temple demonstrated, there could easily have been no temple for the Romans to destroy around the time when Jesus lived. Or the city could have already been in ruins, as in Nehemiah's day. We've gone for many centuries now without a temple. Or the Romans could have destroyed the temple while leaving the city in place. Or have destroyed the city while leaving the temple in place. And you can't accuse the Romans of a Jewish or Christian bias.

Then there's the fact that there was a Roman empire, the fourth empire predicted in Daniel, in the first place, in the right time and the right place. With the sort of unusual penal practices needed to fulfill Psalm 22 and Isaiah 50.

And there's the highly unusual scenario of a Jewish Messianic figure being rejected by his own people while becoming so influential among the Gentiles, including the rulers of Gentile nations, despite the long history of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment. That Jewish rejection has persisted even as Jesus has grown in popularity among the Gentiles, as Paul predicted in Romans 11.

I've gone into a lot of depth arguing for Jesus' fulfillment of the Bethlehem prophecy, Isaiah 9, and other passages, often with widespread ancient and/or modern non-Christian acknowledgment of the fulfillment. And the principles outlined above can be applied to many other passages (e.g., objecting to Christian bias in the disciples' claim that Jesus rose from the dead in fulfillment of Isaiah 53:10-11 doesn't explain the testimony to his resurrection from people who were skeptics before allegedly seeing the resurrected Jesus, like James and Paul). A lot more could be said here, and we've discussed these and related topics in depth at Triablogue. My point here is that we all need to be careful to not go too far in the skeptical direction in how we view prophecy fulfillment. There are dangers in going too far in either direction. It's become popular in some circles to be overly focused on not being credulous by thinking too highly of prophecy fulfillment. We shouldn't be credulous by thinking too lowly of prophecy fulfillment either.