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Thursday, February 08, 2024

Paul's Suffering And Prophecy Fulfillment

I've been thinking about Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 11 regarding how he'd suffered as a Christian. What he says there is significant in a lot of contexts. It provides further evidence that the earliest Christians lived in a setting in which there was a large amount of potential to suffer for the claims they were making (about Jesus' resurrection and other topics). Given Jesus' crucifixion, Paul's former persecution of Christians, and Paul's references to his own suffering in 2 Corinthians 11 and elsewhere, we have multiple, independent lines of evidence that Christianity arose in that kind of atmosphere. And what Paul reports about his own experiences corroborates much of what the gospels and Acts report about such circumstances. The gospels' reports about efforts to throw Jesus over a cliff or stone him, for example, are rendered more plausible by what Paul tells us about the violent reactions he often met with. There are some undesigned coincidences between 2 Corinthians 11 and the gospels and Acts as well. These are just a few examples of the value of Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 11. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is focus on one of the other examples, the significance of the passage in a context involving prophecy fulfillment.

In a post last year, I wrote about how difficult it would have been for Jesus to have arranged to end his life in a manner that aligns well with Old Testament passages like Psalm 22 and Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy. It wouldn't require anything supernatural to try to provoke people, attempting to get them to do something like crucify you. But, as my post linked above discusses, you wouldn't have much control over how people would respond. History provides us with many examples of the variety of potential responses.

And 2 Corinthians 11 gives us some of those. Paul was imprisoned. He was beaten "times without number", "often" in danger of death. He was beaten with lashes a few times. Beaten with rods a few times. Stoned. It's not just that Paul went through such a variety of responses from his opponents. It's also that some of them happened more than once. And his opponents didn't just work through legal channels. They also worked against him, including in the form of violence, outside of legal contexts. The gospels report the same kind of situation with Jesus, and Acts does the same with regard to the other apostles (along with Paul).

How would Jesus, by normal (non-supernatural) means, have kept his opponents from beating him, imprisoning him, publicly humiliating him, stoning him, etc. in a way that would put his life out of alignment with something like Psalm 22 or Daniel 9? They'd be able to do it in so many ways. They wouldn't be limited to killing him differently than he wanted (the means of death, the timing of it, etc.). They could injure him in a way that would alter his plans. Or imprison him. Or whatever else.

As I've mentioned many times before, there wouldn't be penal practices so consistent with Psalm 22 and the Servant Songs in Isaiah if the Romans (not Christians or Jesus) hadn't implemented those practices. Jesus couldn't get himself crucified by the Romans if Roman crucifixion didn't exist in the first place. Furthermore, the evidentially significant alignment between crucifixion and Psalm 22 goes beyond the details of verse 16, as I've discussed elsewhere. There's a particular type of crucifixion and surrounding context involved, as we see not only in the details of Psalm 22, but also in Isaiah's Servant Songs (the scourging in Isaiah 50, the opportunity to entomb the individual with the rich in Isaiah 53, etc.). And there wouldn't have been a destruction of both Jerusalem and the temple (rather than a destruction of only one of them or neither), in alignment with what Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy goes on to predict, if the Romans hadn't decided to do it. So, even apart from what I'm focused on in this post, we have multiple examples of significant prophecy fulfillment that was well outside the ability of Jesus and the early Christians to fulfill by normal means.

But even the aspect of the prophecies that I'm focused on here, which people often underestimate, could easily have not been fulfilled if nothing supernatural was involved. Jesus' plans could have been disrupted in a variety of ways, as Paul's plans were.

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