swivel said:
I wonder what the author of your link would make of this link:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/proph/long.html
(this is a brilliant site that everyone interested in these pointless debates simply must bookmark)
I have to say I do not agree with the word 'brilliant'.
Before examining some of the specifics, a general point.
If, as some of you believe, the New Testament is a fiction made up to fool people long after the events, do you not think that the people doing it would know their own scriptures (often learnt by heart in the days before many books) well enough not to misquote or misunderstand them. Is it really more likely that some cursory glance of an English translation many centuries later would be likely to expose errors by people who lived and breathed the culture and religion described and spoke and fully understood the original language?
Is this really likely?
Now for a few specifics:
Fom Isaiah 7:14: The Hebrew word almah does not only mean 'young woman' but also 'virgin'. This myth was perpetrated by Judaism post the advent of Christianity to attack the New Testament. In fact of course as far as Heberew culture of the time was concerned a 'young woman' would mean an unmarried one and that would automatically mean a virgin, so they are actually synonymous. Note also this is meant to be 'a sign'. A young woman who was not a virgin giving birth would hardly represent a sign from God and has been known to happen many times!!
To absolutely confirm what the passage meant to the Jews of the time, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which was compiled many years before Christ) uses the Greek word parthenos which always means a virgin and not just a young woman (Greek morals were somewhat different!)
As for Jehoiachin being listed in Matthew as being Jesus' ancestor and thus Jesus; messiahship breaking a prophesy, in Jeremiah 22 the prophecy reads,
This is what the LORD says:
"Record this man as if childless,
a man who will not prosper in his lifetime,
for none of his offspring will prosper,
none will sit on the throne of David
or rule anymore in Judah."
Matthew is recording the lineage of Joseph who of course was not the physical natural father of Jesus only hils legal father (technically a step-father) so Jesus was not the offspring (a physical thing) of Jehoiachin so the prophecy is not broken.
Matthew allegedly misquotes a scripture from Zechariah as from Jeremiah but the present (modern) system was not used by the Jews of that time to refer to their scripture. It was often referred to by the section so the beginning would be Moses, the middle would be Psalms even if it was not a Psalm, likewise the prophets (irrespective of which) would be Jeremiah (note the precise order was different too) etc. This can be chacked out in the case of other references and surely you cannot believe that these people were so stupid that they did not know what was a psalm and what was not!
Many of the prophesies are described as having not happened. Could that be because they are stll to happen?
In many passages it is assumed that there is only a reference to one point in time and one set of characters but this is not how literature was written and references to multiple times, events and peoples are often encapsulated in the same section. There is deliberately no attempt at chronology nor even separation between past, present and future. They did not write books then the way we do now!!
If anyone wants to debate any individual items, I should be happy to do so but I think this post is already long enough!
regards,
Gordon.
