Appendix to
From Bible Translator to Agnostic
Ken Daniels
10 May 2003
The following is a message I sent to a family member
who had read and responded to Thomas Paine’s treatise Old Testament
“Prophecies” of Jesus Proven False, which can be found at http://www.deism.com/paine_essay03.htm
and http://www.deism.com/paine_essay04.htm
Dear ___,
I appreciate your
taking the time to dig in and become engaged with me in these issues I'm
struggling through. I trust it will be a fruitful exercise for both of us and
that we will not become polarized as we try to present our respective opinions.
I have to guard against the tendency to become entrenched in my positions just
because I want to make myself look credible or to score some points. I am on
somewhat of a fence, doing all I know how to weigh the merits of both sides,
and I don't want to let my desire to win an argument push me prematurely away
from Christianity as I ponder ways to respond to your points. I'm not sure how
to avoid this problem, but I will try to take your arguments seriously.
As to the issue at
hand, I personally would hesitate to be as much of a bull in a china shop as
Paine was, but given his presuppositions, the notion that there was anything
supernatural in the messianic prophecies was to him completely unfounded, and
he felt that it was most effective to lay out his arguments as boldly and
forcefully as possible. I think he was wrong to do so, and it was perhaps
misjudgment on my part to recommend him for your reading. One effect of his brashness
seems to have been to turn you off from the substance of his arguments. By
focusing in on his offensive nature and a few of his faulty arguments, you seem
to have convinced yourself that nothing of what he says is worth consideration.
I acknowledge, among other things, that it was a wrong on his part to challenge
the church to explain how Matthew could know whether Joseph had a dream or saw
an angel; if Matthew was inspired, God could have revealed it to him. Paine
would have done better to have stuck to the point that the events surrounding
Matthew's dreams are neither historically verifiable nor falsifiable, even if
it was granted that the OT prophecies were referring to those events. Again, I
apologize for offending you unnecessarily through Paine, and I will strive in
my own writings to be more cordial than he. I should mention, though, that not
all the biblical writers were nice. For instance, Paul in rebuking the
circumcision party said he wished they would go all the way and castrate
themselves. Also, I do not think you would be so upset with Paine if he had
leveled similar attacks against the Koran (which he equally disdained but which
had no influence in his context) instead of on the Bible. I still do think that
Paine sincerely felt he was defending God's honor against error, even though it
seems to you that he was doing exactly the opposite, since your faith was the
one he was attacking. Elsewhere Paine talks about God's glory in the most
glowing of terms. Though I don't agree with some of his methods and arguments,
I think a lot of his points have gone unanswered since the time he wrote.
Abraham Lincoln read Paine as a youth and retained a deistic outlook throughout
his life. If I must be accused along with Lincoln for sympathizing with Paine,
so be it.
I think you are
right to bring the focus to the matter of presuppositions. Since Paine did not
discuss many of his presuppositions explicitly in this article on prophecy,
perhaps it would be helpful if I could lay out some of mine and later compare
them with yours.
I, along with
Paine, believe that God exists and that verbal revelation and prophecy from God
are theoretically possible, but we must examine each claim (e.g., the contents
of the Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon) on a case-by-case basis to determine
whether in fact God did in each case reveal Himself or inspire supernatural
prophecies. Paine's conclusion, based on his examination of the Bible (and his
limited knowledge of the Koran, etc.) is that God has not revealed Himself
verbally in these books but has revealed Himself to all through nature. The
same principles apply to miracles: they are theoretically possible, but need to
be examined on a case-by-case basis to determine whether they were bona fide.
Since most pre-modern cultures report all sorts of fantastic miracles (e.g.,
many people in Cantor[1]
believe the radio reports of women being turned to money by applying a special
soap to their bodies; the Egyptians have stories of their spiritual leaders
parting the Red Sea to recover a necklace dropped in the water during a boat
party), any report of miracles from any source, even Jewish, should not be
readily accepted without evidence. It is difficult to go back two or three
millennia to verify whether a stick turned into a snake, an ax head floated, a
child was born of a virgin, water turned to wine, etc. There are some special
cases that offer us a chance even at this distance possibly to see signs of
supernatural intervention. The two main cases are messianic prophecies and the
resurrection, which is why these topics are continually brought into focus. We
can perhaps discuss the resurrection later, but for now the question is whether
supernatural intervention is necessary to explain the messianic prophecies. I
think Paine's goal of proving them "false" (whatever that means) is
overly ambitious; what needs to be determined is whether or not they are
necessarily supernatural and can thus serve as an apologetic for believing the
gospel. But what is a supernatural prophecy?
Here are some of the conditions that it seems (off the top of my head)
would have to be in place before I would acknowledge that any given prophecy
(whether biblical or extra-biblical) requires a supernatural explanation. Any
one condition not met by a given prophecy would either cast suspicion on its
validity or invalidate it altogether as being necessarily supernatural. The
more conditions it doesn't fulfill, the less valid it is.
1) It can be
proven that the event happened after the prophecy. I don't believe this is a problem
for the messianic prophecies of the OT, since we have ample evidence that they
were written well before the time of Christ.
2) It can be
proven that the event that was said to have been fulfilled actually happened.
To my knowledge none of the events of the NT have any contemporary historical
corroboration outside the gospels (external corroboration of Jesus' existence
and death, which I do not dispute, appear many decades after Christ's death).
So without an a priori acceptance of the gospel record there can be no
historical certainty that every event in the gospels (e.g., Jesus' birth in
Bethlehem) happened as presented.
3) The prophecy
must be presented as a prophecy, not simply a historical event that has some
incidental parallels with a later historical event. If this principle is not
respected, there is no limit to the scope of "fulfilled" prophecies
or "types" that can be imagined or chosen from a large corpus of
text, such as Arthur Pink's insight that the three decks of the ark represent
the Trinity. The Mormons have a litany of prophecies they find in the Bible
that correspond to the ministry of Joseph Smith the Restorer. See
http://www.mormons.org/basic/bom/prophesies_biblical_eom.htm for an
introduction (whole books have been written about these "amazing"
prophecies). Because only a minority of what are claimed later to be messianic
prophecies were actually originally presented as such, it struck me as strange
when I heard D. James Kennedy on a TV special claiming that 100% of the messianic
prophecies were fulfilled. If one matches up after the fact a few dozen events
(let's say 100) in Jesus' life with some of the thousands of events (let's say
100,000), calling all the parallel events prophecies, then of course they were
fulfilled 100%. But it seems reasonable to me that if we're going to call
parallel OT-NT historical events fulfilled prophecies, then we need to consider
all the other historical OT events as unfulfilled prophecies, in which case the
rate of fulfillment is much less than 100% (let's say hypothetically
100/100,000 or 0.1%; you may be more generous than me, but in any case it would
be hard to arrive at 100%). Looking at it any other way seems to me like
wanting to have your cake and eat it too. To find parallels between OT events
and Christ's life may be profitable as a spiritual exercise to believers, but I
think it's a mistake to go beyond that and say that this is objective proof of
supernatural prophecy.
4) The object and
circumstances of the prophecy must be clearly identified in such a way that
there can be no mistake as to its precise fulfillment. Christians reproach the
Jews for not seeing that Jesus had to be the Messiah, but even Jesus' disciples
who knew him best did not comprehend the connection between the prophecies and
the events in Jesus' life. They expected a restoration of the Davidic monarchy
and triumph over their enemies (rightly so, according to most of the messianic
prophecies) but, according to Christians, failed to see that the Messiah would
be a "suffering servant" as announced in Isaiah. But can we blame
them for not thinking of all these servant/anointed/shepherd narratives as
messianic? The most famous of them
(Isaiah 53) was not presented primarily as a prophecy but mostly as a past
event. Isaiah 44:28-45:3 would sound messianic if the name of the anointed
weren't given: Cyrus. There are many references to "servant" in
Isaiah, the most common being to Jacob/Israel (try a computer text search), but
also to Eliakim (22:20-25; also sounds messianic) and others. The problem is
that most of the prophecies that Christians consider to be messianic were not
labeled as such ahead of time. It took special explanations from the risen
Christ to cause the disciples on the road to Emmaus to perceive the parallels.
It seems that the right texts have to be selected and viewed from the right
angle, pulled from their context and divided up into thin slices and applied to
multiple events, each separated by hundreds or even thousands of years (i.e.,
dual or multiple fulfillment) in order to see the picture. While a believer may
able to appreciate and discern these kinds of prophecies and rebuke unbelievers
for their inability to see things as they do through the eyes of faith, our
concern here is whether the fulfillments can objectively be seen to require a
supernatural explanation. I hold that an unmistakably true prophecy must be
specific and unambiguous without requiring special instruction and faith to see
the connection. The role of faith is so paramount in Christianity that even the
prophecies require faith and special discernment to in order to see them
correctly as proofs of their divine origin. But if a person does not have faith
to begin with, how can they be convinced that the prophecies are supernatural,
unless their supernatural character is readily evident? If I predicted in official, dated and widely
disseminated writing that an earthquake was going to destroy Dallas exactly ten
years from today and the President of the US was going to die in the
earthquake, and if it were fulfilled to the letter, that would be an objective,
readily evident supernatural prophecy. It seems that, without the eyes of
faith, all the messianic prophecies fall far short of this kind of irrefutable
prophecy. Maybe God does indeed want us to believe more on the basis of faith
than on evidence, but if that's the case, then let's not pretend that the
messianic prophecies are overwhelmingly convincing.
5) Every part of
the prophecy must be fulfilled. If someone prophesies that the current President
will be assassinated, triggering World War III, and then someone does actually
kill him but no war follows as a result, then the prophecy was not legitimate,
even though part of it (i.e., his assassination) was correct. But let's say
that 1000 years later World War III does happen, and someone claims he can
trace its cause through some circuitous route back to the assassination 1000
years earlier. Aha! The prophecy was
true after all. Well, at least it can't be proven false. But for everyone who
lived in the intervening 1000 years, the prophet should not rightly be
considered accurate, since not all his prophecies came true. At least, I
wouldn't pay him any attention. Thus, I believe Paine is correct to challenge
the legitimacy of the Micah prophecy concerning the leader's birth in
Bethlehem, since it goes on to talk about his role in a literal conflict with
Assyria, which did not happen in the time of Christ. For those living in the
past 2,000 years since Christ's life on earth, there can only be an appeal to
some sort of figurative fulfillment in the distant future.
6) The prophecy
must have a literal fulfillment, not just an imagined spiritual fulfillment.
This principle was violated by the Jehovah's Witnesses when they prophesied the
return of Jesus in 1919, but later said he returned "spiritually".
The prophecy of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 seems amazing if you accept
the Christian assumptions about the purpose of Christ's death, but most of what
it refers to is spiritual in nature, so it was possible to apply it to Jesus or
to any other righteous person who was unjustly executed. There are a few
physical references in the passage, most notably to the servant's being pierced
(which could mean on a cross or with a sword or spear; being pierced was a
normal method of execution in that day), but also to his being
"crushed." I'm not sure what "crushed" means in this
context, but it doesn't seem legitimate to focus literally on
"pierced" as a prophecy of the cross while viewing
"crushed" in a more figurative sense.
I probably have
other presuppositions, but these are the first that come to mind.
One comment about
the virgin birth prophecy from Isaiah 7. Paine was wrong to insist that the
Hebrew word meant primarily young woman rather than virgin, because the
opposite is apparently true, but it is also true (acknowledged by Vine's) that
the word can (though less often) refer simply to a young woman. In any case,
the wording was originally intended for the audience in Isaiah's time, and it
no doubt made sense to them in its entirety. Even the term Emmanuel would have
been understood to them as meaning "God is with us," since Hebrew,
like many languages, apparently does not use a "to be" verb between a
subject and a predicate. In Dazaga, you say "house red" to mean
"the house is red". I did a quick computer search in the KJV, and the
first instance of "God is with" showed up in Genesis 21:22 with the
verb "is" italicized, meaning that it does not appear in the original.
So Emmanuel can easily mean "God is with us", which makes more sense
in its original context, and there is no need for a future event like the
virgin birth of Christ to complete the fulfillment. Again, I would not go so
far as Paine and say this demonstrates that Christ's virgin birth was a false
prophecy, but I would contend that no case can be made here for the necessity
of a supernatural explanation for this prophecy, because it fails
presuppositions 2 through 5 above.
I'll close by
mentioning that the Matthew prophecies about coming out of Egypt and Rachel
weeping for her children have had a greater effect than any of the others in
leading me to suspect that there is nothing supernatural about any of the
messianic prophecies. If Matthew had contented himself with drawing a pictorial
parallel between the events, that would have been fine, but when he cites them
as fulfilled prophecies, it makes me wonder whether he's just grasping for
straws, not only in these cases but also in the others. From an apologetic
standpoint, it would seem more advantageous if he had not mentioned these as
prophecies at all.
I could probably
go through all the messianic prophecies and find one or more presuppositions
that they fail, but I don't know whether it would serve any purpose. The crux
of it all, as you say, is the presuppositions. You may think it presumptuous
for me to set up presuppositions like these, but I am being honest about how I
think rather than leaving you to second guess my starting point. Feel free to
critique them and offer your own presuppositions, ensuring that they provide a
grid for filtering out illegitimate prophecies such as those held to by the
Mormons, Jean Dixon, Nostradomus, etc.
Thanks again for
engaging with me. I feel a knot in my stomach when I think about how this might
be affecting relationships in the family, but I feel at peace with God, knowing
that He knows my heart and that I have been honest with Him and with others
about what I truly believe. As I have said before, I would believe in a
heartbeat if I could, but it's not something that can be forced, especially if
I am unable to sense that it is true, deep within me. Continue to pray with me
for a resolution to all this. As I consider whether my present beliefs are
unfounded, I challenge you to seriously consider too whether it's possible that
Christianity may not be true, just like all other religions. Otherwise our
exchange is a charade. But whatever the outcome, I still respect you and look
forward to many years of [relationship] to come.
Love,
Ken