Adrienne Williams

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DennisM:
[QB]I think the real question here is how many people made this calculation before Israel became a state, or is this -- and I consider this likely -- a retrofitting of facts to make it appear a prediction has been made?

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That was my thinking as well. If they were aware of this prophecy (which isn't unreasonable) they would/could surely work in such a way as to coincide the statehood of Israel with the prophecy. I do think that this might not be as easy as it sounds though, considering that the UN had to vote on it and then there were delays that occured. Since it was to a large degree out of the hands of the Jews as to when exactly they became a nation, you'd have to believe that the UN was working to fulfill this prophecy too.

Then you said:
For example, where did the start date come from? Never mind the fact that many if not most scholars date it from the second century B.C., where did that March 14, 550 B.C. date come from? There's no indication in the text that I know of that would give such an exact date. How much would you want to bet that someone did the calculations after Israel's resurrection in 1948. You'd have to be extremely gullible to fall for such an obvious ploy.
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What my boyfriend is claiming, is that Daniel's vision from Gabriel told him when Jesus would die. Even if Daniel is written much later than thought, Jesus still dies. This would be a non-prophecy if Daniel were written much later, but it still doesn't have anything to do with the Ezekiel prophecy being fulfilled. Jesus dies. Ezekiel said Israel would become a nation in a certain amount of time after Jesus died.

2500 years later, Israel becomes a nation using what is believed to be the date Jesus died, and calculating the weeks of years, it comes out to exactly the date when Israel really did become a nation. If Israel became a nation on that particular date in order to make the prophecy come true, my boyfriend says that the United Nations (since they had to vote on Israel becoming a nation) would have had to be assisting in the "engineering" of this. Sorry that I left out a big chunk of the puzzle, I didn't really understand what he meant. Later today I'll have him post to clarify if this isn't clear to anyone.

Adrienne

Kosh

Adreinne - If you (or your boyfriend)
believes that Daniels prophesy is about
Jesus, please post all the relevent passages
(complete and in context) which you think
support that so we can address them.

BTW - since you're young, someone should point
out to you... don't believe everything your
boyfriend says just because he's your boyfriend. His motives are probably skewed.
Especially when he says "This is 12 inches!"

Family Man

Adrienne --

I don't think you quite got what I was driving at. I don't think you'll find a single, documented case of someone prior to 1948 making the prediction that Israel would become a state on April 6, 1948. I'll bet that someone did the calculations after Isreal's rebirth, and that's where the March 14, 550 B.C. date came from. (There is certainly no way to come to such an exact date by looking at the text.) In other words, I suspect this is a manufactured prophecy, only "revealed" after the fact. That is no prophecy at all.

Adrienne Williams

Adrienne Williams

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Kosh:
[QB]

Adreinne - If you (or your boyfriend)
believes that Daniels prophesy is about
Jesus, please post all the relevent passages
(complete and in context) which you think
support that so we can address them.
_____________________________________________

Hello, my name is Chris. I'm Adrienne's boyfriend. I actually have two questions regarding two different prophecies. The first is the Daniel prophecy to which you refer. I'm using the New International Version with all quotes.

Daniel 9: 25-26 is what I am concerned with here. Daniel speaks of seven 'sevens' and sixty-two 'sevens'. I understand that 'sevens' means a week of years (aka 7 years). Daniel says that after these seven and sixty-two sevens from the "issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem", that "the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing". I was told once the date of this "decree" to rebuild Jerusalem, do not currently remember it, but if you did the math, converting the 360-day Biblical years into 365-day modern years, accounted for leap days, etc., you came out on some Sunday in around 30 A.D. which it was claimed was the day Jesus was crucified. Now my question here is, how do we know what day that "decree" was issued? Is it possible to figure out the exact day of something that happened around 4-500 B.C.? If so, and if the day is such that the math works out, it would seem, well, ODD that this prophecy should terminate at right about the same time a bunch of people claim the son of God was crucified.

My second question regards a similar prophecy found in Ezekiel 4:4-8. God tells Ezekiel to lay on one side for 390 days, and the other for 40 days, each day to equal one year of Israel's punishment. This punishment is claimed to have begun with the Babylonian captivity, which lasted 70 years. So 390 + 40 - 70 = 360 years of punishment left. BUT, in Leviticus 26:18, God says that if Israel ignores its two first punishments (Leviticus 26:17 and 26:33) that he will multiply their punishment SEVEN times. Since most Israelis did not return after the Captivity, it is assumed, they ignored their first punishments, and the punishment remaining was multiplied by seven. 360 times 7 = 2,520 years. Again converting from 360-day Biblical years to 365-day modern years, accounting for leap days, the time the calendar changed and we lost 11 days or so in the Middle Ages etc., you come out with 2,483.8 modern years. If you add that to the END of the Babylonian captivity--and I did at one time do the math--you come to May 14, 1948 as the day Israel's punishment ended. The very next day, May 15, Israel became a nation again. The question here is similar to the Daniel question: how does one verify the start date? How does one know when the Babylonian captivity ended?

So, as best I can put it, these are my questions. If these start dates can be confirmed or have been confirmed by modern, scientific scholarship, and these two prophecies terminate when they are 'supposed' to, then it looks...well, it's interesting, anyway. Not sure if by itself it proves anything, but it'd be interesting.

Thanks for any help.
Chris

Photocrat

But you don't have a god, do you? *ahem*

On to the real issue, dates aside, is it not a tad 'freaky' that Israel *did* reform as a nation *at all*, after all that time? The Nazis, Romans or a number of other things could've destroyed them some time ago, as many other civilizations (e.g. that very Roman Empire which leveled the 2nd Temple...)
Also, even if Daniel was backdated, as so many say, wouldn't the prophecy have been given then, even if it was not recorded until much later? You can explain them knowing the events of their future by supposing it was written afterwards, but can you claim it wasn't written until after the 1960's? Might as well make that claim, otherwise...

But why bother checking any of it? After all, you *know* that God doesn't exist, right? Mere logic cannot compete with such overtly demonstrated omnicience as that...

Why bother appealing to Noah when you can reassure yourself so readily against any proof?

A1: Faith is still for idiots, right?
A2: Of course it is, stupid!@#$
A1: Sorry, just checkin'

Kosh

Ooops.

My bad. You said college, I thought "21".

But at 30, you're still young from where I
stand!

Kosh

Well, that's the thing, huh? But I think
this has already been addressed in the
previous posts. That the start dates have
NOT been confirmed. And if the "scientific
scholarship" is to take the end date, and
count backwards to get the start date...

well, some things just can't be reverse
engineered.

hezekiah jones

I think the contortions that lead to March 14, 445 BCE are "detailed" on the website you gave us originally: ultimately, it is verified by the Greenwich Royal Observatory, of all things.

There are several assumptions not made terribly clear in the author's chain of premises, including his identification of the specific decree as the one related in Nehemiah 2:1-8; that the Artaxerxes referred to in Nehemiah 2 is in fact Artaxerxes I, verification of which entails a similar investigation of Nehemiah and Ezra; and that the fiddling with Hebrew vs. Gregorian calendars is correct, which, to a neophyte like me, looks like a horrendous chore in itself.

Much of the answer to your question depends on how much time you care to invest in verifying this author's use of the available data, although this guy is not alone in making these particular claims.

As with any of these so-called biblical prophecies, their proponents, such as Jack and Rexella Van Impe, will lead you on an endless goose chase through seemingly unrelated scripture, generally predicated on the untenable assumption that since the bible is god's word, it can't possibly be wrong. For every premise you invalidate, it seems another one appears in its place.

My personal favorite is the endless pursuit of the antichrist, which invariably involves both Daniel and the Book of Revelation, although the word "antichrist" is nowhere to be found in either of them. It appears only in the Johannine Epistles, the authorship of which is claimed to be identical to that of Revelation by the same crowd who still insist Daniel was written in 550 BCE.

As for Ezekiel, you may find some clues in Pulp Fiction.

Family Man

Actually, atheists don't spend time checking it. But theists keep coming up with these insane ideas, apparently not thinking that skeptics might go: hmmm, I wonder how they got that convenient start date that make their calculations come out right? We're not checking anything out; the refutation is obvious.

Freaky things happen. It doesn't mean that reversed engineered prophecies prove anything more than the faithful can come up with bad arguments to support their beliefs.

I realize you wrote this as a slam against atheists, but you've got it wrong. You don't have to be an idiot to have faith in Christianity; you simply need to refuse to consider the arguments against it.

[ August 14, 2001: Message edited by: DennisM ]