Charles Darwin

Great post, I appreciate it. I got a kick out of your Napoleanic interpretations. But I do think they are more entertaining than relevant. For instance, on Is 53:4-5 you quote and comment:

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'4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed'.

At the end of Napoleon's rule, the Allied powers made it clear they were after him personally, not the French people. Napoleon himself agreed to sacrifice his life for the nation of France if need be.
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But this misses the crucial point that the subject was crushed for *our* iniquities, not *his*. Or again, you write:

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'7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth'.

This stunning prediction of the silent film Napoleon was made many centuries before cinematography was even invented!
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But of course the silent movie did not convey that he was actually silent, nor did anyone watching it come away with this message. Everyone understood that the lack of sound was a technological limitation, not that he was silent. More to the point, this verse, again crucial, tells the reader of the Messiah's humility and submission (to God's will). Something exquisitely modeled by Jesus, not Napoleon.

I'm reminded how evolutionists complain (often correctly) that their critics are not understanding the theory correctly, and therefore are constructing strawman renditions of the theory.

You write: "I have very little doubt I couldn't do the same with Psalm 22 and others." Oh, I absolutely agree. I also have very little doubt that it would have about the same relevance.

Your Napoleanic interpretations also miss the bigger context that the Messiah would be Jewish, not to mention that He would, according the Daniel's timetable, arrive around the 1st century.

So while, yes, you can go through verse by verse, and fit the messages to your Napoleanic interpretations. Your interpretations entirely miss what the genre is all about, and what the real, and obvious, message is that is being conveyed.

To be sure, I'm not saying that these prophecies are going to convince someone who doesn't want to believe. But I do believe that by any half-way objective account they have significant evidential value.

About Ps. 22. Prophecies often do not explicitely state that they are prophecies of the future. Obviously, Jesus's referencing it tells us it was a prophecy. It is quite a stretch to say that Jesus's words were generic (not referencing the Psalm) given the content of the psalm. What a coincidence. The fact that the evangelists don't harp on that point proves very little (either they hadn't figured it out, weren't particularly interested conveying the connection, thought it was obvious and not worth mentioning, etc. � more on this below).

Indeed, you note that Ps 22:7-8 superficially appears to parallel Mt 27:41-3, and that the other accounts give only a little mention of the ridiculing. Now I feel like can't win for losing. What if the correspondence was stronger, and appeared in all the gospels. Then you'd say that shows they were just contriving the story all together, and repeating it for effect. This falls into the category of: "If you don't want to believe, then the prophecies aren't going to help any." But this doesn't mean they aren't legit. evidence.

You pooh-pooh some of the physical descriptions (My bones are out of joint, My tongue clings to My jaws) but this imagery describe the terrible torture of crucifixion. Why would David say "My bones are out of joint"?

As for parts of Psalm 22 that don't exactly fit Jesus' life, yes, but this is par for the course in that genre. Psalms change tenses on a dime, and are always moving in and out of different views. I agree this makes interpreting prophecies more difficult, but c'mon, this isn't exactly rocket science.

Read Ps 22. If you don't think there is at least legit evidence there, then I say you don't want to believe, so badly that you won't even admit the other side has a case. OTOH, I do think you (implicitely) raise the legit questions of specificity, accuracy, precision, etc. Unfortunately, this is not the sort of thing that lends itself to any sort of quantitative analysis, and if one tried I'm sure the up front assumptions would be crucial and make all the difference. In any case, it seems to me that these prophecies are sufficiently clear and obvious to have very real evidential value.

You write that "a good 'prophecy' is specific enough that you can tell what it's predicting in advance of the event. The picture one gets from a plain reading of Psalm 22 alone is quite different than the one you get from the gospels alone." Actually I disagree, for instance, then you could say the evangelists were contriving the story to fit the prophecy, or even that Jesus was fitting his circumstances to the prophecy. Indeed, it has been argued that a good prophecy, and certainly a profound prophecy, is one which is sufficiently vague so as to be not entirely clear prior to the event, but then to be unmistakably clear after the fact.

Charles Darwin

Actually, that is not obvious. IOW, your contention entails the assumption that all personal judgements upon others can be explained by cultural indoctrination alone. But that is begging the question. I'm contending that this is not always true. That there are certain gut-feel, "I *know* that is evil" type feelings that we get which transcend cultural indoctrination.

Now I grant you I cannot prove this using formal logic. It is a subjective claim, depending entirely on your introspection and meditation on what your thought processes when you're having a "that's evil!" moment. You are free to disagree with me, but I don't see how you can defend your statement above.

Charles Darwin

No, I'm not aware of the birth narratives being complete fabrications. Now what's this about "earthquakes, and the dead rising from the grave and walking during the resurrection around that clearly didn't happen." I'm not quite following. Why didn't these happen?

lpetrich

(deleted at the request of the mods, as stated above)

lpetrich

Charles Darwin:
No, I'm not aware of the birth narratives being complete fabrications.

There is good reason to believe that to be the case; consider how the Matthew and Luke genealogies contradict each other and how their birth narratives do not quite fit. Why do Mark, Luke, and John omit something as spectacular as Matthew's mention of Herod's massacre of baby boys?

It may be better to discuss this question in Biblical Criticism & History.

Now what's this about "earthquakes, and the dead rising from the grave and walking during the resurrection around that clearly didn't happen." I'm not quite following. Why didn't these happen?

Read the Gospel of Matthew; some of this had allegedly happened during JC's crucifixion.

And what was this mysterious 3-hour sky darkness that nobody else in the world had seen? Thallus had allegedly recorded it, but Pliny and Philo and Josephus and other historians made no mention of it.

Family Man

I don't have time to post anything substansive at the moment. However, this thread has gone beyond a General Religious Discussion. In fact, CD and I have been having two unrelated discussions: one on the nature of the Bible, which belongs in BC&H, and the second on the nature of morality, which belongs in the morality forum. CD also seems to question evolution, but that is an intrinsic part of our morality disagreement. He can always start his own thread in E/C, where I'm sure the experts there can disabuse him of the notion that evolution is false. If any mod would like to split the threads into their appropriate forum. Otherwise, with CD's permission, I'd like to continue our discussion in the appropriate forums by starting new threads there. In that way, we can benefit by the contributions of experts that don't normally contribute in GRD.

Biff the unclean

No, I'm not aware of the birth narratives being complete fabrications.
Oddly enough the birth narrative of Jesus is exactly what was predicted by the Mithrains for the second coming of the demigod Mithra. Virgin birth, angels in attendance, shepherds watching (just like Mithra's first coming. He was known as "The Good Shepherd") and of course Magi. Magi being priests of Mithra and Zoroaster. They used astrology to predict when their Savior god would return to life on Earth. It is interesting that the author of the birth narrative makes the Mithrains the heroes who save Jesus and the Jews to be arch villains. The king of the Jews even puts all the little male babies to death.
This baby killing, of course, never happened. You can trace this myth back through Moses all the way to the Verdic gods.

Now what's this about "earthquakes, and the dead rising from the grave and walking during the resurrection around that clearly didn't happen." I'm not quite following. Why didn't these happen?
Why didn't they happen? Because they are each notable events and no one noted them.
A major earthquake happened and not a single soul noticed? They noticed every other time it happened.
The sun went dark for three hours and no one noticed? It could not have been an eclipse, they only last a few minutes and only happen when the moon is new. Passover only happens when the moon is full.
The streets filled with zombies, without anyone even recording it?
And you ask why this didn't happen!!!!! Why couldn't there be a bunch of rotting corpses wandering around the shops in downtown Jerusalem? Gee I don't know, can you think of any reason this wouldn't happen ?
:banghead:

DMB

I too have several times invited CD in this thread to post in the appropriate fora and he has so far resisted.

DMB

CD: I notice that you use echolocation as the example of something that couldn't have come about through Natural Selection.

Creationists always used to use the eye as such an example until that was shot down too many times. Why is echolocation a more difficult example than the eye?

One difference is that the bat's system took a long time to evolve. How long have we had sonar or radar?

Please post this stuff in E/C. They will love it there.

sakrilege

Don't forget, it was one person doing stuff within a week's time. Xians have had many people over 2000 years develop the stories.