The reason that the prophecies came true? The OT was already written?

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Can someone help me with this?
The New Testament was written after the Old Testament; the NT writers had access to the teachings and prophecies of the OT. Therefore, since they wanted what they wrote to be true, such as Jesus being the Savior, Mary being virginal, etc., they copied from the OT. Kind of like writing down on Thursday what the lottery numbers are going to be (were) the night before.
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Thanks.
 
ccmcmg said:
Can someone help me with this?

Thanks.
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They didn’t want it to be true, they believed it was true based on the evidence before them.

Yes, they knew the OT, but that’s like me knowing that a writer predicted 50 or 100 years ago what this week’s winning lottery numbers would be. Unless that writer actually got it correct and his or her predicted numbers were the same as the actual numbers drawn in the lottery this week, I’m not going to be impressed and I’m not going to tell anyone that any prophecy was fulfilled or anything.
 
ccmcmg said:
Can someone help me with this?

Thanks.
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This is a criticism rising from a school known as higher criticism in the post enlightenment 17th-18th C which argues “Since there is no such thing as predictive prophecy therefore the incidents of what appears to be predictive prophecy in the Bible must be fakes.”

Quite apart from the fact that this is circular logic and therefore self defeating it also has a GREAT BIG PROBLEM!!!

Namely that the Jews and Romans and Greek critics of early Christianity never managed to make this argument against the claims of the Christians. They argued that the fulfillments and miracles and signs of Jesus were fraudulent but real, but they never argued that they were concocted out of thin air. So the theory has a problem. And to answer this problem it falls back on what C S Lewis (not a Catholic but still smart) called “Chronological Snobbery”.

It goes like this…

“Well of course those people would have been inclined to believe in things such as virgin births because they did not have the benefit of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. But We in Our enlightened, scientific age know better.”

But of course the problem is that this snobbish attitude assumes that people in first, second and third Century Rome, Greece and Palestine must have thought babies were found by young girls in cabbage patches.

COME ON!!!

No! The folks of the First Century knew just as well as we do from whence babies come and how it is they come to be which is why the Gospel writers speak of the Virgin Birth AS A MIRACLE. The same goes for the other signs. The First Century folks knew folks didn’t walk on water, raise the dead, heal the sick, give sight to the blind, feed thousands on a pittance and above all DID NOT RAISE THEMSELVES FROM THE DEAD ON THE THRID DAY!!!

And yet no one produced a body. No argued these signs had happened. They merely argued their meaning.

And so for some critic to come along 1700 years later and say he knows better what happened because he knows miracles just can’t be, that guy deserves to laughed to scorn and ignored.

God Bless
 
This theory has a number of problems. Here are a few I can think of.
  • It ignores the historical evidence for Jesus. The evidence which convinces even skeptics like Bart Ehrman. I
  • It is ignorant of Jewish expectations of the Messiah. The last thing Jews were expecting was a Messiah who would be crucified and then rise from the dead on the third day. If a Messiah was crucified that meant he wasn’t the Messiah. It was time to pack up and go home. The only expectation of a resurrection was a general resurrection at the general judgment. Not a ressurection for the Messiah first.
  • It assumes the eye witness accounts are fabricated without evidence. When historians have multiple attestations of an event from different sources that is considered strong evidence for the event. Usually when people deny the historicity of Jesus or of the resurrection they do so based on philosophical or religious reasons rather than on historical evidence. If there were no miraculous claims in the gospel Jesus would be accepted along with Socrates and Plato.
  • Also under such an assumption no prophecy could be prophetic. Since a prophecy happens before an event. Therefore, if we could not accept an event simply because it was prophesied before then we could not accept any. So that the underlying assumption is anti-supernatural. Well, if you rule out supernatural possibility before even looking at the evidence then you are doing so based on philosophy rather than good evidence based reasoning. Since the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is a supernatural claim you rule it out before even looking at the evidence.
For more info see
m.youtube.com/watch?v=xUKW2Bm5P2k
 
ccmcmg said:
Can someone help me with this?
The New Testament was written after the Old Testament; the NT writers had access to the teachings and prophecies of the OT. Therefore, since they wanted what they wrote to be true, such as Jesus being the Savior, Mary being virginal, etc., they copied from the OT. Kind of like writing down on Thursday what the lottery numbers are going to be (were) the night before.
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Plagiarism could have been a possibility, except we do have extra-biblical historical accounts
such as from Josephus and Eusebius confirming Jesus as the historical resurrected Messiah,
from the House of David even, thus rendering the “copied the Old Testament” theory as rather
ridiculous. What you seemed to have stumbled upon is something clearly from an atheist, who
not only stubbornly disbelieves, but is going out of his/her way to discredit religion.
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If Jesus fulfilled perfectly all the expectations the Jews had for the Messiah then it would be suspicious. However, since what Jesus actually did was completely unexpected, namely to die on a tree which is considered by Jews to be cursed by God, and then to rise from the dead, then it is strong evidence for a historical event that no Jew would have been able to make up, never mind get away with if there were no evidence. There had to be some pretty good evidence in order for these Jews to believe Jesus was the Messiah even after he was crucified and go around testifying even to the death that he had risen. Like I said if a potential Messiah died, and there were many who did, that was the end of that movement. Yet Jesus’ followers did not die off but gained momentum even after his death. Something obviously happened.
 
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