Why I am a Christian (10)

Jesus’ Birth, Life, Death and Resurrection Were Accurately Predicted Years Before the Events

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

The first four explain why I think belief in a creator is reasonable and credible from what I have learned from science. The next two examine the human condition and find that the way we are wired is entirely consistent with what the Bible says about us. The three after that explore the theological themes of sin, hell and providence.

Now, for the next five posts, I am delving into Christology. Who Jesus of Nazareth is and what he did are absolutely central to why I am a Christian.

The first thing I want to say about Jesus is that so many Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah are so clearly fulfilled by him. I have yet to read anyone able to offer a satisfactory alternative explanation as to why they think Jesus of Nazareth is manifestly not the figure predicted.

Mathematician Peter W. Stoner, former Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College, did some sums and calculated that the probability of just 8 such predictions being fulfilled in one person is one chance in one hundred million billion (which is many times more than the total number of people who’ve ever lived). 

Lee Strobel in The Case for Christ and Josh McDowell in Evidence that Demands a Verdict have made much of such data. They claim that there are hundreds of Old Testament prophecies about the expected Messiah and that Jesus fulfilled them all. Whilst I am sure their intentions are honourable, I have to say in the interests of fairness that I think these authors somewhat overstate their case.

Some of the prophecies they reference are verses taken in isolation from longer passages that are not about the Messiah at all. Such verses only really apply to Jesus with imaginative hindsight (e.g. the one verse about Emmanuel in Isaiah 7.1-17). By faith, I can of course see a prophetic dimension in such verses, reading back what I know from the Gospels. But because sceptics would not accept passages like these as legitimate evidence of prophetic fulfilment, I am not including those sorts of prophecies for consideration in this post.

Other prophecies were dramatically and self-consciously fulfilled by Jesus (e.g. the riding of a donkey on Palm Sunday in a deliberate fulfilment of Zechariah 9.9). Though, again, I personally accept these as legitimate fulfilments, for similar reasons, I am overlooking those kinds of prophecies here as well.

No matter. There are many other prophecies about the Messiah that do not fit either of the categories above. Considering only these, the case is still so evidentially strong and mathematically overwhelming that I consider it practically watertight. 

Even limiting myself to a sceptic’s measure of allowable evidence, it seems to me to be beyond reasonable doubt that Jesus’ ancestry, birth, life, death and resurrection were accurately predicted centuries before the events happened.

Here are a few examples:

In Genesis 12.3 we read that, of all human families, the whole Earth will be blessed by a descendant of Abraham. In Genesis 17.19 we read that this promised bearer of blessing will be a descendant of Isaac (not Ishmael). In Genesis 49.10 we read that he will be from the tribe of Judah (not from any of the other 11 tribes of Jacob, or indeed from any of Esau’s descendants). In Jeremiah 23.5-6 we read that he will be a descendant of David (not of any of Jesse's other seven sons or indeed from any other descendant of Judah at that time). 

These four specific branches of the Messiah’s family tree are all confirmed in Jesus’ two independently compiled genealogies in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels. It is clear that they are independent because they differ at various points. (As an aside, though some point this out as evidence of factual error in the Bible, the two accounts are in fact consistent; Matthew traces Jesus’ legal descent through his adoptive father Joseph, and Luke traces his blood descent through his natural mother Mary. Luke notes “He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph”).

Incidentally, no one can possibly now prove their ancestral lineage back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob - or even to David - because all Jewish genealogical records were destroyed in the temple in 70 A.D., very shortly after Matthew and Luke's Gospels were written down. Thus any new claim to be the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy can never be verified – but Jesus’ lineage has not one attesting source but two.

Then in Micah 5.2 we read that he will be born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth – or anywhere else for that matter. This detail is also corroborated in both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels.

In Isaiah 61 we read that he will have a message of good news for the poor and will bind up the broken-hearted. This is a strong feature of his public ministry in all four Gospels.

At this point, sceptics may well allege that such details were woven in to the Gospel narratives by unscrupulous charlatans to make it seem that Jesus was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy when, in fact, he was nothing of the sort.

But is this really plausible? And where is the evidence for it? The evidence is, in fact, heavily stacked against such a theory. 

Bear in mind that the origins of the Christian movement were highly explosive and that the expansion of the church sparked prolonged and violent opposition from both religious and political authorities in the first century. Yet there is no hint of any challenge to the claims in the Gospels about Jesus’ ancestry or birthplace. It would have been relatively easy for a contemporary of Matthew or Luke to suppress the early growth of the church with an evidence-based counterclaim that, for example, he was born in Nazareth and descended from the tribe of Gad. But there is not a trace of controversy on this question.

On the contrary. The unmistakable fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy by Jesus was, as Martin Ayers notes in Naked God, “a key factor in so many Jewish people becoming followers of Jesus. They had been waiting for the Christ, and in Jesus they found a man who ticked every box.” There is no way Jesus would have generated a significant following as Messiah amongst Jews unless his prophetic credentials were beyond doubt.

In any case, the Christian movement was characterised by high standards of moral conviction where its adherents would not compromise an inch - even if the clear consequence was being torn apart by lions in the Coliseum.

If anyone can make a convincing case why so many would bravely accept being eaten alive just to prop up a motley collection of known exaggerations, half-truths, demonstrable factual errors and deliberate deceptions I have yet to hear it.

But the really heavyweight prophetic fulfilments concern not Jesus’ origins, birth and life, but his death and resurrection. 

Psalm 22 is a breath-taking prophetic prediction of the Messiah’s sufferings. It tells of a man in extreme agony, thirsty, scorned and despised, the subject of derision (“let God save him if he trusts in him!”), his clothes gambled for and his hands and feet pierced.

This Psalm, written by King David about 1,000 B.C., but patently not about himself, is particularly remarkable because the Jewish form of capital punishment was by stoning. Here, crucifixion is clearly in view (“they have pierced my hands and my feet”). But this was a form of execution developed by the Romans about four centuries after Psalm 22 was written. In fact, in the days of King David, Rome itself hadn’t even been founded!

In Isaiah 53, written about 750 B.C. (some scholars date it 200 years later but in any case it is comfortably earlier than half a millennium before Christ), we read of a figure who will be rejected by his own people, unjustly condemned without a whimper of protest, horribly disfigured by his beatings, pierced by his killers (for whom he will intercede), die from his injuries, be executed with wrongdoers but buried with the rich and, after death, see the light of life again and be satisfied.

The sharpness of focus in this picture of Christ’s trial, flogging, crucifixion, burial arrangements and resurrection is absolutely awe-inspiring. And ten times in that one chapter Isaiah says that this figure, his suffering servant, will somehow take upon himself all the sorrows, sickness and sinfulness of fallen humanity - and pay for them, bringing healing and salvation through his sufferings.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1946, they found complete manuscripts of all the above mentioned prophecies. Through radiocarbon analysis it was established that the key Old Testament manuscripts (notably Isaiah) dated back to much earlier than 100 B.C. So there is no question of tampering with ancient texts to slip in Jesus’ details after the events – just in case you were wondering…

I stated above that I think that writers like Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel, though I do not doubt their integrity, rather overegg the pudding. I stand by that. Nevertheless, even limiting ourselves to the prophecies above (and there are more) the statistical probability that Jesus is the realisation of Old Testament prophecy points to something approaching mathematical certainty.

Why is it that popular culture makes such a big deal out of obscure soothsayers like Nostradamus and prints vague horoscopes in every tabloid paper, yet fails to take any notice of compelling prophecy like this which, if true, is of supreme importance? Can anything be more perverse?

There’s quite a lot I want to say about Jesus in the next four posts; his persona is absolutely compelling, his teaching is uniquely appealing, his death holds the key to the problem of sin (see Reason 7) and the evidence for his resurrection has won over the most adamant detractors - when they have bothered to look into it.

No one has had a greater impact on the course of world history than Jesus. I, along with billions of other Christians past and present, experience his presence and power in my life today. 

Part of the reason I have put my trust in him is that it all starts here with his faultless track record of perfectly fulfilling every messianic prophecy in the book. 

And that’s the tenth reason I am a Christian.