In what way is the Resurrection the best explanation?

[Vicki Q]

In the year I spent in formal theological training I was taught that prophecy is written for future generations and makes no sense to contemporaneous readers -- it only makes sense in light of its fulfillment much later. Which is just another way of saying what you stated here.

Always nice when people with differing perspectives agree on something.

A great example of this is the claims of the gospel authors that certain OT passages predicted Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection -- something that Jewish scholars find by turns hilarious and infuriating.

And yet it was a group of Jews who developed these ideas. And as discussed earlier in the thread, the interpretations, while different to the usual ones at the time, were well within reasonable interpretive bounds. That the OT meta-narrative, and associated prophecy, ends up with Jesus' resurrection is extremely do-able. The Gospels (far more than most Xians realise!) and the Epistles explain how this works at great length.

Xians trying to use fulfilled prophecy as a slam-dunk body of proof will struggle, but those who see it as the Early Church did, as a jigsaw puzzle that just got completed, can see how well it all fits together.

Those passages weren't about Jesus, and in many cases weren't even intended as prophecy. But they can flogged into service like everything else in the scripture.

You misunderstand how the OT works in relation to the NT. It functions much as the early acts of a play, for which Jesus, then the Church, are the last two acts. Thus all sorts of things that aren't formal prophecy, being part of the narrative, can still function as signposts to Jesus.

For example, the Exodus functions as a model for the liberation of God's people by Resurrection, in both Paul, and in the Gospels, despite being (supposedly) history.

In other words there is no actual prophecy -- just post hoc confirmation bias looking for pattern matches between some text and certain events.

It's what those 'certain events' might be that's such a fascinating question.

Anyway, this discussion has pretty much run its course, so feel free to have the last word.

Hey! I was going to say that!

I'd essentially be repeating what's gone before, so I'll leave the discussions here.

However thank you for a debate carried out with respectful, yet robust argument.