Failed prophecy in the bible if one cares to look

[Angrboda]

NONPROPHECIES

Later, I will examine several examples of these "imaginary prophecies," but a more logical place to begin examination of the prophecy-fulfillment argument would be with what, for lack of a better term, I will call "nonprophecies." These involve those cases where, although alleged prophecies were quoted or referred to by New Testament writers, Bible scholars have been unable to find the original statement. An example is found in John 7:38 where Jesus said, "He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water." If Jesus was right in saying that scripture said this, just where was it said? No such statement in the Old Testament scriptures has ever been located, yet "the scripture" to Jesus would certainly have been the Old Testament. In this statement, then, we apparently have a fulfillment that was a fulfillment of–what? How could there be a fulfillment of a prophecy that was never even made?

Jesus claimed another fulfillment of nonprophecy in Luke 24:46. Speaking to his disciples on the night of his alleged resurrection, he said, "Thus it is written and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day." That the resurrection of Christ on the third day was prophesied in the scriptures was claimed also by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4: "For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures." In two different places, then, New Testament writers claimed that the resurrection of the Messiah on the third day had been predicted in the scriptures. Try as they may, however, bibliolaters cannot produce an Old Testament passage that made this alleged third-day prediction. It simply doesn’t exist.

Confronted with a challenge to produce such a scripture, Bill Jackson, a Church-of-Christ preacher from Austin, Texas, said in my debate with him that "the prophecy had to do with the event… and the fleshed-out details need not have been given at the time" (Jackson-Till Debate, p. 20). He had to say something, of course, but all the talk in the world about fleshed-out details doesn’t remove the fact that Jesus plainly said it had been written that he would "rise again from the dead the third day" and that the Apostle Paul agreed that such a prophecy had been written. The claim of a third-day resurrection prediction, then, was just another example of nonprophecy.

In another example, Matthew said that the purchase of the potter’s field with the thirty pieces of silver that Judas cast back to the chief priests and elders fulfilled a prophecy made by Jeremiah: "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was priced, whom certain of the children of Israel did price; and they gave them for the potter’s field as the Lord appointed me" (27:9-10). The only problem is that Jeremiah never wrote anything remotely similar to this, so how could this be a fulfillment of "that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet"? Some scholars have suggested that Matthew was quoting "loosely" a statement that was actually written by Zechariah (11:12-13) rather than Jeremiah. If this is true, then one can only wonder why a divinely inspired writer, being guided by the omniscient Holy Spirit, would have said Jeremiah instead of Zechariah. To offer this as a solution to the problem posed by the passage doesn’t do much to instill confidence in the inerrancy doctrine. Furthermore, if Matthew was indeed referring to Zechariah 11:12-13, then he certainly was "quoting loosely," so loosely, in fact, that any semblance of a connection between the two passages is barely recognizable: "Then I said to them, `If it is agreeable to you, give me my wages; and if not, refrain.’ So they weighed out for my wages thirty pieces of silver. And Yahweh said to me, `Throw it to the potter’–that princely price they set on me. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of Yahweh for the potter" (NKJV). Many versions (RSV, NRSV, JB, NAB, REB, GNB, NWT, Moffatt, and Lamsa’s translation from the Peshitta text) translate this passage to read treasury for potter, and the Septuagint (the Holy Spirit’s favorite version) reads furnace for potter. All of these variations indicate that the meaning of the original certainly wasn’t clear enough to claim this as a prophecy of the purchase of the potter’s field with the money that Judas was paid to betray Jesus. If it was, then fundamentalists owe us an answer to the question posed earlier: Why did a divinely inspired writer attribute to Jeremiah a prophecy that was made by Zechariah? Of course, when bibliolaters talk about "wonderful prophecy fulfillments," they don’t have much to say about this one. The reason why they don’t should be obvious.

Matthew was quite adept at citing nonprophecies. When Joseph took his family to Nazareth upon their return from Egypt, Matthew said that he did so "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophets, that he should be called a Nazarene"(2:23). Bible scholars, however, have been unable to find any statement that any prophet ever made that this could be a reference to. As a matter of fact, the Old Testament prophets never referred to Nazareth, period. The word Nazareth, as well as Nazarene, was never even mentioned in the Old Testament. If this is so, how then could the period of Jesus’s residency in Nazareth have been prophesied by the prophets?

This matter also came up in my debate with Bill Jackson. He tried to circumvent the problem by claiming that the prophecy was only spoken by the prophets and that nothing was said to imply that it had ever been written (Jackson-Till Debate, p. 20).This is at best a far-fetched quibble that fails to take note of the fact that Matthew routinely introduced written "prophecies" by saying that they had been spoken by so-and-so. He said, for example, that the "voice heard in Ramah" had been "spoken through Jeremiah the prophet" (2:17-18). Earlier he had said that the famous virgin-birth prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 had been "spoken by the Lord through the prophet" (1:22). He introduced Isaiah 9:1-2 by saying that this had been "spoken through Isaiah the prophet"(4:14). He introduced Isaiah 42:1-4 by saying that this had been "spoken through Isaiah the prophet" (12:17). There are numerous other examples in Matthew to show that his style was to introduce alleged prophecies by saying that they had been spoken by such and such a prophet. If the prophecy-fulfillment argument offers such wonderful proof of divine inspiration, then, we have every right to demand that bibliolaters show us just where it was prophesied that Jesus would be called a Nazarene as Matthew claimed in the passage cited from his gospel account. How can there be proof of divine inspiration in a prophecy statement that may never have been made?

In two oral debates, my opponents have quibbled that Old Testament scriptures called Jesus a Nazarene when the Messiah was referred to as a "branch" that would come out of Jesse (Is. 11:1; 53:2), because the Hebrew word netser (branch) is the word from which the town of Nazareth derived its name. Strong’s Concordance, however, declares that the name Nazareth is of uncertain derivation, and Eerdmans Bible Dictionary says that the name was derived perhaps from naser, which means watch or neser, "a sprout or descendant" (1987, p. 751). There is obviously scholastic doubt over the linguistic origin of the name Nazareth, and as long as that is true, this "argument" is completely without merit.

PROPHECIES: IMAGINARY AND UNFULFILLED
Farrell Till