Bible prophecies

[The Grand Nudger]

If you have a spare 0.5 year, get into the “A Marginal Jew” series. He does the question of where standard historical criteria takes us extremely well. Not one for the Rapture Ready people, though.

This "A Marginal Jew" that begins laying out it's case by an invocation of the embarrassing "embarrassment" argument? Tell me it gets better from there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Meier

Now Jesus had no reason to say the Temple had a big wrecking ball headed its way. He could have declared it redundant, like he did ritual Torah. But he said it was to be destroyed giving detail, and used apocalyptic language to indicate that this was central to his program (see reply above).

Regardless of whether or not we want to put this in the mouth of jesus or some later author the writing would have been on the wall. The first Roman-Jewish war either loomed or had already occurred- and it didn't come out of nowhere. It would happen twice again. To the romans, these folks were a perennial pain in the ass.

I'd like to see what you mean with regards to detail. What detail?

He repeated the point with the symbolic cleansing of the Temple/ cursing of the fig tree incident. In other words, he wrote very theological big cheques which, at the time reality looked unlikely to honour (things were relatively peaceful).

Hehehehe, Darth Jesus, tk pushing tables and force choking plants. Relatively peaceful? During what time? 7-23CE we see roman pacification...but that's a deceptive word isn't it? I doubt the romans were pacifying the area with smiles and handouts. By somewhere around 40ce we're talking rioting in the streets. Caligulas death bought, maybe, another 5 years before insurgents started to operate within the borders of the empire. I can;t stand back and look at all of this and decide that the time period was relatively peaceful - or even remotely peaceful. Clearly, these folks had grievances which would manifest themselves sporadically as revolts, rebellions, and insurrections. I only mention all of this because it's as generous as I can be with regards to the claim. Had there been a jesus, and had he made such a prediction - it would be like me "prophesying" that our adventures in the middle east would fail - back in 2003. We've no shortage of that sort of "prophesy" today - and they probably didn't have any shortage of it then. All of this becomes moot point if the narrative was written or took it's final form after the events took place, of course.

However he got it right. Now if you don't believe there is prophecy at all, because there is no God, then this won't change your mind. But on the basis of what solid history can be got from this, it fits rather more comfortably with a Christian worldview than with an alternative worldview.

Whomever "he" was...whenever "he" was writing, sure. The subjects of "prophecy" and "god" are in no way inextricably bound to each other. I don't believe in "prophecy" because we have no examples of it. We have plenty of examples of claimed prophecy from all around the world. All are fatuous, none meet the bar I set for evidence - and most are fairly easy to conceptualize as passable guesses - at most - of an entirely unremarkable sort (as the "prophecy" above would appear to be no matter how we approach it). It wouldn't matter to me if someone claimed prophesy handed down from god or a toaster. I'd call bs on the "prophecy" bit all by itself.

I'm left wondering what a "christian worldview" is, and how it has any relationship with history at all. What's the alternative? A factual worldview?