Bible prophecies

[The Grand Nudger]

Much as I admire your disagreement with the academic world on the criterion of embarrassment, you might want to rethink. I had read the whole passage, am fully aware of the limitations of that and every other of the normally used criteria, and indeed JPM has a section devoted to the uses and limitations.

Good, we're on the same page. Since you brought up theology, and since you declared the message to be full of it - then that's that, by the standards of the criteria. I'm not sure why we're still talking about it?

If you declare judgement on Israel, state that destruction of the Temple within a generation is an essential part of that judgement, and the Temple survives, your whole program is shot. Best to not make those sorts of predictions. Unless you're sure.

Meh, hardly. The "prophets" in the OT got things wrong and yet judaism not only survived, it spawned two more faiths. There is value in simply making a statement, something that clearly wasn't lost on the "prophets" as they variously chimed in on the fates of the northern or southern kingdoms (whichever was fashionable to rail against at any given moment) in much the same way as the jesus character does in his own narrative. As min is fond of saying, Tyre is still here - and I would add, so are the jews.

Actually, this is spot on. That's exactly what Jesus was doing. Although I might want to add that it didn't take any prophetic gift to work out that by attacking the Pax Romana, the national authorities and the religious beliefs of a large section of the population, you were going to have Health and Safety issues. It was, in short, a really stupid thing to do.

There goes that criteria of embarrassment again. It's like you're intentionally trying to tank it or something.