Prophesies in the Bible

[Mr Greene]

Easy to write a prophecy after the fact.

Well, that is what I want to know.
When a book was written (and probably who wrote them).
How do they figure out if a book was written before or after the fact

Everything prior to Ezra was written around 450 BCE.
The "prophets" and their "prophesies" are fictional.
There is also the fact that a number of the NT books were rewritten to have the main character fulfill these "prophesies", eg.
The Messiah is supposed to come from Bethlehem, one gospel admits that Jesus never came from there, but tried to cover it by claiming it didn't matter. A second gospel took the position that he did  but stuck strictly to Jewish prophesies. A third threw caution to the wind and had line-up of astrology, greek mythology, persian mythology, a long dead roman governor, a non-existent census and mass murder.

[Minimalist]

I think you'll find this interesting.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/chris...aniel.html

Whenever critical scholars point out that Daniel's purported predictions were written after the fact, Christian believers routinely retort that they are merely showing a philosophical prejudice against the possibility of supernatural prophecy. Actually, it is not a question of philosophical presuppositions, but a question of hard evidence and inference to the best explanation. Daniel's "predictions" of events up to the desecration of the Temple in 167 BC and the beginning of the Maccabean revolt substantially came true--yet its predictions of a new invasion of Egypt by Antiochus and the Resurrection of the Dead soon thereafter totally failed. The author correctly "predicted" the rise of Alexander the Great, and the history of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings, but he fared far worse in his predictions that God would supernaturally slay Antiochus Epiphanes, raise the dead, and inaugurate the messianic age in 163 BC. The most likely explanation of this strange pattern is that these prophecies were first composed just before the time they started to fail by an author who had no genuine talent for predicting the future.

Enjoy.