Prophecy doesn't make sense

[The Grand Nudger]

Retconning christ was a lucrative business. Funny thing, ofc, is that the OT doesn't say any such thing, and the christians failed to sufficiently retcon christ even to the tortured horoscope-style beliefs they held. Apologia.

Still, we think that something like that also happened with the OT narratives. Particularly because we know that they're a product of exile and diaspora literature - but they purport to recount specific viewpoints in a pre-exile community. Like any other psuedo-history, we suspect that the author added detail - but it's neither beyond the realm of plausibility or entirely without hard evidence that there were critics at the time espousing those viewpoints and, in the full light of history...even if the region didn't fall for their stated reasons..it most assuredly did fall.

If the world ended, and fox was reporting......sort of thing.

Just as the later writers and compilers of the christian narrative preached an immanent destruction as an effort to mimic the style of those earlier complaints and play on those same human behaviors and impulses that doomism enjoys......

[zwanzig]

Take the instance of the prophecy of Jesus' birth. It was prophesied in the OT, apparently. Considering that the NT was written afterwards, it's really simple to create the Jesus character to match what was already written would happen.

Biblical prophecy is nothing more than that. A farce.

I was thinking the same thing about the Messiah prophecy where he's expected to come riding into the city on a mule or a colt. IF we allow that Christ as a person actually existed, and he was Jewish, growing up and learning those prophecies...how hard would it be to say, "Well, I want people to believe I'm the guy. So, I'll do the things they say the guy is supposed to do, to further emphasize my claim to be THE guy."

[The Grand Nudger]

Jesus the Man never seemed to get around to repelling the foreign invaders or crushing all other nations beneath his superior davidic boot.

[Lightbearer]

The thing with OT prophesies is that you may think it's come true until you discover the prophecy was made after the event such as the fall of Jerusalem, prophesied some 60 years after the event.

[The Grand Nudger]

The entire OT was written after the events it references, loosely, and those events are offset centuries in time from their OT setting. It's an establishment legend, not a crystal ball.

[Ferrocyanide]

I was thinking about the nature of prophesies today and it occurred to me that tying something that happens to something someone said previously and trying to hold that up as supernatural, doesn't actually make sense.

I thought about putting a caveat on that, like, "Well, if it's super specific..." but no, that falls prey to the same flaw as regular, vague/ poetic prophecy does.

A prophecy is "you have told me how this will happen." You have given me directions to follow. If I want to fulfill a prophecy, I could(or likewise, anyone else who comes along with the intent to do so). The fact that I do so, doesn't mean you actually predicted the future. And isn't that poisoning your control group if you tell people a prophecy? There's no way after that to determine if the future was predicted or some one did something to fulfill it deliberately. 

The only way you could know a prophecy was real and true is to blind fold the prophecy speaker, take them to an unfamiliar place, and keeping them blindfolded, they predict things happening mere seconds before they do. 

Or, you predict a bunch of stuff, write it all down, but don't tell anyone, then lock the prophesies in a box with the date you locked it written inside. It would have to be untouched until after the prophesies were fulfilled and you'd need to prove without a doubt no one heard them before, after, or during the locking it in a box. Then you could open it and see all these super specific things and dates that were predicted before they happened. But proving a prophecy IS a prophecy and not just directions in a scam, is a very unhelpful magic trick at that point.

It depends on the prophecy.
If it is about a natural disaster, for example, you claim that on Thursday, Mar 11, 2021, 1:31 PM an earthquake will hit some specific city, on the richter scale the level will be 6.1, the number of deaths will be 102 with 50 males and 52 females. Building X and Y will crumble down.
You can make this prophecy 5000 y ago or 10 y ago. I doubt that any human can generate an earthquake and have this specific number of deaths, and mention a specific building on a specific street will collapse.

I also doubt that any human has an ultra high detailed computer simulation that can predict things to that level of detail.

If you make your prediction 5000 y ago, we have to assume that future humans will not take your prediction seriously.
Imagine if the guy believes the prediction and decides not to build Building X in that city.

If your prediction is sort of like the Bible, which claims that the messiah will come through some city gate riding a donkey on Thursday, Mar 11, 2021, 1:31 PM, ...well anyone can read your book and then it turns into a play, a theater, a cinema.

--Ferrocyanide

[Mister Agenda]

Take the instance of the prophecy of Jesus' birth. It was prophesied in the OT, apparently. Considering that the NT was written afterwards, it's really simple to create the Jesus character to match what was already written would happen.

Biblical prophecy is nothing more than that. A farce.

I was thinking the same thing about the Messiah prophecy where he's expected to come riding into the city on a mule or a colt. IF we allow that Christ as a person actually existed, and he was Jewish, growing up and learning those prophecies...how hard would it be to say, "Well, I want people to believe I'm the guy. So, I'll do the things they say the guy is supposed to do, to further emphasize my claim to be THE guy."

That always makes me think of Rodeo Jesus; Matthew hedged his bets and had him ride BOTH a colt and a donkey.