Failed prophecy in the bible if one cares to look

[Nay_Sayer]

Already with the "The mods are bullies" route NZ?

[arewethereyet]

Already with the "The mods are bullies" route NZ?

Chickenshit way to back out.  It was either that or go nuclear.  meh

[GrandizerII]

Of course we’re not discussing ancient Tyre in the modern sense - why would we? But ‘nation’ in the ancient sense can also mean ‘city’ or ‘tribe’ (as in the Twelve ‘Nations’ of Israel. 

Tyre was a city then, it’s a city now. Prophecy failed. Get over it.

Boru

Every detail of the prophecy against Tyre came through, including how the destruction would occur:


"This is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah has said, 'Here I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring up against you many nations, just as the sea brings up its waves. And they will certainly bring the walls of Tyre to ruin and tear down her towers, and I will scrape her dust away from her and make her a shining, bare surface of a crag. . . . And your stones and your woodwork and your dust they will place in the very midst of the water."—Ezekiel 26:3, 4, 12


CONFIRMATION OF TYRE'S DESTRUCTION:

"A 19th-century traveler commented on what was left of ancient Tyre in his day, saying: "Of the original Tyre known to Solomon and the prophets of Israel, not a vestige remains except in its rock-cut sepulchres on the mountain sides, and in foundation walls . . . Even the island, which Alexander the Great, in his siege of the city, converted into a cape by filling up the water between it and the mainland, contains no distinguishable relics of an earlier period than that of the Crusades. The modern town, all of which is comparatively new, occupies the northern half of what was once the island, while nearly all the remainder of the surface is covered with undistinguishable ruins."" (Sources: JW.ORG and Encyclopedia Britannica)
https://www.britannica.com/place/Tyre


FYI:  I've had this conversation with atheists at other websites who, unable to overcome the accurate fulfillment of the prophecy against Tyre, are reduced to cherry-picking the single portion of the prophecy that they imagine will support their skepticism: the portion where it says Tyre will never be rebuilt.  The reality is that Tyre, as a Nation, was never rebuilt.  In its place today stands a district with the same name.  A district and a nation are two entirely different things.


That said, I am removing myself from this thread as I obviously will not win an argument with a moderator. 

Many nations here doesn't mean one nation after another. It's just figurative speech. It's a way to say God will bring Tyre to ruin in full force, with Nebuchadnezzar representing those "many nations".

Note the flow to verse 7.

Also, the reason "nations" are mentioned is because of what is said in verse 2.

[Angrboda]

Of course we’re not discussing ancient Tyre in the modern sense - why would we? But ‘nation’ in the ancient sense can also mean ‘city’ or ‘tribe’ (as in the Twelve ‘Nations’ of Israel. 

Tyre was a city then, it’s a city now. Prophecy failed. Get over it.

Boru

Every detail of the prophecy against Tyre came through, including how the destruction would occur:


"This is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah has said, 'Here I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring up against you many nations, just as the sea brings up its waves. And they will certainly bring the walls of Tyre to ruin and tear down her towers, and I will scrape her dust away from her and make her a shining, bare surface of a crag. . . . And your stones and your woodwork and your dust they will place in the very midst of the water."—Ezekiel 26:3, 4, 12


CONFIRMATION OF TYRE'S DESTRUCTION:

"A 19th-century traveler commented on what was left of ancient Tyre in his day, saying: "Of the original Tyre known to Solomon and the prophets of Israel, not a vestige remains except in its rock-cut sepulchres on the mountain sides, and in foundation walls . . . Even the island, which Alexander the Great, in his siege of the city, converted into a cape by filling up the water between it and the mainland, contains no distinguishable relics of an earlier period than that of the Crusades. The modern town, all of which is comparatively new, occupies the northern half of what was once the island, while nearly all the remainder of the surface is covered with undistinguishable ruins."" (Sources: JW.ORG and Encyclopedia Britannica)
https://www.britannica.com/place/Tyre


FYI:  I've had this conversation with atheists at other websites who, unable to overcome the accurate fulfillment of the prophecy against Tyre, are reduced to cherry-picking the single portion of the prophecy that they imagine will support their skepticism: the portion where it says Tyre will never be rebuilt.  The reality is that Tyre, as a Nation, was never rebuilt.  In its place today stands a district with the same name.  A district and a nation are two entirely different things.


That said, I am removing myself from this thread as I obviously will not win an argument with a moderator. 

This is one detail that was definitely incorrect. Alexander built a causeway to the island by dumping the material from the mainland portion of Tyre, but he never placed the stones and woodwork of the island city into the sea, as once the obstacle that the sea presented was no longer a problem given the existence of his causeway, there would have been no point. That morons like our friend here think that, after building his causeway, and conquering the city, Alexander proceeded to have his men tear down the buildings and toss them into the sea. Only a complete idiot finds that a reasonable conjecture.

The Tyre prophecy is shot through with multiple failures, starting with the idea that Nebuchaddnezzar would seize Tyre -- it never happened.



The details have been thoroughly discussed and shown to be in error as prophecy. The only people who defend the Tyre prophecy are people who can't stomach the bible not being literally true from end to end. Defenders of the Tyre prophecy are nutjobs who cherry-pick this or that detail, while ignoring the details where the prophecy failed. You have to be crazy or stupid to defend this prophecy.

And it's really beyond pointless, as there is an argument concerning prophecy that says that it need not be fulfilled to be valid prophecy. The argument is that if a prophecy of destruction failed to come to pass, it's because the actors involved heeded the warning and amended their behavior, thus obviating the need for the punishment prophesied. Biblical apologetics is filled with this sort of "heads I win, tails you lose" logic. All it shows is how gullible believers can be.

[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

[arewethereyet]

Prophecies are like horoscopes in that you can make them fit if you just bend them around enough.

[Nay_Sayer]

Prophecies are like horoscopes in that you can make them fit if you just bend them around enough.

Which also happens to be the philosophy of the adult film industry, only it isn't with horoscopes

[Paleophyte]

It's a bit of a problem that Tyre was never destroyed. The closest that it came was when it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, when it was partially destroyed. If you live in a magic realm where 'partly destroyed' = 'destroyed and never rebuilt' I suppose it's close enough, but the rest of us will point and laugh. At no point was Tyre without inhabitants, or even less than a city. In no way was it rubble fit only for fishermen to dry their nets. Alexander himself worked to ensure that Tyre didn't suffer that fate, having recognised its strategic importance. Tyre was so not destroyed that we have coins produced in Tyre and issued by the city mint from the late 320s, just a few years after the conquest. Tyre is widely regarded as one of the most ancient continuously inhabited cities on Earth.

Somewhat more importantly, the prophecy in Ezekiel isn't about Alexander. It's about the siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezekiel 26:7), and it's pretty clear that it was old Neb who was supposed to destroy Tyre. Despite a 13-year siege, the Babylonians never managed to take the island portion of the city. The passage in Ezekiel 29:18 appears to acknowledge this, indicating that Neb and his army 'got no reward from the campaign against Tyre'. Amusingly, since Ezekiel was clearly written during or after the siege, this would count as failed current events rather than prophecy. You lot need better editors for your fiction.

[Paleophyte]

Prophecies are like horoscopes in that you can make them fit if you just bend them around enough.

Well, to a degree. When the prophecy pretty clearly states that 'X will happen and King Y will do it', but X doesn't happen and King Y has been worm food for a few millennia, it's pretty safe to say that no amount of bending will do the job.

Much of the difficulty with Biblical prophecy arises from the fact that they aren't even supposed to do that. We treat them that way because we understand them through the lens of Hellenistic prophecies that we're familiar with through the Oracle of Delphi and such. The difficulty is that all of the prophecies in the Old Testament are from a Hebrew tradition, which treats prophecy in a totally different way. To them, the passage in Ezekiel reads as instructions that 'If Nebuchadnezzar destroys Tyre then...' And if he doesn't then it won't. The Jews didn't have a problem with this because the prophecies weren't failed, just unfulfilled. People hadn't done their part and nothing more was expected to happen. It's just a story of some heathen king fucking it all up.

Then along comes Jesus, and his little sect gets spun into a Roman mystery cult, and along the way, a lot of Hebrew prophecy gets misinterpreted through a completely different cultural lens. The resulting cultural confusion produces the incoherent rambling now known as Biblical prophecy.

[GrandizerII]

Exactly, we are getting sidetracked by the whole thing about Alexander the Great or modern Tyre. Ezekiel 26 was clearly about Tyre in the time the passage was authored, which would've probably been when Nebuchadnezzar was in the middle of besieging Tyre. It was never intended to be about some event hundreds or thousands of years later.

The only good argument NZ had in response was Ezekiel 26 mentioning "many nations" at the start, but even then when you look at the whole context, it was not meant to be taken literally. Here lies the challenge with understanding prophetic books in the Old Testament (like Ezekiel). You frequently see a mixture of verses meant to be taken figuratively and verses meant to be taken literally, and even sometimes both simultaneously.

That said, if you start from the very first verse and read all the way to the end of the chapter, you will see things more clearly (like why "many nations" is mentioned at the start).