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Prophets

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Submitted By gusnpoe
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To many Christians the Prophets are seen as being predictors of the Messiah, but it can be argued that one can take any tidbit of information from a source (not just the bible) and use it, whether within context or out of context, to support one’s argument. In my opinion, as far as the prophets are concerned, just because the prophets seem to predict the coming of the Messiah because of the parallels that have been drawn between the books of the prophets and the New Testament does not necessarily mean that they were able to predict the future—it means that the New Testament authors such as Matthew had either heard or could refer back to the writings of the Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, Micah, and Hosea. The problem is not that the authors of the New Testament were trying to build a bridge to the old; the problem is that over time the people have come to think like Borg did in his period of “pre critical naïveté” that “the prophets were supernaturally inspired predictions of Jesus”. For me, the skeptic, it seemed all too convenient that the Old and New Testaments would match up so well in the seemingly never ending series of predictions and fulfillment; almost like the Nostradamus nonsense that you hear about on the History Channel. I wondered what it was that made people make this jump, this connection. That’s when I read that this way of reading the prophets had been reinforced by the best selling book “Halley’s Bible Handbook” which dated back to 1924. According to Borg the central claim of the handbook is that “by the time we reach the end of the Old Testament, the entire story of Christ has been pre-written and pre-figured.” Borg also says that the handbook takes it a step further than that by saying that not only were the prophet’s predictions proof that Jesus was the messiah, but that it proved the truth and supernatural origin of the bible.

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