The Big Questions About Jesus 预览

Did Jesus Fulfill Prophecy?

Some years ago, I started writing my autobiography. I got through a fair chunk of writing, and now I’m taking a break. I realized how many weird and wonderful twists and turns my life has had! It’s certainly not going the way anyone – even I – predicted it would! On that basis, you can understand how I find it very difficult to predict my future!

From the very start of Christianity, followers of Jesus have claimed the coming and work of Jesus were a direct fulfillment of prophecy, that is, of predicting the future. The Old Testament, written centuries before Jesus was born, is full of detailed promises about the coming Messiah, so many that it’s difficult to dismiss them as imaginings.

Here is one example of a “Messianic Prophecy.” Micah 5:2 says the Messiah would come from Bethlehem. Prophecies such as this are so precise in their details that critics of Christianity used to say that these prophecies were written after the fact. However, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s and early 1950s changed all that forever. Those scrolls contained parts of every book of the Old Testament of the Bible, except one. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls could be dated firmly to before the time of Jesus, this proved definitively that these prophecies existed even many hundreds of years before Jesus was born. They were determined to have been written between 500 to 1,000 years before his birth.

Peter Stoner was an American mathematician and astronomer in the 20th century. He calculated the odds of eight of these Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament being fulfilled from when they were made until our day. Messianic is from the word “messiah,” the Jewish word for the Savior who would come. Stoner took eight of these prophecies and ran the numbers. What he discovered was staggering! He found the probability of these eight prophecies being fulfilled in one man was

1/100,000,000,000,000,000 = 1 x 1017.

With those kinds of ‘odds,’ I don’t believe there’s any coincidence about the life of Jesus. This calculation moves Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection beyond probability to certainty: Jesus was someone special, and he was who he said he was.

– Eliezer Gonzalez