Cont'd
Failed or Faked Prophecies
Christians, like non-Christians, would like to know in advance what may happen in future. Life is so unpredictable! How nice it would be if somehow, we can know in advance what lies hidden in the murkiness of our tomorrows! Not only do they have such a desire, they think some of their members actually have such a special ability. They are called "prophets". They think that the arrival of Jesus as their messiah or savior had long been "predicted" by their prophets in the sacred books they call their old testament (OT). They think that their prophets had been given their gifts by God himself. Like St. Paul, they think that what to man is impossible, is to their God possible. Or so they believe. Since their desire to be delivered from their miseries is so strong, they try their best to detect any inkling of the arrival of their future messiah from what is reported to have been said by their "prophets". As Tobin says, they interpret passages as prophecy that are not prophetic at all or reinterpret prophetic passages that had nothing to do with their Messiah. "Modern scholarship has shown that most of these so-called messianic prophecies in the OT do not refer to Jesus or the Messiah. Critical historical scholars identify fewer than half a dozen passages in the OT as genuinely messianic." he says. Yet, even in these cases, they refer to people and events of their own time, not to the distant future. ( see J Alberto Soggin Introduction to the Old Testament 1987 257).
Christians often confuse their wish with reality! Matthew thus interpreted Hosea 11:2 as a prophecy of the holy family from after the death of Herod (Mt. 2:14-15) when it was really just talking about the return of the Israelites during the Exodus and Isaiah 7:14 is cited as a prophecy of Jesus' miraculous birth to a virgin (Mt. 1:22-23) when in fact that passage has nothing to do with virgin birth at all since the Hebrew word used (almah) means not a "virgin" but merely a "young woman.". Matthew himself had used the Greek translation of the Bible which mistakenly translated the Hebrew word almah into parthenos or virgin! (Ludemann Virgin Birth 70). In fact, the whole context in which the "prophecy" in Isaiah 7: 10-17 refers to what happened at the prophet's own time and had nothing to do with events of the distant future ( see Miller Born Divine 93-94)
To Tobin, what is even more fatal to Christian beliefs is that what are thought to be prophecies of its prophets have failed as such e.g.
1. Isaiah 19:5-7 written almost 3000 years ago, claims that the Nile would dry up during its day, yet even today, the Nile is still there.
2. Isaiah 17:1-2 claims that Damascus, the capital of Syria, will cease to be a city forever. What would the inhabitants of that city now think?
3. Ezekiel 26:7-14 predicted that Nebuchadnezzar will destroy the city of Tyre yet even by the prophet's own later admission in Ezekiel. 29:17-20, the prophecy had failed.
4. Ezekiel 29: 8-12 predicted that Egypt would become desolate, completely uninhabited and Egyptians would be scattered to other countries yet there has not been such an Egyptian diaspora.
5. Ezekiel 29: 19-20 predicted that Nebuchadnezzar will conquer Egypt but he never did.
6. Jeremiah 36:30 prophesied that Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, shall have no successor yet 2 Kings 24:6 says that he was succeeded by his son.
7. the author of the book attributed to Daniel predicted in Daniel 11:45 where Antiochus IV (ca 215-164 BCE) would die somewhere between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea but he died in Persia. Although in the first part of the book Daniel is narrated in the third person, later portions of it clearly presents itself as being written by Daniel himself e.g (Daniel 7:1. 28; 8:2; 9:2, 10:1, 2 and 12:4 & 5) where the prophet presents itself as written in around the 6th century BCE. Modern scholars are now agreed that Daniel was written a year or two after 167 BCE (Anderson A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament 1979 211 Soggin op cit. 477). A detailed treatment of Daniel's prophecies can be found in cap 7 of Tim Callahan's Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? 149-77) Tobin says that even as early as the 3rd century, Porphyry (234-ca 305) had already pointed out that Daniel was remarkably accurate for events written up to the desecration of the Temple of Jerusalem in 167 BCE but it is now thought by scholars that that was because they were not "predictions" at all but were in fact "postdictions" written "after" the relevant events but presented as if they were written before them, a favourite trick used also by modern "mediums" to win credence for their "supernatural" powers and for the purposes of personal gain!
Forgeries in the Bible
It is well known that to win credibility. sometimes, works written by A, a relatively unknown author, are deliberately presented to the world as written by B, someone more famous. Such writings are called pseudepigraphy (literally false writing). Thus Jewish writings outside of their canons such as the books of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, Wisdom of Solomon and the Psalms of Solomon are well known to have been written much later than the time of their supposed authors. Christian pseudepigraphy outside of the canon includes works like 2 Corinthians, the gospel of Thomas, Letter of Peter to James (found in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies) . All such works are falsely attributed to the relevant apostles. ( See Bart Ehrman Lost Scriptures: Books that Did not make it to the New Testament 2003; Willis Barnstone The Other Bible 2005)
The next question one would ask is: are there pseudepigraphy even within the canonical Christian Bible? According to Tobin, the answer is something known for years by critical Biblical scholars: an "unequivocal Yes". Examples include the following:
1. the book of Daniel ( see Anderson op cit 209-12 and Soggin op cit. 475-78)
2. some portions of Psalms (Anderson op cit 179-180)
3. the later part of Isiah ( Anderson op cit 113, 119-120 and Soggin op cit 299)
4. the so-called Pastoral Epistles like 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus are considered by the vast majority of scholars ( some 80-90% according to Brown Introduction to the New Testament 1997 639, 654, 673) NOT to have been written by Paul but by someone else around 100 CE for, inter alia, the following reasons:
(a) such epistles were only first mentioned by Irenaeus around 185 BCE and the arch Paulinist Marcion (d.ca 160) seemed unaware of their existence (cf. 1 Corinthians which was quoted as early as 95 CE by Clement (1 Clement 47) (see David L Barr New Testament Story: An Introduction 1995 169 G A Wells The Jesus Myth 1999 79, 270 n32)
(b) In the authentic epistles, Paul always referred to the Gentiles as "you" (e.g. Romans 11:13; 1 Corinthians 12:2) but in Titus, he used the first person plural "we" (Titus 3:3) to include himself as one of them. This is not characteristic of his habit. (Barr op cit 171)
(c) At the time Paul wrote the authentic Epistles, an organized church had not yet come into existence and there were still many different kinds of believers like prophets, apostles and miracle workers etc. and they spoke whenever they wanted to and there was no one truly in charge (1 Corinthinas 11: 33; 12: 28 and 14: 26-33) but in the Pastoral Epistles, we find a hierarchy of paid and formally appointed offices for bishops, presbyters and deacons (1 Timothy 3: 1-7; 4: 14; 5: 27 and Titus 1: 5-9) (Barr 170 & Udo Schnelle The History of the New Testament Writings 1994 170)
(d) in the genuine Pauline Epistles, he expected an apocalyptic end of the world within his own lifetime or those of his flock (1 Corinthians 7: 29-31; 1 Thessalonians 4: 15-17) but in the Pastoral Epistles, "Paul" is already making provisions for the death of his followers to pass on his teachings (2 Timothy 2:1-14) (Werner G Kummel Introduction to the New testament 1973 382)
(e)About 36% of the the 848 different words used in the Pastorals are not found anywhere else in the rest of the 10 letters of Paul and of this unique vocabulary, 211 words are commonly used by 2nd century writers. (Barr 169 Erhman 357)
(f) even words shared by genuine Pauline Epistles and the Pastorals like "faith" have different meanings. In the genuine Epistles, "faith" means a sense of trust in Jesus's redemptive power (e.g. Romans 1: 16-17) but in the Pastorals, they seem to mean the body of teachings of the church (e.g. Titus 1: 13)
5. Colossians, Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians are also considered pseudonymous (Brown op 591, 600, 621)
6. 2 Peter is unanimously considered to be pseudonymous (Brown 762)
7. 1 Peter is similarly considered pseudonymous per L Michael White of U of Texas at Austin, its authenticity is "now doubted by almost all modern scholars" ( From Jesus to Christianity 272)
8. James and Jude are also generally considered pseudepigraphical (Brown 726 Schnelle History of Theology 417)
According to Tobin, this is a really serious matter. Forgeries are deliberate attempts to deceive! Some defenders of the faith try to sidestep the stigma of fraud by claiming for example that notwithstanding the same, they do contain some "higher truths" and they use such euphemistic terms as "pseudepigraphia" or "pseudonymity" to lessen the impact of the gravity of such words as fraud or forgery. Others claim that while they might not have been written by Paul or James or Jude, they were written with their approval as "extension of his thought" (Brown 586) and still others argue that the ancients accepted pseudepigraphy as something "normal" and that to see them as "deception" would be " a great misunderstanding of the ancient world, imposing our modern concepts of authorship and copyright most inappropriately. (Barr 158)" But this does not seem to work. 2 Thessalonians tells its readers "not to be deceived" by "a letter as from us" ( referring to I Thessalonians ). In doing so, it is in effect calling 1 Thessalonians ( in which Paul says that the the apocalpyse is near) a deceptive letter from the genuine Paul: the forger claiming that the original was a fake! ( See Gerd Ludemann's Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity 1996 108-19). Whilst it may be true that pseudepigraphia might have been more common in those days, that does not mean that they ought to be condoned. In fact one of the early church father Tertullian (ca 160-ca 225) told of a story of how the forger of 3 Corinthians, a Christian presbyster was convicted by the ecclesiastical authority for falsely attributing it to Paul ( Bart Ehrman Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faith We Never Knew 2003 30-32, 210 The New Testament: A History Introduction to the Early Christian Writings 2000 341-44) As Ehrman said in his new book Jesus Interrupted 116, the ancients used words like pseudon (a lie) and nothon (a bastard child) to describe forgeries. Yet we find so many examples of such forgeries in the Bible. The Christian fundamentalists must seriously consider their view that their Bible is God-inspired and contains the word of God, so much like what is said in the forged 2 Timothy 3:16 " Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for instruction in righteousness."!
If the Bible is so full of inconsistent views, if the story of the the Exodus, the Patriarchal Narratives and the Conquest, the birth of Jesus, once thought to be historical, are so riddled with improbabilities and so akin to myths and legends, if the prophecies of the Bible are so often faked or failed or subjected to such false interpretations or reinterpretations and if the fundamental faith of so many Bible-believing Christians that their sacred book is inerrant as containing the very words of God is in fact the words of a forger, how then can we still consider it to "inspired" by God, as we are so often told by our preachers?
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