re: #44 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I recall meeting a mathematics doctoral candidate who tells me that he believed in Jesus because of how all of the Old Testament prophecies has been fulfilled in the new Testament.

I did not even bother to broach the possibility that the NT might have been “tweaked” to fit the OT, as that was something he obviously could not accept.

Had the OT been lost and forgotten and rediscovered only after the OT was written, then he might have had a case, but that was never the case.

What the NT writers did is take various bits and pieces of the prophetic books and arbitrarily assigned them to Jesus. When one reads the quotes in context they are either not prophecies at all, or they are prophecies related to very specific events that by that time had already come to pass.

Now, such “midrashic” interpretations were arguably within the Jewish tradition, and indeed some of the out-of-context verses used to support Jesus were also seen as messianic by other Jewish sects, so the NT writers weren’t unique here. But the fact remains - if you can cherrypick various unrelated verses out of their context, you can postdict anyone.