Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, an old-earth Creationist ministry, claims that the Bible has thousands of fulfilled prophecies. We’re critiquing his top 13. Keep in mind that Ross has a doctorate in physics, so he’s no dummy . . . well, at least not in physics.

Let’s continue with part 2 (part 1 here).

4. Psalms and Zechariah both predicted the execution of Jesus.

These books described the crucifixion and correctly stated that no bones would be broken (not true of many crucifixions).

Ross gives three Old Testament references.

• “[Yahweh] protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken” (Psalm 34:20). This is a psalm of praise, and one of the many good things God does is protect his favored people from injury. How is this a prophecy, let alone a flawless prophecy of the crucifixion, resurrection, and atonement of Jesus?
• “They will look on me [that is, God], the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son” (Zechariah 12:10). In this chapter, God is listing what he will do to protect Judah from enemies. The only suggestion of the passion narrative is the word “pierced.”
• Psalm 22 is the final citation. I’ve discussed that in detail, but in brief, Psalm 22 is about the woes of Israel, portrayed metaphorically as an abused man. There are as many elements of the psalm that can’t be shoehorned into the crucifixion narrative as there are parallels, hardly what we’d expect from the “100% accurate” prophecy of a god.

It’s ridiculous to imagine that these feeble connections to the Jesus story are anything but imagined, especially when Ross claims that the chance of the Bible saying what it does in this instance without this being a fulfilled prophecy is 1/10¹³. Where is the resurrection? Where is the explanation for Jesus’s sacrifice?

5. Isaiah predicted that Cyrus would destroy unassailable Babylon and free the Jewish exiles.

“Isaiah made this prophecy 150 years before Cyrus was born, 180 years before Cyrus performed any of these feats (and he did, eventually, perform them all), and 80 years before the Jews were taken into exile.”

Ross cites three verses from Isaiah (44:28, 45:1, and 45:13) in which God declares that Cyrus is his anointed, who he will help to “subdue nations”; Cyrus will command that Jerusalem be rebuilt; and Cyrus will set free the Jewish exiles held in Babylon without demanding a ransom.

These verses are so glowing and accurate that it’s almost like Cyrus became the champion of the Jews and then they honored him (and gave the credit to God) by writing this account. And that’s indeed what almost surely happened. Isaiah the prophet lived in the mid- to late-eighth century BCE, and he only wrote the first 39 chapters. Chapters 40–55 were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and the final version of the book was only completed around 70 BCE.

6. Babylon was said to be indestructible, and yet both Isaiah and Jeremiah accurately predicted its ruin.

To see why Babylon was considered so formidable, just look at its size. It was 196 miles square and enclosed by a double wall, each of which was 330 feet high and 90 feet thick. “These prophets further claimed that the ruins would be avoided by travelers, that the city would never again be inhabited, and that its stones would not even be moved for use as building material.”

Let’s pause and consider the size of these fortifications. Take Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and stack another on top. That’s roughly the height and thickness of this wall. Now make it 196 miles long, and then make a second identical wall. That would be a big construction project now, and this was the sixth century BCE.

Wikipedia gives Babylon’s maximum area at 2200 acres, which could be enclosed by a wall just seven miles in circumference. We actually have several contemporary estimates of the size of Babylon’s fortifications, some far more modest than the dimensions Ross cites.

Ross can’t be faulted for inaccurate reporting from ancient historians, but he can be for highlighting data he likes without even acknowledging the contradicting evidence.

Ross points us to Isaiah 13:17–22, which does indeed declare that God will overthrow Babylon and that Babylon “will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations.” Jeremiah 51:26 and :43 repeat that Babylon will be “desolate forever.” But, once again, when we read the verses closely, we find that Ross hasn’t told us the whole story.

• God will destroy Babylon “like Sodom and Gomorrah” (Isaiah 13:19). Unlike prophecy #5, there is no mention of God using Cyrus as his tool. God will personally destroy it in Sodom-and-Gomorrah fashion—that is, with fire and brimstone. Where’s the evidence of this?
• It also states that on this terrible day when God opens his can of whoop-ass on Babylon, “The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light” (Is. 13:10), and the land will be made desolate and the sinners destroyed. “I [God] will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins.” The destruction of Babylon is highlighted, but this is just a part of a worldwide (or at least regional) judgment.
• When will all this happen? Isaiah 13:22 tells us: “[Babylon’s] time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.” But if Isaiah wrote this part of the book before 700 BCE and Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE, Ross must explain the delay.
• Jeremiah 51 also makes this bold prediction: “The sea will rise over Babylon; its roaring waves will cover her.” Didn’t happen. Babylon is hundreds of miles from the sea and about 35 meters above sea level. Ross could argue that this was hyperbole, but to maintain his claim that “the Bible is 100% without error,” he enters dangerous territory. He has given himself permission to decide himself what’s literal and what’s figurative.
• Both Isaiah and Jeremiah were edited after Cyrus, so they’re not even reliable historical accounts.
• Babylon would never again be inhabited? Wrong again. Cyrus didn’t destroy Babylon but used the city, as did the next king, Darius the Great. The New Testament even refers to “The church that is at Babylon” (1 Peter 5:13).

Six prophecies down and seven to go—who thinks they’ll get any better? Continued in part 3.

See also: 8 Tests for Accurate Prophecy and Why Bible Prophecies Fail

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/21/16.)

Image credit: U.S. Geological Survey, public domain
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Reasons to Believe is an old-earth Creationist ministry, which means that they accept science’s age of the earth but reject evolution. They claim that science supports the Bible and that “the Bible is 100% without error.”

Hugh Ross of RtB says that there are thousands of accurate biblical prophecies. From those, he has picked out 13 to highlight in “Fulfilled Prophecy: Evidence for the Reliability of the Bible.”

Let’s see if 13 is a lucky number for Dr. Ross.

Prophecies in the Bible

He begins:

Approximately 2,500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2,000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter—no errors. . . .

Since the probability for any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 10²⁰⁰⁰. (emphasis added)

I love it when apologists rely on volume over accuracy. “Uh, okay I know that most of these UFO reports are crap, but if we say that each has just a one percent chance of being accurate, when you consider the enormous number of them, this is very strong evidence!”

Uh huh. Does the same logic make astrology accurate, too?

Ross again:

The acid test for identifying a prophet of God is recorded by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:21–22. According to this Bible passage (and others), God’s prophets, as distinct from Satan’s spokesmen [by this he means mediums and clairvoyants such as Jeanne Dixon or Edgar Cayce], are 100 percent accurate in their predictions. There is no room for error.

Ross cites a passage from Deuteronomy, but I notice that he excluded the preceding verse, which demands death for any false prophet. He’s claiming that all of his prophecies came true perfectly, so consider the upcoming critique to see how he does. Ross says that there is “no room for error”? We’ll return to that claim uncomfortably often to check.

1. The book of Daniel predicts the crucifixion of Jesus.

Daniel predicted that the Messiah would begin his public ministry 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem, that the Messiah would be killed, and that the second destruction of Jerusalem would follow. “Abundant documentation shows that these prophecies were perfectly fulfilled in the life (and crucifixion) of Jesus Christ.”

“Probability of chance fulfillment = 1 in 10⁵.”

I’ve written at length about the various interpretations of Daniel. Christians have several, so Ross would get pushback from other Christians who believe in a contradictory interpretation.

I’ll let that earlier post discuss the details of what Daniel says, but note that the Bible doesn’t record a decree to rebuild Jerusalem, it records four of them.* Apologists pick the one that best serves their calculations and hope no one notices the others.

The interpretation that best fits the facts has the book written, not by Daniel in the sixth century BCE, but by an unknown author around 167 BCE. The atonement and the end of the world were expected in about 164 BCE. (More.)

I would say more about the probabilities assigned to each individual prophecy, but there’s not much to say. Ross justifies these values with little more than that they come “from a group of secular research scientists.” Presumably, Ross wants the fact that they’re not Christian to show that they’re objective, but without their work, these numbers are based on nothing.

How would you even assign a probability to this one given that there’s a plausible and completely natural explanation? There was no fulfilled prophecy, so the calculation is meaningless.

2. The prophet Micah names Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah.

Matthew 2 says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and cites the relevant verses in Micah 5 as prophecy. But since Matthew had read this “prophecy,” this makes him an unreliable source to report the fulfillment of that prophecy.

There is even a scholarly term for this error, vaticinia ex eventu, which means “prophecies after the event.” It’s like saying, “I predict that it will be sunny yesterday.” That may be correct, but it’s hardly a prophecy.

What does it say about the Bible’s historical reliability when historians need such a term? This is the kind of error that Christians would spot in an instant in a claim from another religion, and yet Christians like Ross either don’t notice or have a different standard for their religion’s prophecies.

Ross is right that Micah refers to Bethlehem as the birthplace of someone important:

Though you [Bethlehem] are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel. (Micah 5:2)

However, we must read it in context. Micah was written when Assyria was attacking both Israel and Judea. This “ruler” would be the one to lead the fight against the invaders:

[You] will deliver us from the Assyrians when they invade our land. . . . Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed. (Micah 5:6–9)

Does this sound like any part of the gospel story? You still want to pretend that this “ruler over Israel” is Jesus?

This “prophecy” is also given a probability of chance fulfillment of 1/10⁵, which is ridiculous when the natural explanation is obvious and the supernatural explanation doesn’t even fit.

3. Zechariah predicts that “the Messiah would be betrayed for the price of a slave—thirty pieces of silver.”

The prophecy is fulfilled when Matthew records that very payment made to Judas the traitor.

Actually, Zechariah 11:12–13 laments that God is unappreciated by the people of Israel. There is nothing about a Messiah or betrayal. And then when Matthew 27:3–10 attempts to connect the Judas/30-pieces-of-silver story with the prophecy, it gets the prophet wrong and names Jeremiah instead.

Oops. So much for the Bible being 100% without error, as Ross claims.

Zechariah refers to a potter, not a potter’s field; nevertheless, Ross sees that as an important parallel between Zechariah and Matthew. But the New Testament isn’t even consistent internally. Look at the two stories of the last hours of Judas (Acts 1:18–19 vs. Matthew 27:4–8) to see that they’re incompatible.

• Who possessed and spent the thirty pieces of silver? Acts says that Judas bought a field with the money. Matthew says that Judas returned the money to the priests, which they declared tainted, and they bought the field.
• How did Judas die? Acts says that he died from a fall, while Matthew says that he hanged himself.
• There is a “Field of Blood” in both stories. Why was it named that? In Acts, it was named this because Judas fell and died in it. In Matthew, it was because it was bought with the blood money.

The probability given here is 1/10¹¹, which is ridiculous when, yet again, this is a prophecy after the fact and the claimed connection simply isn’t there.

Ross said that Bible prophecies have “no room for error.” That’s a good criterion, but in that case, these are not Bible prophecies.

Continued in part 2.

See also: 8 Tests for Accurate Prophecy and Why Bible Prophecies Fail

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/19/16.)

Image from NOAA, public domain

*The Old Testament has four decrees for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, each with a different date (Ross’s calculations use the third one):

• Decree of Cyrus: 538–536 BCE (2 Chronicles 36:22–3)
• Decree of Darius Hystaspes: 521 BCE (Ezra 6:6–12)
• Decree of Artaxerxes to Ezra: 458 BCE (Ezra 7:11–26)
• Decree of Artaxerxes to Nehemiah: 444 BCE (Nehemiah 2:1–8)

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It’s not like I go through life looking for arguments. I’m just a happy-go-lucky, tousle-headed scamp skipping through life and whistling a happy tune who unaccountably gets blindsided by nutty Christian arguments just begging for a good thrashing. It would be rude to ignore them.

In fact, I’m happy to agree with Christians when I can, and just to prove that, let me point out an article by Greg Koukl, “Never Read a Bible Verse.” His point is that you should never read just a Bible verse but rather read the entire paragraph or even the entire chapter to understand the context.

That’s good advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s true that broadening your reading to the local context can clarify the meaning of the verse and is a fairer way to approach that verse. Unfortunately, this doesn’t assure us that the Bible doesn’t say something contradictory elsewhere—it’s a big book. Said another way, the actual context is the entire Bible. Don’t quote the Bible as an authority until you can assure me that the Bible never undercuts that message elsewhere.

The problem can be illustrated with a familiar source of simplistic Christian apologetics.

Chick tracts

Chick tracts are small comic pamphlets that use a story to illustrate conservative Christian principles (or attack evangelicals’ usual rogues of Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, evolution, and so on). A typical story will have a sinner scared straight by a glimpse of hell, for example. The printed tracts are cheap enough that street evangelists can hand them out to potential converts.

Let’s use Chick tracts as examples where a broader biblical context would give a very different interpretation of the point they’re making.

1. Bogus prophecy

“The Greatest Story Ever Told” is the condensed gospel story, and it can’t resist repeating several of the five claims of fulfilled prophecy in the first two chapters of Matthew. It first quotes Isaiah 7:14, “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” Yes, I realize that the author thought this was a prophecy of Jesus, but it’s not. Simply following the “never read a Bible verse” rule, we can find from the context that this claim was to be fulfilled just a few years after it was spoken, in Isaiah’s own time. (More here.)

The tract also says, “The Bible prophesied that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:1–2).” Wrong again, and you’d discover that if you’d read the context. Those verses talk about a ruler who will turn back the Assyrians, who began conquering Israel in 740 BCE. Micah 5:9 says, “Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed.” Whose story is this? Certainly not that of Jesus.

2. Belief in Jesus is mandatory

“Back from the Dead?” is the hilarious tale of someone who visits hell during a near-death experience. In it, Jesus is quoted from John 14:6, “No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “It’s Not Your Fault” quotes John 3:18, which makes a similar point: “He that believes not is condemned already.”

This is one where the whole Bible is the context. Romans 5:19 says, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” That is, we didn’t opt in to get the sin of Adam, and we needn’t opt in to get the salvation of Jesus. No belief is necessary.

Christians seem endlessly eager to harmonize ill-fitting verses like these, but they’re still ill-fitting. An omniscient Creator would have made sure that his message got into the world clearly and unambiguously.

3. Works don’t get you into heaven

God turns revenge to love in “The Hit!” Someone says, “The only way anyone gets to heaven is through faith in Christ alone” with a reference to Acts 4:12. This is standard Chick: making a statement and then backing it up with just a Bible reference. I’ll agree that this verse does back it up (“Salvation is found in no one else”), but it’s just a context-free reference.

A character in “Back from the Dead?” says, “You can’t make it [to heaven] by good works” and cites Ephesians 2:8–9 and Titus 3:5. In “It’s the Law” we read, “[No,] good works will not take away our sins!”

But consider the entire Bible, and we find the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46), which makes plain that those who make it to the Kingdom do so through their good works. There is no mention of faith.

4. God hates slavery

“Kidnapped!” is about child slavery, and it tries to portray the Old Testament as anti-slavery by quoting Exodus 21:16, “He that stealeth a man, and selleth him . . . shall surely be put to death.” (Unsurprisingly, Chick prefers the King James Version.)

Nope. God has no problem with slavery. In fact, biblical slavery was pretty much identical to American slavery.

5. God hates fags

In “Birds and the Bees,” a little girl lectures us about homosexuality. Referring to the people of Sodom: “Today those same kind of people are back, but now they’re called Gays!” with a reference to Genesis 13:13.

Sorry, little girl, read the story. The “sin of Sodom” was rape. Yes, that’s a bad thing, but it’s bad whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual.

Little Girl then says, “But God still says being Gay is an abomination!” with a reference to Leviticus 18:22, but she needs to “never read a Bible verse.” Read more widely, and it’s clear that Leviticus 18–20 are full of ritual abominations. Don’t plant your field with two kinds of seed or wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19); don’t cut your hair (19:28); don’t use fortune tellers (19:31) (and kill them, by the way—that’s in 20:27); the death penalty is the punishment for cursing your father or mother (20:9); and don’t forget your kosher food laws (20:25).

Today, we ignore these ritual abominations. You can’t go back to retrieve one you’re fond of.

6. Only through Jesus can sins be forgiven

A gang killing gone wrong is the tale in “Gomez is Coming.” In the thrilling conclusion, we are told, “Only someone who was sinless could pay the price for our sins” (1 Peter 3:18).

Not really. In Matthew 16:19, Jesus tells his followers, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Binding means to forbid and loosing means to permit, both by an indisputable authority. The parallel verse in John 20:23 is, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Apparently, forgiving sins isn’t that big a deal.

If Christians today say that the Great Commission doesn’t just apply to Jesus’s original disciples but applies to today’s Christians as well (it doesn’t), perhaps they’re bold enough to tell us that they can forgive sins, too.

7. The Ten Commandments

“It’s the Law” cites Exodus 20 and 34 in its references to the Ten Commandments. Whoops—here’s where being honest about the context bites them. Exodus 20 lists the original set of Ten Commandments. But remember that Moses smashed them in anger and went back up to get another set, which was put in the Ark of the Covenant. The second set is listed in Exodus 34, and it’s a very different set.

Let’s rephrase the advice we started with: never quote a Bible verse to pass along God’s position on a matter unless you’re certain that it is unambiguously what the entire Bible says on that subject.

See also: Christians’ Damning Retreat into “Difficult Verses”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/24/16.)

Image from Kamil Porembiński (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Arguments for the reliability of the New Testament are built as a chain of claims—the reliability of oral history, the short duration between events and documentation, the large number of Greek copies, and so on. We’ll look at one of these links, the time from original authorship to our best copies, to see how well it stands up.

Where the data came from

Making a spreadsheet of the time gap for every chapter in every book in the Bible was a tedious task, though not a difficult one. The oldest manuscript with a complete New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, written in about 350 CE. For 57 of the New Testament’s 260 chapters (22 percent) this was the oldest source, but the remainder have papyrus copies that are older. These papyri vary in size. For example, P46 contains more than eight epistles (letters), while P52 has just a few verses of John 18. (“P46” is papyrus number 46, and so on.)

That gave an oldest date for each chapter, and this list has the date of authorship for each book (from the 50s for Paul’s authentic epistles to 90 and beyond for John, Revelation, and some of the epistles). Subtract the two to get the time gap from authorship to oldest copy for each chapter.

Time gaps for gospel chapters

The chart above shows the gospel chapters in order for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The red bars indicate the first chapter in each book. The height of each bar is the time gap from the original to our best copy for that chapter.

Matthew and John each have 18 papyrus sources, Luke has 6, and Mark only 2. Though Mark is thought to be the oldest gospel, scholars have speculated that once churches had Matthew and Luke (which were basically second editions of Mark), Mark lost its value and wasn’t copied as much by the early church.

The time gaps for the chapters in John look pretty good compared to the others because it was the last gospel to be written and because papyrus P66, dated to 200 CE, is a complete copy. P52 (written as early as 125 CE though probably later) has bits of John 18, and P90 (late second century) has bits of John 19.

Two papyri dated to 200 CE cover most of Luke. Nevertheless, 22 of these 89 gospel chapters have no papyrus copies that improve on the Codex Sinaiticus (350 CE). This problem is particularly obvious in Matthew, where it must rely on Sinaiticus for 43 percent of its oldest chapters. The average chapter time gap for Matthew is 200 years, making it particularly unreliable. Mark is even worse, at 230 years.

The height of each bar is the length of the dark period during which no one knows for sure what happened to the content of these books. We have enough data to repair some errors, but we don’t know how many errors remain and how bad they are. How much confidence can we have in a copy written centuries later than the original?

You wouldn’t believe a supernatural story if it was claimed to have happened yesterday, but with the gospels we have supernatural stories about Jesus passed on as oral history for decades. They were then written, but we don’t have the originals but only copies from centuries later.

A note how the dates are chosen: if a chapter’s oldest copy holds just a fragment of one verse, that’s enough to assign that copy’s date as the oldest for that chapter. Since most of the earliest papyrus collections are made of pages that are each fragmentary, this is a generous concession in favor of the Bible.

Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians

(Remember that red columns are chapter 1.)

Acts and Romans both have a decent number of papyrus sources (8 and 7, respectively), but continuing down the list, it’s 4 sources, then 1, 1, and 3. Fortunately for these epistles, they are mostly in P46, which is dated to 200 CE.

Ephesians (the last six chapters on the right) looks unusually good, but that’s only because it’s a pseudo-Pauline epistle, one that falsely claims to have been written by Paul but was actually written about 30 years later than Paul’s actual epistles.

All the rest: Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude, and Revelation

The one-chapter books stand out here.

Hebrews (thirteen chapters, each 115 years tall, near the center) has 8 papyrus sources, including the excellent P46. Revelation has five sources, mostly poor. The remainder have three or fewer sources, and four books have zero sources and must be completely backstopped by Codex Sinaiticus.

Every link in the chain that builds to the conclusion, “And that’s why the New Testament is historically trustworthy!” must be reliable. When the average chapter-by-chapter time gap from original to oldest New Testament copy is 171 years, this link in the chain clearly isn’t.

See also:

• The Bible’s Dark Ages
• A Simple Thought Experiment Defeats Claim that Bible Is Accurate

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/22/16.)

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