Jesus & the Torah

[Murad]

I have studied the bible for over 40 years. ....Jesus fulfilled all the law and all prophecies about Him in the Spirit.

Question for debate:
1. Did Jesus fulfill all the prophesy in the Torah like many Christians claim?

[McCulloch]

At least they're not burning our houses and forcing us to leave the country with nothing but the clothes on our backs any more.

What would you have us do? The 2% should start a fight with the 65-80% or so? Feh. Let 'em think what they want, as long as they leave us alone.

Perhaps we atheists and humanists have something to learn from the Jewish experience. Check back in about a thousand years.

[cnorman18]

In the Christian view, it seems to be about getting your own precious little butt out of the fire and into Heaven.

Going to stay silent on your main point, but feel like I keep getting this opinion foisted on me 'round these parts.
Not all of us take that reading; can we at least qualify that as "many Christians"?

Want to compromise on "most"? I don't know of a variety of Christianity where personal salvation isn't a primary concern. I'd suspect that those where it isn't are about as common as varieties of Jewish belief where it is, which are very rare indeed.

[cnorman18]

At least they're not burning our houses and forcing us to leave the country with nothing but the clothes on our backs any more.

What would you have us do? The 2% should start a fight with the 65-80% or so? Feh. Let 'em think what they want, as long as they leave us alone.

Perhaps we atheists and humanists have something to learn from the Jewish experience. Check back in about a thousand years.

I'll put it on my calendar.

What are you saying, exactly? Surely you aren't alleging persecution of atheists and humanists on the same scale as that which has been historically directed at Jews.

If it's about tolerating (or ignoring) others with different beliefs, I'd say you're right. I don't feel the need to tell people they're being irrational idiots or superstitious children if they aren't affecting my life directly, and I see a lot of that around here. I don't object to Christianity or Christians at all, unless they start moving toward imposing their beliefs on others through the law, or doing the Westboro thing; and the latter are very rare indeed.

[Jester]

Want to compromise on "most"? I don't know of a variety of Christianity where personal salvation isn't a primary concern. I'd suspect that those where it isn't are about as common as varieties of Jewish belief where it is, which are very rare indeed.

I don't claim to have any numbers on that.
The only thing I'd add then, is that we should distinguish between an element being a primary concern, and the belief being about that element.

[McCulloch]

I'll put it on my calendar.

Good. If I'm not there, start without me.

What are you saying, exactly? Surely you aren't alleging persecution of atheists and humanists on the same scale as that which has been historically directed at Jews.

While atheists have been persecuted and killed for our lack of belief, it is nothing compared to scope of the persecution of the Jews.

If it's about tolerating (or ignoring) others with different beliefs, I'd say you're right. I don't feel the need to tell people they're being irrational idiots or superstitious children if they aren't affecting my life directly, and I see a lot of that around here. I don't object to Christianity or Christians at all, unless they start moving toward imposing their beliefs on others through the law, or doing the Westboro thing; and the latter are very rare indeed.

That is the lesson that we non-theists could learn from the Jewish experience.

[cnorman18]

I'll put it on my calendar.

Good. If I'm not there, start without me.

I'll wait...

What are you saying, exactly? Surely you aren't alleging persecution of atheists and humanists on the same scale as that which has been historically directed at Jews.

While atheists have been persecuted and killed for our lack of belief, it is nothing compared to scope of the persecution of the Jews.

True, and that's probably for a reason; NOT doing something, i.e. worshipping Jesus, is both less offensive and less visible than openly doing something very different, like worshipping in an entirely different way. If atheists had been as vocal and outspoken in the 14th century as they are today, you'd have been pursued just as ferociously as we were.

For our part, Jews might have learned to fly a bit more under the radar, but then we've never been particularly inclined to hide our beliefs any more than we've been inclined to proselytize.

If it's about tolerating (or ignoring) others with different beliefs, I'd say you're right. I don't feel the need to tell people they're being irrational idiots or superstitious children if they aren't affecting my life directly, and I see a lot of that around here. I don't object to Christianity or Christians at all, unless they start moving toward imposing their beliefs on others through the law, or doing the Westboro thing; and the latter are very rare indeed.

That is the lesson that we non-theists could learn from the Jewish experience.

Agreed. Religious freedom works, for the most part; and if it ain't broke....

[McCulloch]

And now, back to our regularly scheduled debate.

Did Jesus fulfill all the prophesy in the Torah like many Christians claim?

I have examined all the passages in the New Testament quoted from the Old, and so-called prophecies concerning Jesus Christ, and I find no such thing as a prophecy of any such person, and I deny there are any.

Looking at the seventh chapter of Isaiah, it becomes clear that the child in question is to be born as a sign to Ahaz, King of Judah, that he will not be defeated in battle by Rezin, King of Syria, and Pekah, son of the King of Israel. Jesus' birth was seven centuries late to be such a sign. In Isaiah 8:3-4, a prophetess gives birth to a son--Maher-shalal-hash-baz--who is clearly described as the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14.

A prophecy related to the birth of Jesus is the claim that the Messiah would be born at a time when King Herod was killing children. Only the gospel of Matthew (2:16-18) makes this claim, quoting a prophecy of Jeremiah (31:15) which states that "A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she refused to be comforted, because they were no more." There are two problems with this alleged messianic prophecy: it is not a prophecy about children being killed and it is quite doubtful that there ever was such a slaughter of innocents by Herod. "Rachel weeping for her children" refers to the mother of Joseph and Benjamin (and wife of Jacob) weeping about her children taken captive to Egypt. In context, the verse is about the Babylonian captivity, which its author witnessed. Subsequent verses speak of the children being returned, and thus it refers to captivity rather than murder. The slaughter by Herod is also in doubt because the writer of Matthew is the only person who has noted such an event. Flavius Josephus, who carefully chronicled Herod's abuses, makes no mention of it.

Matthew goes on to claim that to evade Herod's murders, Jesus was taken as a child to Egypt. This is done, according to Matthew 2:15, in order "that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, 'Out of Egypt did I call my son.'" This is a reference to Hosea 11:1, which is not a messianic prophecy at all. It is a reference to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

At the end of the same chapter of Matthew (2:23), its author writes that Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus settled in Nazareth, in order "... that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, 'He shall be called a Nazarene.'" There is no such prophecy in the Hebrew scriptures, though some claim this refers to Judges 13:5. This verse describes an angel speaking to the mother of Samson, telling her that her son "shall be a Nazirite." This is not only not a messianic prophecy, it can't be what Matthew is referring to. A Nazirite is quite different from a Nazarene. A Nazarene is an inhabitant of Nazareth, but a Nazirite is a Jew who has taken special vows to abstain from all wine and grapes, not to cut his hair, and to perform special sacrifices (see Leviticus 6:1-21). Jesus drank wine (Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18), and so could not have been a Nazirite.

A prophecy dealing with Jesus' life and ministry is Zechariah 9:9, which says "Behold, your king is coming to you ... humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Jesus was not king, so that aspect of the prophecy remains unfulfilled. The alleged fulfillment of this prophecy is also problematic. According to Mark (10:11-19), Luke (19:28-38), and John (12:12-19), Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey. But Matthew 21:1-11 has Jesus riding on both a donkey and a colt, indicating his misunderstanding of the prophecy.

Matthew 26:14-15 states that Judas Iscariot was paid thirty pieces of silver by the Jewish priests as payment for his betrayal. Matthew 27:9-10 claims that this is done to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah:

Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver for the price of the one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel; and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me."

The problem here is that the quoted verse appears nowhere in the book of Jeremiah. There is a verse which is quite similar in the book of Zechariah, but there the prophet Zechariah is speaking about himself and no betrayal is involved. Jeremiah 32:9 says seventeen shekels, not thirty. There is really no question that Matthew meant to refer to Zechariah rather than Jeremiah. But Zechariah is speaking of his own experience rather than a messianic prophecy. But Matthew 27:5-7 tries to fulfill this non-prophecy by telling a story of Judas Iscariot throwing his payment into the temple before committing suicide, after which the priests use the money to buy a potter's field.

The gospel of John (19:32-36) tells of soldiers breaking the legs of the crucifixion victims to hasten their deaths, yet sparing Jesus because he was already dead. John 19:36 cites Psalms 34:20, "He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken," as the prophecy which is thereby fulfilled. There is no indication that Psalms 34 is intended as prophetic. The intent in the gospel of John is to represent Jesus as a sacrifice, specifically corresponding to the paschal lamb. A requirement of the paschal lamb is that none of its bones be broken. But this analogy fails for several reasons: the paschal lamb was not for the atonement of sin, and Jewish sacrifices were required to be completely without blemish, sore, or injury but Jesus was scourged and mutilated.

Includes material shamelessly taken from The Fabulous Prophecies of the Messiah by Jim Lippard

See also:

• Isaiahs Immanuel is not about Jesus
  Out of Egypt is not a prophecy
  Rachel weeping was not for the slaughter of the innocents
  He will be called a Nazorean is not in the Bible
  Isaiah 53 is not about Jesus
  Jesus riding a donkey is not in the Old Testament
  Judas betrayal money not in the Old Testament
  Soldiers gambling for Jesus clothes not in the Old Testament

[cnorman18]

And now, back to our regularly scheduled debate.

Did Jesus fulfill all the prophesy in the Torah like many Christians claim?

I have examined all the passages in the New Testament quoted from the Old, and so-called prophecies concerning Jesus Christ, and I find no such thing as a prophecy of any such person, and I deny there are any.

Looking at the seventh chapter of Isaiah, it becomes clear that the child in question is to be born as a sign to Ahaz, King of Judah, that he will not be defeated in battle by Rezin, King of Syria, and Pekah, son of the King of Israel. Jesus' birth was seven centuries late to be such a sign. In Isaiah 8:3-4, a prophetess gives birth to a son--Maher-shalal-hash-baz--who is clearly described as the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14.

A prophecy related to the birth of Jesus is the claim that the Messiah would be born at a time when King Herod was killing children. Only the gospel of Matthew (2:16-18) makes this claim, quoting a prophecy of Jeremiah (31:15) which states that "A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she refused to be comforted, because they were no more." There are two problems with this alleged messianic prophecy: it is not a prophecy about children being killed and it is quite doubtful that there ever was such a slaughter of innocents by Herod. "Rachel weeping for her children" refers to the mother of Joseph and Benjamin (and wife of Jacob) weeping about her children taken captive to Egypt. In context, the verse is about the Babylonian captivity, which its author witnessed. Subsequent verses speak of the children being returned, and thus it refers to captivity rather than murder. The slaughter by Herod is also in doubt because the writer of Matthew is the only person who has noted such an event. Flavius Josephus, who carefully chronicled Herod's abuses, makes no mention of it.

Matthew goes on to claim that to evade Herod's murders, Jesus was taken as a child to Egypt. This is done, according to Matthew 2:15, in order "that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, 'Out of Egypt did I call my son.'" This is a reference to Hosea 11:1, which is not a messianic prophecy at all. It is a reference to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

At the end of the same chapter of Matthew (2:23), its author writes that Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus settled in Nazareth, in order "... that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, 'He shall be called a Nazarene.'" There is no such prophecy in the Hebrew scriptures, though some claim this refers to Judges 13:5. This verse describes an angel speaking to the mother of Samson, telling her that her son "shall be a Nazirite." This is not only not a messianic prophecy, it can't be what Matthew is referring to. A Nazirite is quite different from a Nazarene. A Nazarene is an inhabitant of Nazareth, but a Nazirite is a Jew who has taken special vows to abstain from all wine and grapes, not to cut his hair, and to perform special sacrifices (see Leviticus 6:1-21). Jesus drank wine (Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18), and so could not have been a Nazirite.

A prophecy dealing with Jesus' life and ministry is Zechariah 9:9, which says "Behold, your king is coming to you ... humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Jesus was not king, so that aspect of the prophecy remains unfulfilled. The alleged fulfillment of this prophecy is also problematic. According to Mark (10:11-19), Luke (19:28-38), and John (12:12-19), Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey. But Matthew 21:1-11 has Jesus riding on both a donkey and a colt, indicating his misunderstanding of the prophecy.

Matthew 26:14-15 states that Judas Iscariot was paid thirty pieces of silver by the Jewish priests as payment for his betrayal. Matthew 27:9-10 claims that this is done to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah:

Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver for the price of the one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel; and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me."

The problem here is that the quoted verse appears nowhere in the book of Jeremiah. There is a verse which is quite similar in the book of Zechariah, but there the prophet Zechariah is speaking about himself and no betrayal is involved. Jeremiah 32:9 says seventeen shekels, not thirty. There is really no question that Matthew meant to refer to Zechariah rather than Jeremiah. But Zechariah is speaking of his own experience rather than a messianic prophecy. But Matthew 27:5-7 tries to fulfill this non-prophecy by telling a story of Judas Iscariot throwing his payment into the temple before committing suicide, after which the priests use the money to buy a potter's field.

The gospel of John (19:32-36) tells of soldiers breaking the legs of the crucifixion victims to hasten their deaths, yet sparing Jesus because he was already dead. John 19:36 cites Psalms 34:20, "He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken," as the prophecy which is thereby fulfilled. There is no indication that Psalms 34 is intended as prophetic. The intent in the gospel of John is to represent Jesus as a sacrifice, specifically corresponding to the paschal lamb. A requirement of the paschal lamb is that none of its bones be broken. But this analogy fails for several reasons: the paschal lamb was not for the atonement of sin, and Jewish sacrifices were required to be completely without blemish, sore, or injury but Jesus was scourged and mutilated.

Includes material shamelessly taken from The Fabulous Prophecies of the Messiah by Jim Lippard

See also:

• Isaiahs Immanuel is not about Jesus
  Out of Egypt is not a prophecy
  Rachel weeping was not for the slaughter of the innocents
  He will be called a Nazorean is not in the Bible
  Isaiah 53 is not about Jesus
  Jesus riding a donkey is not in the Old Testament
  Judas betrayal money not in the Old Testament
  Soldiers gambling for Jesus clothes not in the Old Testament

I know you're posting all this for our esteemed readers, and not for me; I am of course familiar with all of this material. My personal favorite is the laughable passage in Matthew that has Jesus riding on a donkey and her colt at the same time, which is pretty hard to do anyway; the author, if he was in fact Matthew and was in fact Jewish, was apparently, and oddly, not familiar with the common Hebrew poetic device of parallel expressions, which in Hebrew poetry had a place analogous to that of "rhyme" in English poetry. Hebrew poets would say the same thing in two slightly different ways, to give the poem a kind of rhythm and texture, not in sound, but in thought.

Quite literally at random -- I pulled the psalm number out of my hat -- here are the first three verses of Psalm 51, with the parallelisms in boldface and marked <a> and <b>:

1 Have mercy on me, O God,
<a> according to your unfailing love;
<b> according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.

2 <a> Wash away all my iniquity
and <b> cleanse me from my sin.

3 For <a> I know my transgressions,
and <b> my sin is always before me.

And here's Zechariah 9:9, similarly annotated:

9 <a> Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion!
<b> Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and having salvation,
gentle and riding <a> on a donkey,
<b> on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

That sort of thing is found all over the Psalms and the Prophets, and turns up in many different passages in the Hebrew Bible. It's even echoed in the words of modern speakers. Read the text of any of Dr. King's speeches and you will see this same pattern in modern English.

So I knew all that. The Christian reading of many supposedly "Messianic" passages in the Hebrew Bible is in conflict, sometimes glaring conflict, with the actual meaning of the text.

Look, just to get it right out front: if you're arguing that the Gospels are filled with misunderstandings, mistranslations, and outright errors regarding the text and meaning of the Hebrew Bible, and that Christians are being either silly or disingenuous when they stick to that story, you'll get no argument from ME. I think you're right. Further, some details of the Gospel narratives may well have been deliberately shaped to fit these, and other, passages in the OT -- though that doesn't mean that they didn't actually happen. If the Gospel account is to be believed, Jesus himself quoted Psalm 22, in Hebrew, on the Cross. He may have done so in full knowledge of how that would be understood at a later time. This stuff didn't happen in a vacuum, either before or after the fact.

Whatever. Nevertheless: I said I don't have warrant to say that Christianity is a false religion, and I still don't. For all I know, God intended those passages to be misread by Gentiles unfamiliar with Hebrew poetry and who hold the weird conviction, which we still see in the present day (and on this forum), that single verses ripped from their context have prophetic meaning. I don't roll that way, but when I say I believe in freedom of thought, I mean that I believe that people have the right to believe things that I think are mistaken, wrongheaded, or even egregiously dumb. Remember that other Christian dictum -- that things that are foolishness with man are wisdom with God. I've made a few monumental screwups in my own life that turned out to be for my own good a little farther down the road. If you're a theist, it's quite possible to believe that God intends you to screw up sometimes. Maybe you're even right. I can't speak for Christians, and I surely can't speak for God.

Remember, too, that in Jewish belief, what you BELIEVE doesn't matter. What you DO does. If someone wants to read about Peter's betrayals on the night before the Crucifixion and decide to worship roosters, and make a Gothic basilica out of his chicken coop, my attitude is: Knock yourself out, dude, as long as you feed the hungry, comfort the sick, shelter the orphan, and don't ram your rooster-worship down anybody else's throat.

I think the details of theology are trivia, and it's my opinion that the Christian belief that elevates doctrinal correctness to the highest priority is pretty dumb too; but that's me. The mileage of others, as they say, may vary. As long as they don't tell ME what to believe, it's not my problem or my business.

[McCulloch]

I know you're posting all this for our esteemed readers, and not for me;

That and an attempt to get this debate back to being a debate about the questions raised in the OP. I would like to hear the reaction of any Christian to this question. The oft repeated claim that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophesy is totally without merit.

[cnorman18]

I know you're posting all this for our esteemed readers, and not for me;

That and an attempt to get this debate back to being a debate about the questions raised in the OP. I would like to hear the reaction of any Christian to this question. The oft repeated claim that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophesy is totally without merit.

Well, I have to admit that I'd find that interesting myself; unfortunately, the only responses I've ever seen to these objections have amounted to "That's our story and we're stickin' to it." I can't think of a better or more honest defense of those doctrines than my own, posted above... which is about as ironic as it gets, from where I sit.