rikuoamero wrote:
[
Replying to post 17 by Divine Insight]
Instead they point to the fact that the Gospel Rumors have Jesus riding into the city on a donkey.
Well, duh?
Does it even need to be pointed out that riding a donkey into a city is an extremely trivial thing to do?
I get a sense of
"Wow! He rode a donkey! Clearly must be divine magic at work! Amen! Praise the Lord!" from a certain someone.
The idea here is that this is supposed to be "fulfilled prophecy" even some of the authors of the Gospel rumors make this claim right in their writings:
Matthew 21:
[1] And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples,
[2] Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me.
[3] And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them.
[4] All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying,
[5] Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.
See, Matthew is claiming that this event fulfills prophecy. And then Luke also repeated this since Luke was copying from Matthew.
However, the problem here is that clearly Matthew,
the author of this claim, obviously knew that there was a prophecy that the messiah should ride a donkey into Jerusalem. It's clearly he know this since he claims that this prophecy was being fulfilled.
But we have no way of knowing whether Jesus actually rode a donkey into the Jerusalem. All we have is Matthew's original claim, and Luke repeating that rumor.
So why should we think that any prophesy had been fulfilled? For all we know Matthew made up the part of about the donkey specifically so he could claim that prophesy that he clearly already knew about could be fulfilled.
This is totally unimpressive.
These Christian theists want to start arguing about probabilities like "What's the probability that Jesus would have fulfilled so many of these little prophesy details?
The improbability is ASTRONOMICAL! Therefore Jesus must have been the prophesied messiah.
But this is totally wrong.
The real question is, "
What's the probability that the authors of the Gospels made up stuff in an effort to try to have Jesus fulfilling all these prophesies?"
And the answer to that is that it's extremely probable that this is precisely what they did. They were clearly trying to convince their readers that Jesus was the messiah and would say anything they could to try to make a case for their agenda.
So the idea that these would represent astronomical improbabilities is nonsense. The authors simply wrote in little things like having Jesus ride a donkey into the city precisely in an effort to have Jesus fulfilling prophesies.
They pointed out that this fulfills prophesies. That shows that they were fully aware of what the prophesies were as they were writing these Gospel Rumors.
So this idea that so many prophesies had been fulfilled by Jesus that he just had to have been the prophesied messiah is nothing other than an underhanded trick being played by the authors of the Gospels.
We have no way of knowing whether any actual Jesus ever fulfilled all these little details that the authors of the Gospel Rumors claim he fulfilled.
So it's not impressive at all.
Not only this but Jesus NEVER became the King of Jerusalem. So it really wouldn't matter if he had satisfied all these trivial details anyway. If he didn't become KING, then he failed to fulfill the MAIN prophecy.
So it's all nonsense.
The argument that mathematical probabilities demand that Jesus fulfilled these prophesies beyond any possibility of pure chance, is just nonsense. The authors of the Gospels simply made up these claims. That solves the probability problem right there on the spot. It had nothing to do with chance. The authors of the Gospels simply wrote all those details into their stories when they were sitting there with those prophesies
IN HAND. No wonder Jesus was fulfilling every detail. That's simply what the authors of the Gospels
WROTE IN.
These theists must be pretty naive to fall for that old trick.
