Did Jesus Fulfill Prophesy?

You’re saying they couldn’t find the clit? I’m just gonna say that’s delightful.

Look, they were hiding. They were up under a cleft.

It’s not always easy to find. It’s not their fault.

Oh gosh, it’s a good thing my wife doesn’t listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan. And I’m Dan Beecher, and you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Uh, riding high, just, uh, having fun, getting out into the world. Uh, no, not right now. Right now I’m just sitting in the comfort of your apartment podcast studio. Uh, we’re coming, coming to you live from Data Over Dogma Studios here in lovely downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. All right, uh, I’m fine. How are you, Dan?

Uh, I’m doing all right. I’m getting over, uh, my post-SBL, uh, what do they call them, con crud? The con crud. Yes, the convention, uh, uh, sickness that, uh, that I pick up, always manage to pick up, usually probably in an airport on the way home from— I think they call it Conclave is what they made a movie about that, didn’t they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, yeah. And, uh, but yeah, other than that, uh, it’s a lovely-ish, very cold day, uh, here, but the sun’s out at least, I guess.

Yeah, man. Uh, yeah. And you know what I hear?

What do you—.

I hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting-tingling too. It is for us now in this part of the temporal plane, the holiday season.

It is.

Others may be listening— you, you listener at home may be catching this a different time of year, but for us right now it is the holiday season. And so, as is our wont, or want if people want to get weird about it, uh, we’re going to talk about Jebus and his birth.

It’s, it’s the time of year where we’ve got to confront, uh, some of that ever-present misinformation. And we’ve, we’ve done this many times in the past talking about things like, uh, why December 25th. Talked about— we’ve talked about no room at the inn.

Uh, we’ve talked about stuff like that, which turns out there’s not even an inn.

There’s no inn to speak of.

Yeah, so why would there be room there? It doesn’t make any sense.

And we may actually in this episode, I will warn people, we may cover some ground or touch on some ground that we have hit before because it, you know, it’s one of those things where, I don’t know, sometimes you got to hit some things that you already talked about.

There are only so many passages in the Bible that discuss Jesus’s birth.

So, but I think we got some fun angles to talk about. First, we’re going to take issue with This is mostly just apologetics. We’re going to take issue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But right, like the whole show is going to be apologetics. But our first Taking Issue, we’re going to get on to Ken Ham’s website.

Ken Ham.

We’re going to go over to Answers in Genesis and we’re going to see if the birth of Jesus actually fulfilled prophecies from the Hebrew Bible. And then in the second half of the show, And it will be an exact half too. You watch. Numerically work it out. I want you guys to make sure that you hold us to this.

We’re going to do Sari Apologetics, or Sari Apologetics, in which we will talk about some of the objections that people have raised, Dan, to your claims on the media of socials.

Yes, yes. I am out here to ruin Christmas for everybody. And so a lot of apologists have said, no, here’s the story, and we’re going to talk about, uh, we’re going to talk about those claims. So yeah, yeah.

All right, well, let’s, let’s dive in with Taking Issue. And we’re Taking Issue this week with, as we said, Answers in Genesis. Uh, there’s an article written by one Dr. Tim Chaffey. And earlier, what you guys at home don’t know is that Dan immediately dove into, where is that doctor from? Do I need to call out whether that doctor title is deserved or not?

Whenever, whenever people make a big deal of including doctor on their names as in their credits for articles, and particularly blog posts and stuff like that, it always raises the red flag because there are a lot of folks out out there who insist on being called Dr.

Oh, Jesus fulfilled 300+ prophecies, and you know, the chances of that happening are infinitesimal.

Yeah, well, they’re significantly better if you craft the story so that he does fulfill those prophecies.

And that’s one of the things that you have to bring up every time people talk about that, because the fulfillment is found in the same book as the prophecy. So it’s like Harry Potter fulfilled a lot of prophecies as well, as long as you just keep the scope internal to Harry Potter.

Right. And so it’s harder to make Harry Potter fulfill fulfill the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, but I’m sure we could find a few.

I’m sure we could find a couple. But, but yeah, what we’re talking about is somebody writing about Jesus in a way that makes the story fulfill prophecy. And, and one of the reasons that this is the best interpretation of the data is precisely because there’s another story about Jesus’s birth from another text, and it’s different in most of the places where, uh, at least the story in Matthew has Jesus fulfilling prophecy. And we’ll talk about that. But to start, yes, the probably the most famous prophecy of the whole nativity comes from the book of Isaiah .

Isaiah. Yeah, we’re doing Isaiah 7:14 . Is that the one we’re doing right now?

Right, so this is coming from, uh, probably the second half of the 8th century BCE. And, uh, a lot of whether or not this seems like a prophecy is going to come down to how it’s translated. And the way, uh, the Good Doctor— the translation that the Good Doctor has here is, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.”

Which, by the way, we’ve mentioned this before, but it, it really blows my mind how willing they are to throw this one out there, like right out the chute, right out the gate, when we know that his name was not called Emmanuel. Yeah, that, that, like, forget the virgin thing. We’re gonna get to the virgin thing. I get that. But like what the heck is going on with the Emmanuel part?

Yeah, it’s not like it was his middle name.

It was like Jesus Emmanuel Christ. No, that’s not—.

Mary was like, “Jesus Emmanuel Christ, you get down here and clean your room.” “Yeah, Mom, okay.”

No, it’s— yeah, that’s so weird to me that they trot that one out, but okay.

Well, and there’s a reason for that. If you look in, because it’s quoted in Matthew 1:23 , I think it’s in the 20s somewhere.

1:23. Okay, Matthew 1:23 . So I’ve got a few different translations in front of me. The King James Version says, “And they shall call his name Immanuel.” Now, if you’ll notice in Isaiah 7:14 , it doesn’t repeat, or it doesn’t give us a subject because it’s still being governed by the subject, the virgin. “Right.” “Shall call his name.” So the mom is going to name him Immanuel according to Isaiah 7:14 . Once we get to Matthew, it’s no longer the mom who’s naming him, right? What it says is, “They shall call his name Immanuel,” which sounds like this unnamed “they” may not be the parents. It may be that the followers of Jesus will refer to him as if he were “God among us.” So it’s kind of, uh, as if the author is kind of massaging things, right? A little bit.

I get that.

Point of order.

And yet it says, “Shall call his name,” even in Matthew, “his name Emmanuel.” It doesn’t say, “Shall call him,” yeah, “the Emmanuel.” Shall refer to him by title of Emmanuel. And by the way, no one ever does, right? No one calls him Emmanuel.

Not in the New Testament. But we don’t need exactness here. And, and this is one of the things that, that apologists will sometimes say— prophecies are, are vague. And, uh, and, and that just makes them more true.

That doesn’t—.

It’s not like they’re intentionally vague so that they can be shellacked over a variety of different contexts. So I think the way that you can get around people going, “Well, wait a minute, his name’s not Immanuel. I mean, in the same chapter you say his name’s going to be Jesus.” So yeah, this is one of the fudgy ways to get around the fact that this prophecy doesn’t seem to be quite on target. But that’s a change that is introduced in the way that Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 . But Isaiah 7:14 is being mistranslated here as well, because it does not say the virgin shall conceive. If you go look into the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, you go look in the NRSV-UE, you go look in a variety of different translations, and it will use the words “young woman,” ‘cause the Hebrew is almah, which means young woman of marriageable age.

And it doesn’t let you know whether or not it is in the future or in the past, because it’s using an adjective which means pregnant. And so it’s just saying ha-almah harah, and then you have to provide the to-be verb. And so you could technically say, well, I want it to be in the future. And that’s what the Septuagint does in the Greek translation.

But that adjective overwhelmingly is used to refer to either a current existing pregnancy or an imminent pregnancy.

So it usually is pregnant or is right about to become pregnant.

Is about to be pregnant.

Yeah. And so—.

Is currently doing the dirty deed.

Yeah, like the pregnancy is in the post, to be brief. And so yeah, what this almost certainly is referring to, the overwhelming majority of scholars will agree on this, is this is a reference to a woman who is pregnant in the time period when the author, who probably is some historical dude named Isaiah from the 8th century BCE, knew about some woman who was pregnant and was like, “Look, that woman right there, she’s pregnant.” And then it goes on to say she will give birth to a son, which is not much of a prophecy because that frequently happens when you’re pregnant.

You got a 50-50 shot on that one.

Yeah. And she will call his name Emmanuel. And so the prophetic part really comes in the next verse, where it says, uh, before he is—he shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. Because the, the king is wringing his hands over the fact that there’s this, this coalition that’s forming up in the north. And, and Isaiah’s like, “Enhance your calm,” right? Because this—that, that lady’s pregnant. She’s going to have a son, Emmanuel, and, you know, before his, uh, you know, whatever euphemism or whatever idiom you want to use today to mean before he, uh, you know, grows up, those countries are not going to be countries anymore. So relax. Uh, and that’s what the prophecy is doing in Isaiah 7:14 , right?

So Matthew, the author of the Gospel of Matthew , has wrenched this out of context now with the help of the Septuagint’s translation, because the Septuagint wants it to be relevant to its own time and place hundreds of years later. So, right, it’s already being brought a little closer, and so Matthew has just given it one additional step. And it should be noted that this notion that there’s a virgin birth is widely agreed to be a posthumous secondary accretion to the Jesus tradition where you’re starting to get sensitivities to the origins of Jesus. Paul and Mark say nothing about Jesus’s origins, except that Paul says he was born of a woman, but great. Happened to most of us.

Really sets him apart there.

Yeah. So there’s nothing significant about his origins until we get to the later gospels where they begin to push the divinity of Jesus’s origins further and further back in time. And so the virgin birth probably developed as sensitivities about the, you know, just the nature of sexual desire and sexual intercourse is leading people to want to distance the divine Messiah from kind of a natural birth. And we talked about the Immaculate Conception. Yeah, that’s just the further teasing out of those concerns.

Yeah. And so part of me wondered if it was—if the virgin birth—because I get that there were all of these new sort of sexual mores and a little bit of, you know, conservative ideas of sexual impropriety creeping in, or what, you know, in this moment in history, but also, could it be that it was just who the author of Matthew was trying to square this idea of the—I think I remember you saying something about the Septuagint having taken the Hebrew of Isaiah and then making it the word virgin.

I don’t think it is solely a result of the translation of almah as parthenos. I think that contributes. I doubt that that is the sole reason. I doubt that the author was just like, look, it says parthenos, I got to do something about that.

Because, you know, it calls Dinah parthenos in the Septuagint after she has been violated. So like, uh, and I have a friend named, uh, Rodrigo de Sousa who, uh, wrote a wonderful paper published, oh, 15, 10, 15, no, 2008, so 17 years ago, uh, entitled, uh, Is the Choice of Parthenos Theologically Motivated in Septuagint Isaiah 7:14 , or something like that, and talks about the fact that that word had some semantic fuzziness to it even back then. And so it may It may have just been kind of like, yeah, it works. And, uh, and so the author of Matthew, I think, is probably, uh, it’s probably a combination of factors. Uh, and then the, the author of the Gospel of Luke , I think, is probably just picking up that football and running with it, uh, writing as they are after. And, and the Nativity account in Luke chapters 1 and 2, I think, is probably even later than the rest of Luke.

I think it’s a secondary addition to the Gospel of Luke as well.

So interesting, it’s coming later. Let me say, sorry, I know you want to move on with this, but I do want to check in with one thing. Yeah, I consulted another scholar about this.

We talked about this, Dan. We don’t—.

One, one, one, Dr. ChatGPT.

And, and that scholar didn’t even get his degree.

He’s— no, but he did steal all of y’all’s degrees.

He did. Yeah, that’s That’s fair.

So he— what ChatGPT said was that somehow Matthew taking these older prophecies and squirreling around with them was part of a midrashic tradition.

A certain— Yeah.

And so I want to know more about that, or if that’s just sort of not really a thing, but What is a midrash, and how do you clear it up? Is it a cream? What do you use?

Well, midrash comes from darash, which means to seek. And so it’s an approach to scripture that tries to uncover significance and meaning that is really that is relevant to the reader and the person engaging the text. And so I think there is a sense in which it is certainly engaging in a very dynamic interpretive hermeneutic practice that is related to midrash. I would hesitate to say that the authors were like, “I’m going to do midrash on this.” And And so I don’t think that’s illegitimate. I don’t know that if I were writing about this that I would choose to focus on that. But yeah.

Okay. Well, I think that’s— You’re in a fight with Dr. GPT.

That’s all I’m saying. I get in fights with Dr. ChatGPT all the time.

Yeah. As well you should. As well you should. Don’t trust ChatGPT, kids. Straight out the barrel. Get yourself a Dan. And then, I mean, I guess what ChatGPT said was that the midrash, the reason it said that it was a midrash was that it claimed that it was normal as a Jewish interpretive technique to sort of take older scripts and twist them and play with them and sort of expound on them and whatever.

And so, and so to take an old prophecy that doesn’t actually apply to this, and then just sort of apply it, would have been understood, at least at the time, to have been a not, this is the absolute fulfillment of this prophecy, but like, look at this echo to something in the past or something.

Yeah. And I think there’s truth to that. Obviously, we’ve already talked about how the Septuagint is fiddling with the rendering itself.

Right.

And so, so yeah, absolutely, it is, it is following in the footsteps of other Greco-Roman Jewish interpretive practices. In that sense, it’s not an outlier.

Right.

Now, to the degree I would agree with the notion that like everybody knew and it was transparently just, “This is how we play with the text. We’re not taking it seriously,” I don’t know about that. I think that And there’s an argument to be had there.

Although it does sound like, to me, to my untrained ear, it sounds like Matthew is making hard claims. It doesn’t sound like it’s like, “Hey, let’s just play with this a little bit and see what we think about it.

Yeah, have fun with it. And I don’t think Dr. Chaffey is suggesting this is just their creative exegetical practice. Right. I don’t think that’s the claim. I think the claim is this is absolutely historical, and this is what the prophets were talking about, and this is how Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies, and that’s how you can know that Jesus actually resurrected. Like, I— that seems to be the argument coming from the folks who are appealing to these things today. Now, whether or not the original audience of the Gospel of Matthew would have been like, “Oh, I didn’t know that was what that was about.” I think that depends on the audience you reconstruct. And so I think that’s a little fuzzier and also not really the point of what we’re doing here. But not to say you’re going off topic, but just to say—

Yeah, I am a little lost in the woods here.

So should we get back into some more? Let’s do a few more of these. Yeah, um, I think the, the next one that’s, uh, brought up is, “Oh, and you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.” That’s Matthew 2:6 , and this is obviously riffing on Micah 5:2 , which, uh, if I can just pull it up here real quick, is a, uh, is a prophecy that says, um, well, it starts in 5:1, doesn’t it? It depends on how you divide this up. But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. So that’s the messianic prophecy, sure, as it was, as it came to be understood by the time of the New Testament from Micah 5 .

Now, in the original context, this is probably pre-exilic, and the expectation is that there is an Israelite king, probably from the line of David, who is going to arise and rule the people and lead the people. And there are a lot of details about what’s going on in there that are still hotly debated by scholars, but nobody thinks this is actually about somebody who’s going to be born 700 years later. This is about someone who is supposed to shepherd Israel prior to the exile.

And but this is why— the reason we’re bringing this up is that this is why the Gospels have to swirl this guy into Bethlehem somehow.

Yes. And this is an interesting point to bring up. Again, Paul and the Gospel of Mark say nothing about Bethlehem. In fact, there are only 3 places where the word Bethlehem ever occurs in all of the New Testament. One is in Matthew’s nativity account, one is in Luke’s— well, multiple occurrences, but one place is Matthew’s nativity account, one place is Luke’s nativity account, and then there’s a single verse in the Gospel of John , I think in chapter 7, that references the Messiah being born in Bethlehem. And the one of the reasons we think, hey, maybe this is just something that was, that was added later is because both Matthew and Luke have very different ways of getting Jesus to Bethlehem, right? Because Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth. And so both of them have to get Jesus back to Nazareth so he can be raised in Nazareth and be “Of Nazareth,” middle name “of,” you know, “Nazareth Jesus of” here. So they have very different ways of doing it.

And if you just read Matthew, if you do not have the Gospel of Luke , if you just read Matthew, Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem. And then they take off, Herod does his thing, and they gotta scramble into Egypt as refugees. And then they want to come back after Herod’s dead, but Herod’s son Archelaus is ruling in Judea, and so they’ve got to head north. And it says they settle in Nazareth, which is not what you do when you’re returning home. It’s what you do when you’re going to find a new place to live, right? Um, and so the Gospel of Luke is entirely different. They live in Nazareth. They’re just going down to Bethlehem because of this census thing that is going on that we’re going to talk about later.

Um, yeah, so the— so the why and the reason behind this is just that we have to, in— for the fulfillment of prophecy’s sake, we have to get him to be both from Nazareth and from Bethlehem. Is that correct?

Yes, it’s— he’s Jesus of Nazareth, everybody knows where he came from, uh, but we somehow got to have him born in Bethlehem. Okay, so, so we have two completely different stories about how Jesus of Nazareth was actually born in Bethlehem. Yeah. And that is— and scholars think this is probably because after Jesus’s death, when stories about, “Oh, this is the Messiah, he resurrected, game on, game on, everybody.”

What? How dare you?

So, uh, we, we go down to Matthew 2:18 , and we have, uh, Herod, uh, the slaughter of the innocents. Yes, not a part of Luke, uh, but—.

And that one feels like a pretty strong oversight. That one feels like, ooh, Luke, come on, man, what are you doing?

Yeah, um, and the reason all these prophecy fulfillment things are in Matthew is because Matthew was the one who was like, we gotta have him fulfilling all these prophecies, more prophecies. More prophecies.

And so, well, and he often is like overtly says, and this fulfilled the prophecy of X, right? He was, he was being very overt about the whole thing.

Yeah. One of the main rhetorical goals of the Gospel of Matthew is to show how thoroughly and comprehensively Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy from the Hebrew Bible, even if it’s not an actual prophecy from the Hebrew Bible. Okay, so here in Matthew 2:18 , we get a quote: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted because they are no more.” And this is from Jeremiah 31 , and this is about the exile. It’s just a lament. And this is something that happens quite a bit in the Gospels, where they take something that is lamenting something that has already happened, and they flip it, and they say, “Oh, this is about the future. This is about this thing that just happened.” And, uh, and this is, this is about Jesus. And so obviously this is about Herod killing all the innocent people in Bethlehem because Ramah is not by Bethlehem. Um, so like Bethlehem is like 6 miles south of Jerusalem. Ramah is like 6 miles north of Jerusalem.

So, well, someone was— that weeping and lamentation was loud. It was a very loud lamentation.

Yeah, so, uh, probably not. That one’s not as much of a bullseye as, uh, as the others also weren’t. So, um, it’s a slant prophecy. Uh, and then just a few verses before that, we have, uh, because of Herod’s slaughtering of the innocents, we have, uh, Joseph and, uh, Mary grabbing Jesus and running off to Egypt. And then we have, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” Which is another non-prophecy that comes from the book of Hosea , uh, chapter 11, verse the first. And that is, uh, when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me. They kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols. So this, this is about Israel coming out of Egypt with the Exodus, and right just not being able to figure out— keep those dirty balls out of your—

Keep your balls to yourself, man.

Yeah, you don’t know where they’ve been. So, so another, another thing that is not really a prophecy, but is something that the, the author of Matthew— and, and certainly this is something that you, you see in a lot of biblical hermeneutics and a lot of biblical exegesis— is just see resonances. Oh, this is just like this thing that happened over there. Boom, prophecy roasted. It gets to be a prophecy even though it was never understood that way.

Is your understanding of this one— because it is confusing why Matthew sent them to Egypt when nobody else talks about him going to Egypt, or do other people talk about him going to Egypt? I don’t know. So like, is it your understanding that Matthew took this Hosea and was just like, I’m gonna run with that. That’s— I’m just going with it and just, uh, threw it into the story. It’s so confusing to me because you’re right, “Out of Egypt I called my son” is very clearly a reference in Hosea to, you know, to the, the people of Israel. Uh, I don’t— I— it’s so weird to me. Why, why, why put him in Egypt?

Um, I, I think it’s part— it, it’s a pretty complex constellation of events that Matthew has constructed here. But you need to get Jesus to Nazareth. Luke has Jesus, uh, or at least Jesus’s parents starting in Nazareth. Matthew does not. So how do you get him to Nazareth? Well, if you have him leave, then you just scare him out of Bethlehem. Yeah, you scare him out of Bethlehem.

Right.

You need him in Nazareth. Okay, well, you have Archelaus ruling in Judea, but guess what? Archelaus was not ruling in Galilee. Okay, we can get Jesus to Galilee. That’s how we get him to Nazareth. He’s, he’s got to leave, come back when Herod is dead. But then because somebody else took that part of Herod’s kingdom, then Herod’s direct line is no longer ruling over Galilee. We can have them settle in Nazareth. Okay, where’s he going? Why is he getting out of, of, uh, Bethlehem? Oh, let’s get him to Egypt because we’ve got this passage that says, ‘I have called my son out of Egypt.’ And let’s get him to Egypt because of Herod’s slaughtering of the innocent. Like, it’s, it’s a very complex, um, procession of events, but it all, it all fits together quite well. It is a, it’s a dramatic story. That has Jesus get from Bethlehem up to Nazareth and allows Matthew to say, oh, prophecy, oh, prophecy, guess, guess what, prophecy along the way.

So, and I just had to look it up and remind myself Nazareth is way up north. It’s like, yes, 150 kilometers north of Jerusalem. And Bethlehem is like right next to Jerusalem.

Uh, it’s like 6 kilometers or miles, I forget which one. 6 is the number though. Uh, south, south, southwest, just barely a little bit west of, uh, Jerusalem.

Yeah, so, uh, like if you’re standing on, uh, in a high point in Jerusalem, you can just make out one of the hilltops of Bethlehem if you’re looking south. And you know what to look for. Yeah, so, um, and then we got an interesting one that, uh, God warned Joseph in a dream not to go back to Judea, so instead he took Mary and Jesus to Nazareth in Galilee, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene. And what I think is interesting here is, and this is another reason to think that Matthew does not have Joseph and Mary in Nazareth prior to Bethlehem, is if this prophecy is that he would be called a Nazarene, why didn’t Matthew say, so they went home? Or why? Like, he, he has this decision to go to Nazareth, and that decision is what ultimately fulfills this prophecy, which it does not seem to be motivated by any kind of previous connections to this place at all.

So, but the problem is there’s no part of the Hebrew Bible that says he would be called a Nazarene.

So that’s a reference to a prophecy that we have no knowledge of.

Well, and there are two ways that this has traditionally been answered, and one is more common these days than the other. One is that he would—

Nazarene is really supposed to be like Nazirite, okay, and those two things, just to— those two things are not even related conceptually, is that right?

They are not related conceptually. However, the way they are written in Greek transliteration is very close together.

Right.

So, um, but they— like, there’s nothing in the Hebrew Bible that says the Messiah would be a Nazirite either.

Right.

Uh, and the other thing is that it could be something from Isaiah 11:1 , which talks about a, uh, a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And Jesse is David’s father, so it’s Davidic. And it just so happens that, um, the word for, um, the branch shall grow out of his roots is netzer. And so the the claim is that Isaiah 11:1 basically says the Messiah will be a Netzer, or a Nazarene, if you like. So it’s still squinting at this pretty hard. Yeah. To try to make a connection there. But it might be that Matthew was like, we got to have a prophecy here. Come on, let’s find something. And they were like, Netzer? He’s like, I can work with that. I can work with that.

Let’s do Nazarene. That sounds like he’s from Nazareth.

It’s also possible that there were, you know, that there was just a Nazarene prophecy going around that just wasn’t— that we don’t have or whatever.

Yeah, it could have been something that they were like, this is the agrapha, the unwritten prophecy, or it could be something that was in some texts that we just don’t have anymore that at that time, the author of the Gospel of Matthew was like, I can buy that being scripture. Um, so yeah, so what we have in Matthew is a series of things that really, apart from just the identification of Nazareth and the identification of Bethlehem, are not in Luke.

Um, where Matthew is, is telling the story in, in their own unique way to have Jesus fulfilling these prophecies. And the data don’t support the conclusion that Jesus actually fulfilled these prophecies. The data, I would argue, don’t even indicate he was born in Bethlehem. I think most likely he was probably born in Nazareth, and then long after he died, people were like, who’s gonna stop us from saying he was born in Bethlehem?

We can say whatever we want. You?

The president? You know, they were just like, yeah, we can have him born in Bethlehem. And these are ways to tell the stories in ways that make it seem like you’re fulfilling prophecies, even when they’re not even prophecies to begin with.

So make it—.

Throw a few in. Why not make a few up? It’s fine. Oh my God.

And so I think, I think if you want the fulfillment of prophecy to be evidence of something, you got to do an awful lot better than this because these that like, it’s easy to fulfill prophecy when you’re the one telling the story. And if your whole goal is to show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy, you’re a motivator. You’re a— excuse me, you’re a motivated crafter of a specific kind of story.

So yeah, I just find that a stretch. Yeah.

Other prophecy fulfillment in this article from Answers in Genesis, isn’t— he doesn’t even merit talking about. I mean, things like Nazareth was looked upon with scorn, which meant that it fulfilled the idea that the Messiah would be despised and rejected of men. Come on.

Really?

We’re gonna stretch that hard?

Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s quite a reach. But, but, you know, these, these kinds of articles are not for critical thinkers. They’re for people who really want to believe and just want to be made to feel like they have good reason to believe. Because even some of the things in here are about, like, when we get to the “he would be called a Nazarene” prophecy, like, they introduce these options and it says, “However, there are a few plausible solutions to this dilemma.” So what is the argument? The argument is that it’s plausible. Here are ways that we can argue that it’s plausible. So it’s not about what’s most likely, it’s about—and I would say plausible is even a little bit of a stretch. It’s that tiny little sliver of not impossible that apologetics is concerned to gin up.

Well, if that’s where we’re gonna go, if we’re gonna talk about that, let’s do some Sari Apologetics and move on to our next segment. All right, so Sari Apologetics. We’re gonna get to this. You, Dan, sent me a document. Oh, let me pull it up. It’s somewhere. Uh, here we go. Uh, and these are— give us the setup for what, for what, uh, what this is.

Okay, so I, I’ve frequently pointed out that, uh, Luke chapter 1 and 2, one, contradict the Gospel of Matthew , but two, contradict themselves. Uh, and they, and they contradict the Gospel of Matthew mainly in the fact that we’ve talked about some of it, like Matthew has Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem. They have nothing to do with Nazareth until they’re coming back from, from their refugee stint and are forced to go up to Galilee in fulfillment of some prophecy that might exist somewhere. So that’s one example. You know, Luke has Jesus is born in Bethlehem and they hang out, they’re hanging out with family, they go to the temple, they fulfill what’s required of them, and then they just mosey on back to Nazareth.

Right.

You do not get the sense that the king is trying to murder the baby in the Gospel of Luke . No one’s fleeing or whatever. Yes. And you know, then they’re like, well, the author just didn’t think it was important. It’s like, that is pretty profound authorial neglect to be like, “Yeah, they went to the temple. This is really important that you know that they fulfilled all this stuff. What about the fact that the king tried to murder him, and so they had to flee to another country?

No, not important." Well, let’s go through your arguments and objections. What you’ve done is you’ve separated this out into— you’ve made some argument. Yes, we’re going to do some role-playing. And I’m going to make the apologetic objection to whatever your claims are.

And feel free to editorialize to your heart’s content.

Oh, you know I will. You know I will. Glad to hear it. All right, go.

Okay, so we’re going to start with the fact that the Bethlehem story is likely a secondary addition to the Jesus tradition. We’ve already talked about some of the reasons why, but one of them is the fact that it’s never even mentioned in the letters of Paul or in the Gospel of Mark . And again, the word Bethlehem only ever occurs in Matthew’s nativity account, Luke’s nativity account, and John’s reference to the prophecy of the Messiah coming from Bethlehem.

Aha! This, my friend, is the fallacy of the argument from silence. Yes, just because they didn’t mention it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

They were not paying attention to important things.

Yeah. And you know what? I think of all the stuff we’re going to go through, this probably is like the least illegitimate because there is a degree to which it is an argument from silence.

Now, there is a point that a lot of people will make: an argument from silence is not a fallacy if we should have it, if we should expect to see it, if they should have mentioned it. And I think that that is not necessarily true, at least of the writings of Paul, because Paul’s not really about his temporal life. We have a passing reference to him being born of a woman, but that’s serving a more theological point.

Well, and Paul’s not even claiming to have met Jesus.

Right.

Whereas these gospel authors were, at least if the authorship attribution were correct, we would be assuming that the authors had actually met and hung out with Jesus.

Yes. Now, Mark is supposed to have just been the interpreter for Peter, so he not necessarily know stuff. Luke is, you know, doing all this investigating. So, um, to a degree, yeah, we would expect them to have hung out with them. So it is true that that’s a bit of an argument from silence. Mark, I think you would expect some kind of reference to this. But what’s interesting is even just outside of the nativity accounts of both Matthew and Luke, they never refer to Jesus having come from Bethlehem. It’s always Jesus of Nazareth. And scholars think that the nativity account in Luke is a secondary addition. And there are even scholars who think the nativity account in Matthew is a secondary addition. And the fact that they never— you never have a reference back to anything that happened before Jesus’s baptism in any of the Gospels apart from the nativity accounts themselves is suggestive that the— his origins were not important.

To the stories that were in circulation about Jesus. It’s once his ministry begins, that’s when Jesus becomes relevant to everybody. And so you’ve got those nativity accounts, but outside of that, there just doesn’t seem to be any relevance to Jesus’s origins, and certainly no indication about being born in Bethlehem. But we’ve talked about other reasons to think this is a secondary addition as well. So if we’re just isolating that one point, I would say to some degree, touche.

And would say, but there are a lot of other things that contribute to that conclusion as well. And this is one of the conclusions I think is, I would say, is probable, is most likely, but it’s certainly not a slam dunk.

And I’m going to guess we’re not going to get a lot of touches in this.

I was about to say, that’s the last you’re going to hear that from me. So relish it.

All right, next.

Uh, next, Matthew— and, and we talked about this in the previous segment— seems to have Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem and only later settling in Nazareth as a result of their desire not to return to Bethlehem in light of Archelaus’s rule in Judea.

Aha, but says, uh, Mr. Apologist coming in, uh, Matthew never says that Joseph and Mary were from Bethlehem, never says that they were from Bethlehem and not Nazareth. He never claims that. He just— they just happen to be there then.

Yeah, yeah. And this is, this is a pretty common one. And, and this is, uh, something you see in a lot of the arguments about contradictions where, you know, one resurrection story says there was an angel and then another resurrection story says there were two angels. And it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, it said there was one. It didn’t say there weren’t two.

Right.

To say there’s an angel only means there’s at least one. Yeah. If it says there’s an angel, all that means is there was at least one angel. And if it says there were two angels, all that means is that there were at least two. Could have been billions of angels. There could have been angels coming out of the cracks in the rocks, and they only felt it was relevant to mention one or two. And this is a much weaker point, because as we pointed out, the narrative states pretty clearly that they are coming back out of Egypt and they’re like, “Oh, we can’t go back to Bethlehem. I guess we got to go to Galilee.” And the text says that they settle in Galilee, in Nazareth, which is what you say when someone is moving somewhere new, not what you say when someone is returning home. If this was where they were originally from, the narrative would be different. This is not the way you describe someone returning home.

Well, and that, that hit home for me when I looked at that map just, just a few minutes ago.

Oh, and saw how far away it is.

Just because like, that is so much farther away. And they’re, you know, they’re on donkeyback if there’s even a donkey. There’s not even a donkey. But like, when you’re— yeah, when you’re going that far out of your way You’re, uh, yeah, that’s— you, you’d mention that that was home. It does feel like—.

Yeah. And all right, yeah, so I, I don’t think that objection holds any water. I, I think that’s a pretty weak one.

Okay, next.

Matthew has Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem until they flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s killing of the innocents and only returning to settle in Nazareth after Herod’s death. Luke 2:39 has them peacefully returning to Nazareth after they fulfill the legal requirements related to Jesus’s birth. In other words, Luke does not seem to know that they were literally chased out of the country by the king, right, and then forced to, uh, to reside in another country before returning to Nazareth, right?

And here the objection, uh, is, is very similar. Yeah, it’s just, well, It doesn’t say that— it doesn’t preclude the possibility that the slaughter of the innocents happened and they went into Egypt. It just doesn’t mention it.

Yeah, and this is the same kind of thing as earlier where you take these incongruities and suggest that, hey, it’s just dealer’s choice. The author could have said something but just decided not to. But again, in this case, that is—.

Thought he was running long. He was like, gosh, you know, I just started this story, but one needs to use the editorial mind if you want to craft an interesting story.

Yeah. And my argument would be that is pretty criminal neglect to leave out that detail.

Yeah, it’s a pretty— it’s a pretty— it’s such a strong detail too. Yeah, like that’s juicy. That’s a juicy part of the story.

Oh yeah, big time. And just chronologically, it doesn’t seem to work because in Matthew, Herod says, says, when did the star appear? And then goes and has everyone 2 years and under killed, which suggests that this is taking place 2 years after Jesus’s birth. So Jesus is like maybe almost 2 years old, if not 2 years old. When this is happening, and still in Bethlehem, and, and still in Bethlehem. So, uh, another indication that they lived in Bethlehem, right, in Matthew. But in Luke it says that they, uh, you know, they had to present them at the temple, and when all was fulfilled, they returned to their own city, or their own town, in Nazareth. And then it says they visited Jerusalem at the Passover every year. That does not allow for, one, them to flee to Egypt until Herod dies.

It does not allow for them to be persona non grata in Jerusalem for however long. It does not allow them to still be around in 2 years when Herod is on the lookout. And it also suggests that they were free to come back once a year. And so it just doesn’t fit.

Right.

It doesn’t fit.

Well, speaking of them coming from Nazareth down to Bethlehem, why did they do that?

Well, we have the mechanism in Luke is this notion of a worldwide census. Caesar wanted the world to be taxed. So he told everybody they had to go to their own city to be taxed. And the point to make here is that Rome would not have issued a census requiring everyone return to their ancestral hometown to register because that, one, wouldn’t be possible for many people, would nuke the economy for months, and would give the Romans utterly useless information.

Right.

The whole point of the census is, “Who’s living and working where so we can tell the people who are governing that place, this is how much we want from you in taxes.” So the notion that you would just go wherever you were from to register is just bafflingly, just asinine, just ahistorical. That would not have happened.

Excuse me, Dr. McClellan, but I do believe that—if that is your real name, if that’s from an accredited university, that doctorate of yours. But I do think that if you went to the British Museum and looked up P. London 904, the Papyrus 904, you would see very clearly that there was a Roman edict that read Gaius Vibius Maximus, prefect of Egypt, says the enrollment by household being at hand, it is necessary to notify all who for any cause whatsoever are outside their nomes, or territories, to return to their domestic hearth or home, that they may accomplish the customary dispensation of enrollment and continue steadfastly in the husbandry that belongs to them. Yes. So, aha!

They were—wait a minute, I think I see the problem of my own argument.

Yes, and that would be that this says nothing about ancestral homestead or hometown. It says your hearth. And this is talking about returning home precisely because people traveled. People traveled for work, people traveled for pleasure, and if they’re doing a census, they want to know where you live or where your job is.

Yeah, where’s your hearth? Get to your hearth!

Get to the hearth, uh, olly olly oxen free, we need you, we need you back at your hearth. And this is unrelated to the notion that this census would require Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, and the text says that he went down to Bethlehem because he was of or descended from the house and the lineage of David. It’s not saying that’s where he lived. It’s saying that’s where he descended from ancestrally. He was of that ancestral hometown.

Uh, point of order. Luke 2:3 says that everyone went to his own city, which suggests hometown rather than ancestral hometown. Boom, you got schooled.

Yes, it does say they all went to their own towns to be registered in verse 3. And then it says Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. So here’s the interesting thing though. When you go all the way down to where it says they went home, which is, uh, I think Luke 2 , is it 39? Yes. Uh, when they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, so, so this is that, um, stuff in the temple with the baby Jesus and all that. Then they’ve fulfilled everything that is required of them. They returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the Greek is identical to the Greek of Luke 2:3 . In other words, it says everybody in verse 3 went to their own town. According to Luke 2:39 , Joseph and Mary’s own town, exact same Greek, was Nazareth.

Oh, so if you’re saying that the census only required you to go to your own town, then they left their own town, right?

And they messed up the census somehow.

One way or another, they messed it up.

Yeah. So he just misunderstood. It was a pretty big mistake. He’s like, ah, like I showed up at SBL a day early because I thought I am on a committee at SBL and I thought our committee meeting was on the Friday and SBL starts on Saturday. And no, it turns out that there are a lot of meetings that take place on Friday, but my particular meeting had actually been scheduled for Saturday. So I showed up a day early. For—because I didn’t understand. So, so yeah, that kind of thing happens. But it’s a much bigger mistake for Joseph and Mary.

Joseph and Mary had to travel that distance while she was pregnant.

Yeah, that’s, that’s rough. She’s like, why would we have to go to our ancestral hometown?

I don’t know.

I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know.

I just think at least get me a donkey.

Do they have those new electric donkeys?

I think she’s an e-donkey. All right, next thing.

So, uh, we have no record of an empire-wide census, uh, from anywhere in ancient Rome, and they would not have conducted a census themselves within Herod’s own client kingdom. Herod was a client king, very similar to the way that, uh, we, we have a lot of other countries that kind of do our bidding in the United States. And we have a long history of telling countries to do our bidding.

We’re good at it.

What do you want? Yeah. And something very similar went on then. And basically Rome said, “Hey, this is the tribute that you owe to us, and we don’t care how you get it, just pay it.” And then Herod would go around and say, “Give me my money,” and charge taxes to people based on the tribute. And obviously Herod would also do ‘one for me, one for them, one for me, one for them.’ They would charge extra. But Herod was in charge of figuring out how to get the money, and all Rome wanted was, “Hey, we’d like this much money from you.” So yeah, there’s no— the notion that there was an empire-wide census that included Herod’s client kingdom is not supported by the data.

Except for in Tacitus’ Annals, Book 6, chapter 41. A tribe known as the—.

Say it right.

Ciate.

Did I misspell that? Yeah, it’s actually the I should be an L and the E should be an I. So try again to say it right.

I can’t. I don’t know what you just said. You say it.

C-L-I-T-A-E. Clitae? Yeah, something like that. Um, okay, that’s okay.

I should have— I looked up other things, I didn’t get around to looking up what that was. Okay, okay. Uh, anyway, in Tacitus, the Clitae, uh, were required to give an account of their revenue and submit to a Roman tribute, even though, uh, they were subject to a client king named Archelaus.

Yes, and this is not the Archelaus that took over rule of Judea after Herod died. This is Archelaus of Cappadocia. Uh, this is a different Archelaus. So, so this is brought up—.

My preferred Archelaus, actually.

Yeah, he’s a better Archelaus, but, um, the best one. Yes, the Arch Archelaus, if you will. Um, and this is brought up a lot. Um, our, our good friend, uh, Inspiring Philosophy quoted a, a scholar who brought up this passage as evidence that they would’ve meddled in the affairs of other client kingdoms, including imposing censusi, censi, censuses upon them. And the problem is that’s not at all what the text says. I’m going to read from a translation and then correct some of the translation and then explain what’s going on here.

At the same time, the Clitae, a tribe subject to the Cappadocian Archelaus, retreated to the heights of Mount Taurus because they were compelled in Roman fashion to render an account of their revenue and submit to tribute. There they defended themselves by means of the nature of the country against the king’s unwarlike troops, till Marcus Trebellius, whom Vitellius, the governor of Syria, sent as his lieutenant with 4,000 legionnaires and some picked auxiliaries, surrounded with his lines two hills occupied by the barbarians, the lesser of which was named Cadra, the other Davara. It just goes on like that.

I stopped paying attention.

I don’t know what we’re doing. I did too. But in short, it does not say that Rome imposed a census. It says that this tribe that was subject to Archelaus was compelled in Roman fashion to render an account of their revenue. Now here’s the problem. The— it doesn’t say in Roman fashion. The Latin actually says, according to our mode, they were subjected to a census.

Now here’s the thing. If you go ask a classicist what’s going on here, they will, every last one of them, tell you, oh, this means Archelaus imposed a census upon the tribe that was in his own kingdom. And did it in the Roman fashion.

Right.

And it didn’t work. They objected. They ran off to the hills, and then they were giving Archelaus trouble, and Archelaus had to go, uh, Rome, can you help out here a little bit? And Rome was like, oh, you again? Okay, send the, uh, we’re gonna send Trebellius, Marcus Trebellius, with a bunch of legionnaires and some auxiliaries to root out the rebels that you evidently can’t handle on your own.

So you’re saying they couldn’t find the clit? I’m just going to say that’s delightful.

Look, they were hiding. They were up under a cleft.

It’s not always easy to find. It’s not their fault.

Oh, gosh. It’s a good thing my wife doesn’t listen to podcasts. Uh, but I just realized that could have reflected negatively on me, and that was not where I was going.

I’m just letting it out.

That’s not where I was going, I promise you. Not where I was going. Um, but that has nothing to do with Rome imposing a census on a client kingdom. That has to do with a client king imposing his own census and trying to do it in the Roman fashion. Because when Rome imposes a census, you don’t say, Rome is imposing a census in the Roman fashion, as, as those Romans are wont to do. Yeah, you just say they imposed a census because they, of course, they’re doing it in the Roman fashion. But no, this was a client king doing it as the Romans did, um, like they do on the Discovery Channel. And so, um, it was— this has nothing to do with that. So yeah, there, there are apologists who will bring this up and it is profoundly misguided.

And that brings us to the final—

Yeah, let’s, let’s get through this last one.

We’re running long here, but now this, this, this could go on forever, but Luke 2:2 claims that the census took place when Quirinius— I’m going to say that name again because I slurred it— Quirinius governed in Syria, and that would be a reference to the census overseen by Quirinius when he was legate in Syria starting in 6 CE after Herod Archelaus was deposed and Rome took over direct rule of Judea and needed to know how to tax the region. Yeah. Okay.

So the objection you’ve given me involves a word that I—

You just say prote or prote.

Okay. We’re not crushing our protes here.

No, no.

Okay, so, uh, the objection is Luke 2:2 uses the word prote, which can mean earlier or before. So the passage should be translated, this was the registration before Quirinius began to govern in Syria.

And, uh, the problem here is that, uh, prote, it’s actually spelled slightly differently when it’s used to mean earlier or before. For it is followed up immediately after by a noun or a participle, uh, or a phrase that is in the genitive case. And that is not what we see in Luke 2:2 . So there, there, there are scholars who have been like, yeah, this is— while it’s not an, uh, you know, utterly impossible reading, it is not a plausible reading and is clearly just apologetic in origin. It is just an attempt to sidestep the fact that Luke 2:2 would have to have this census and Jesus’s birth dating to 6 CE, which directly contradicts Luke 1 , which has it occurring during the reign of Herod the Great, or very shortly after his death in 4 BCE, a full decade before Quirinius took over rule.

So, uh, yeah, that objection also does not work. It’s not the weakest of all the objections here, but it’s far from a plausible objection to the recognition that Quirinius, uh, had nothing to do with Syria or any census anywhere near the reign of Herod the Great.

All right, well, there you go. Uh, apologists, sorry apologists, uh, your sorry apologetics don’t seem to be cutting it this time, but next round they’re gonna come through with some hardcore stuff.

Oh, I’m sure they will.

You, you better, you better be getting down to fighting weight so that, so that, because they’re, uh, they’re coming for you. Uh, friends, thank you so much for tuning in. If you would like to get an ad-free version of this show, possibly get it early, you can become one of our patrons over on patreon.com. You go over there, you give us a little bit of your money every month. We appreciate it. It keeps our, our families fed. And then, uh, you get to be a part of, uh, making the show go, and you get access to the, to the show, to the ad-free version of the show. You get— you can get access to the after-party that we do every week, uh, bonus content where you can ask us questions. It’s the best way to actually get us to respond to you. If you want a response from us. It may not be timely, but we will respond to you. So head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma to do that. We, we always appreciate our patrons the most. But speaking of appreciating people, we appreciate Roger.

Thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing the show. And we will talk to you all again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Did Jesus Fulfill Prophesy?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology