Blog
These are opinionated essays. They argue positions on biblical-studies topics and draw conclusions from critical scholarship. For neutral, both-sides treatments that adjudicate nothing, see Scripture Analysis.
All posts
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Psalm 22 and the Crucifixion: Did David Predict the Cross?
Psalm 22 is a lament whose sufferer is rescued, not raised. Its "pierced" line rests on a disputed word the gospels never quote, and no one read it as a prediction before the cross. The gospels told the passion in its words.
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The Probability Argument Debunked: Why "1 in 10¹⁷" Proves Nothing
Peter Stoner's famous 1-in-10¹⁷ prophecy odds, taken at their strongest, and why every factor prices an event reported by writers who already knew the prophecy.
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The Triumphal Entry: Fulfillment or Staging?
Mark's Jesus sends ahead for the donkey, and Matthew's version has two animals where Zechariah's poetry has one. Why the triumphal entry reads as an enactment rather than a prediction come true, and where scholars divide.
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Failed Prophecies: The Misses the Fulfillment Lists Count as Hits
Tyre still stands, Damascus is still a city, and Egypt never lay desolate for forty years. A look at the prophecies the fulfillment lists explain away or count as hits, judged by the standard they apply to the hits.
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Prophecy Fulfillment in Other Religions
Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu traditions each read older texts as foretelling their own savior, and by the apologist's own method each one succeeds. A test that every rival faith passes cannot single out the true one.
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Messiah ben Joseph: Did Jews Expect a Dying Messiah?
Rabbinic tradition knows a messiah who dies before the final redemption. But in the Talmud he falls in battle rather than dying for sins, and the texts that name him come after Jesus. What the tradition can and cannot show.
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Matthew's Fulfillment Formula: Creative Writing or Historical Reporting?
Out of Egypt, Rachel weeping, a Nazarene verse no prophet wrote, a field credited to the wrong prophet, and two donkeys. Matthew's fulfillment formula, read against the Old Testament passages it quotes.
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The Suffering Servant Debate: Israel, the Prophet, or the Messiah?
Isaiah 53 read through the Septuagint, Qumran, the Targum, the Talmud and Rashi: why an ancient messianic reading was never a Christian one.
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Daniel's Prophecies: Prediction or Postdiction?
Daniel's forecasts are precise to about 167 BCE and wrong after it; weighed against Jerome, Kitchen, Hasel and Constable, the Maccabean date still holds.
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Who Wrote Isaiah? And Why It Matters for Prophecy
Isaiah 53 is the most-cited messianic prophecy, but most critics have long held Isaiah to be several centuries' work. The case for multiple authors, the defense of single authorship, and what the dating means for the prophecy.
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How the New Testament Writers Read the Old Testament
The New Testament writers did say the prophets spoke of Jesus. But they read those texts by pesher, midrash and typology, finding correspondences backward from Jesus, and none of those methods yields a prediction.
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Ezekiel's Shepherd-King, Reduced to One Line
The 356-prophecy list keeps Ezekiel's shepherd-king as one line, "Descendant of David", and drops the land, the statutes, the reunited tribes and the temple.
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Overlapping Prophecies: The 24 Passages Critical Scholarship Shares with the Apologetic List
All twenty-four passages critical scholars read as messianic sit on the apologetic list too, but read whole, they describe Davidic kings and exilic hopes.
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What Jews Actually Expected From the Messiah
Second Temple Jews looked for a king, a priest, a prophet or a heavenly figure. John J. Collins's four messianic paradigms, and why none of them had room for a messiah whose defining act was to die.
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Reading Backwards: How Crucifixion Created Christology
A crucified messiah was a contradiction in terms. How the cross sent Jesus's followers back into Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, and why the christology they found there was read backward from the event rather than predicted before it.
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The Septuagint Problem: When Your Prophecy Depends on the Greek
Three famous 'fulfilled prophecies' lean on Greek wording the Hebrew does not bear out, from Isaiah's 'virgin' to Psalm 22's 'pierced' and Hebrews' 'body'.
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The Proof-Text Game: How 356 Becomes 24
A popular list counts 356 prophecies fulfilled in Jesus. Check each verse in its context and the count falls to roughly two dozen that some ancient Jewish tradition read messianically, and only a handful of those predate Christianity.
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Did Jesus Fulfill the Real Messianic Prophecies? A Critical Assessment
Set aside the 356-item lists and test Jesus against the passages ancient Judaism actually read as messianic: the Davidic king, the servant, the royal psalms. Read as first understood, he fulfilled none; his followers reread them after the cross.
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