Christmas prelude: voices of the past

One of the things that excites me most about Christmas, is the fact that we commemorate and celebrate the single most decisive birth ever in human history. And what is more: this birth was proclaimed no less than seven centuries before it actually occurred, if we are to believe the Bible.

But should we?

A FIGHT OF IDEAS

So-called liberal and conservative theology have for a considerable amount of time been slugging it out in order to achieve dominance. Proponents of liberal theology contend that predictive prophecy is impossible: there is absolutely no way human beings can actually know beforehand when or how a certain event will transpire.

So, they claim, any recorded prophecy must either have been fabricated by overly zealous propagandists in advance, or some editorial genius (called scribes) must have masterminded and brilliantly carried out a startingly successful cover-up operation. The charge? They twisted and tweaked the content of the manuscripts so that the actual wording 'proved' that the prophet got it right.

A GIANT HOAX?

So it's all a series of hoaxes designed to double-cross the gullible, then? The stunning predictions by the Hebrew prophets about the child that was to be born in Betlehem before the time the Jewish temple would be destroyed; it's just a product of human cunning?

No way.

The conservative view in this matter is that the ancient prophets first spoke, and then subsequently produced a written record of, more than a hundred individual predictions of what was to happen in and around the roman province of Judea cirka 4 AD, give or take a few years. And to date no attempt at explaining away the legitimacy of such a position has conclusively carried the day. There are rationally plausible reasons why we should accept the predictive prophecies of Scripture as genuine and ancient, predating the events they foresaw would happen by years, decades or centuries.

LET'S HAVE A FRESH LOOK AT THINGS

1. Liberal theology bases its assumptions on a so-called scientific worldview in which the notion of a god acting outside of, and independent of, the confines of time and space, is frowned upon, ridiculed or ruled out altogether. Naturalistic science assumes there is nothing beyond what our instruments can measure in hard facts, and, consequently, liberal theology jumps onto the bandwagon, bellowing that there are no supernatural beings capable of delivering 'foretellings' allegedly made prior to the events they speak of.

Their problem is precisely that: they jumped onto the bandwagon much too early. Today, scientists even allege that our universe, the cosmos, is made up of visible and invisible matter, the latter having earned the 'nick-name', as it were, of dark matter. It cannot be seen; it defies observance, it cannot be grasped or viewed by the human eye. But, still, it's out there in gargantuan amounts. It exists, even though it cannot be captured on a photograph.

Science, then, it seems has moved beyond the rigours and limitations of a naturalistic worldview, and thus toppled a huge pile of conclusions reached by the eminent and enlightened minds of die-hard sceptics: there is much more than meets the eye.

There may even be a bigger mind than those of liberal theology capable of alerting humans of imminent or not so impending events, before they even materialize. Am I not right?

THERE'S TOO MUCH TO CALL IT COINCIDENCE

2. The sheer body of predictive prophecies should in itself discourage any atheist or agnostic from concluding prematurely: these predictions come in their hundreds throughout the Old Testament, and unbiased research have uncovered an mazing degree of precision and concurrence:

The life, death, career and ressurection of Jesus Christ fit perfectly into this seemingly incoherent, heterogenic mass of scattered sayings. He fits them all, fulfilled them all, and lived them all to the fullest sense of their meaning.

What is the likelihood of one man haphazardly, totally randomly, fulfilling predictions about himself (no chance of a mistaken identity) - without even being able to control contemporary political institutions, solicit help from the mass media spin doctors (of which there were none at the time), or even sway the keepers of historical records or the guardians of hallowed religious texts into publishing the necessary back-up story, the vital propaganda?

GALILEAN TRICKERY?

Jesus couldn't have pulled that one off, no matter how hard he may have laboured at passing off as the real Messiah, when in fact he was not.

• He couldn't control his own place of birth (Betlehem, according to a certain Micah)

• He couldn't have orchestrated his own execution (by crucifixion, according to Psalm 22)

• He couldn't have persuaded thousands of people into producing false testimonies about their own supernatural healings at the hands of this Galilean carpenter (Isaiah)

• He couldn't have prearranged his own rejection by the majority of his own countrymen (Isaiah), although some remained faithful.
  

• He couldn't - 2700 years ahead of time - even before his own birth, have manufactured forged documents stating that he would, in a distant future, be loved, worshipped and admired by millions of people who even claim they know he's alive (the same Isaiah)

• He couldn't possibly have gone back in time, after his own execution, in order to add to the Old Testament text a passage describing how he would, posthumously, 'live' to see his desdcendants (disciples) (again old Isaiah).

Come one, skeptics. Accept the evidence, or, if you're not ready to do that: at least consider it.