Eyre Lines

An issue came up in a recent Alpha session, that on “When and how should I read the Bible”, regarding fulfillment of prophecy by Jesus. In fact it came up twice, once in casual conversation and once in the group discussion. A friend gave me a copy of a brief article suggesting that Jesus fulfilled many prophecies and that the odds against this were astronomical, asking if I agreed with this – and, of course, I didn’t; then someone in the group pointed to Psalm 22 and the close similarity with the crucifixion account in Matthew.

It is fairly easy to find sites which list dozens of prophecies ostensibly “fulfilled” by Jesus. Here’s one such which deals only with messianic prophecies. It is slightly less easy, but still trivial, to find sites giving the Jewish attitude to fulfillment of messianic prophecy. Here’s Aish.com on the topic.

I’m inclined to agree with Aish.com that it’s all very well to have fulfilled some messianic prophecies (quite a few people have fulfilled significant numbers of these, including the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who at least according to his followers managed a better overall total than did Jesus), but in order to claim the status of the one and only messiah, you need to fulfil all of them. It is, of course, standard in Christianity to say that the unfulfilled prophecies will be fulfilled at the second coming, but this does not convince, just as the suggestion of many Chabad Lubavitch supporters 20 years ago that the late Rabbi would return to fulfill the remainder does not convince. Now, I happen to think that both Judaism and Christianity have gone up a wrong path in determining that there should be one and only one messiah, as I wrote about here some time ago. However, there we are; we do not have a full set of fulfilled messianic prophecies for anyone who has so far lived, including Jesus.

The reference to Psalm 22 is not, however, a reference to a specifically messianic prophecy; Psalm 22 is not generally regarded in Judaism as prophetic or as messianic. There are, of course, also lists of prophecies more generally which are said to have been fulfilled; here’s a list of 351. The list of correspondences between Psalm 22 and Matthew and John’s accounts of the crucifixion is fairly extensive in its own right; consider verses 16 to 18, for instance (the link I use there is to a parallel literal translation of the Hebrew Masoretic text which includes links for the derivation of each word, and I find this very helpful in “going behind” English translations).

However, there are also a lot of features in Psalm 22 which are not recapitulated; there are no bulls besetting him like ravening lions, for instance, no swords, no dogs, and it is clear from the passage that the author survives rather than dies. This points up something which I always find when looking at claims that prophecy has been fulfilled where the “prophecy” has been gleaned from a non-prophetic passage; you can find snippets of Hebrew scripture to echo almost any circumstance you might wish to, but in the wider context the parallel breaks down.

But, you might say, in those three verses, at least, the parallels are fairly numerous and close.  Abandoned by friends and surrounded by enemies, bones disjointed (probable in a crucifixion), hands and feet pierced, casting lots for garments… and this in a context in which Matthew describes Jesus as quoting the first verse of the Psalm (“Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani” – Matt. 27:46).

Well, not so much so. The Psalms were the worship songs of Judaism (and still are), and Jesus and those who wrote about him could be expected to know them rather well. Aside from casting lots for garments, all those components of vv. 16-18 I quoted would refer to any crucifixion, and anyone crucified would be likely to think that God had abandoned them (if they had any belief in divine providence for them, at least), so at least if Jesus were able to speak having been crucified (which is rather dubious) this would be a natural verse to come to mind. If you’re a churchgoer, it’s likely that you’ve found yourself framing events in your own life in the words of worship songs or hymns, if you’re not, in popular music you know well.

The casting of lots for garments, however, is not in Matthew, but in the far later account of John. Now I tend to think that casting lots for Jesus’ garments is unlikely if you attempt to harmonise the gospel accounts, as by this point he doesn’t have any garments to speak of. However, if you’re a Jewish writer of the day and you hear that soldiers at the scene were playing dice (i.e. casting lots), you are going to think of Psalm 22, and assume that division of garments is involved.

And, indeed, this kind of mechanism is what the vast majority of historical-critical scholars see in the Gospels; the writer knows his scripture and fills in details from the library of scriptural references he has in his head. This may even have happened in the minds of actual eyewitnesses (though the overwhelming probability is that none of the gospel writers was an eyewitness). Our brains fill in detail we didn’t actually see from what we expect to have seen. Having had a career in which I needed to assess and test eyewitness accounts in court on a regular basis, I am only too familiar with this mechanism.

The same historical-critical scholars see a great deal more of this in the gospel accounts, and the result is that they discount most sections of the accounts which appear or are said to fulfill prophecy on the basis that it is to them probably eyewitness or interpreter bias in favour of what they expect to have happened, even if it didn’t actually happen, particularly those which the biblical author explicitly states are fulfillment of prophecy.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that events didn’t happen exactly as the gospel-writers say they did, and they happened to fit neatly to various scriptural passages which the writers knew – indeed, there is such a range of potential passages that there were bound to be some which could be brought to mind. What it does mean is that in terms of historical proof, apparent fulfillment of scripture is worthless.

The talk was, of course, about reading the Bible, and this post also has something to say about “how”, and the choice of a version (of which there are huge numbers in English).

There is a translation issue revolving around “they have pierced my hands and feet” in Psalm 22:16/17 because the primary meaning of the word “ariy” is “lion”; “kaariy” can be translated as “like a lion” rather than as deriving from the word “karah” meaning to dig, plot, bore or open and being “they have pierced”. That is why my link is to an etymological parallel translation.

You will find “they have pierced” in most Christian bibles, and indeed in many Jewish translations into English, but a substantial amount of Jewish scholarship prefers “they bite like a lion my hands and feet”, which does not map to crucifixion well. There’s some further discussion of this in a Wikipedia entry.

There are, in other words, times when our translations will not deliver us a complete picture, and where any translation is going to arrive at a decision as to how to translate something on the basis of their theological preconceptions; the Christian sees scriptural fulfillment, the Jew sees nothing of the sort. There is no way of knowing which is correct, and there is therefore good reason not to rely too strongly on any one translation.

Finally, my friend who passed me the article on fulfilled scripture saw divine providence in the fact that he had brought this hoping to ask me about it on an evening when the talk should have been about prayer, but had been changed at the last minute to being about the Bible due to a miscommunication between organiser and speaker. I wonder whether he would see the same divine providence in the coincidence that the passage brought up as evidence of scriptural fulfillment in the talk was, unbeknownst to the person who mentioned it, one which rests on a seriously dubious piece of translation?

I suspect not!