Response to Evan Fales=review of In Defense of Miracles
Specifically my chapter AFulfilledProphecy as Miracle@
Robert C. Newman
Unfortunately, Professor Fales is correct when he doubtsthat Amainstream@ biblical scholarship takes fulfilledprophecy seriously. Hume=s dictum B prefer any explanation to a miracle B has come to dominate biblical studiesto such an extent that virtually anything non-miraculous will be acceptedinstead.
For instance, the writing of the first five books of theBible has been taken from Moses and given to four anonymous authors J, E, D andP (and at least as many editors) living five to ten centuries later so as toavoid admitting the historicity of the miraculous plagues, the parting of theSea, the giving of the law at Sinai, and the predictions about covenant cursesand kingship. Never mind that a stupendous array ofplot theories is then necessary for the many times each successive new versionis introduced to the Israelis in order to convince them that this document hasbeen in existence and circulating publically for centuries. Similar problems face partitioningtheories for Isaiah and Zechariah, and assigning late dates to other works suchas Daniel and the Psalms.
For the New Testament Gospels, which narrate the miraculousworks and predictions of Jesus, a number of theories have been proposed toseparate them from the apostles. In the twentieth century, a consensus developed around one such model,in which the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are almost totally dependent on theGospel of Mark and on a hypothetical source of Jesus=sayings labeled Q, thus reducing the threefold witness to one or two, andcasting doubt on the reliability even of these. Never mind that this reconstructionruns roughshod over both the earliest traditions and book titles, where theseGospels are always and only assigned to Matthew, Mark and Luke B an apostle and two close associates ofthe apostles. How, if they wereoriginally anonymous, or known to have been written by someone else, did thisinformation get completely and unanimously replaced?
Where a prophecy cannot be dated later to make it aprediction after the fact, the prophecy may be claimed to be vague, or itsfulfillment coincidental, or (as Fales does several times) one may deny thatthe prophet intended to speak about anything beyond his own generation. Yet critical scholars themselvesregularly admit that some prophecies were fulfilled centuries after they wereallegedly made (e.g., the deathbed predictions of Jacob in Genesis 49). Of course, they assign this predictionto a time much later than Jacob. But in doing so they must at least admit that this later author thoughtprophets predicted events centuries in advance! The objection is thus incoherent. If the ancients thought that a prophet might be predictingevents centuries in advance, why not the prophet himself?
My point in all this is to make it clear that Hume=s dictum is skewed. Even if a miracle has occurred, one whofollows Hume=s advicewill always deny it. No matter howstrong the evidence, the witnesses may be lying, my senses may be deceived, orI myself may be dreaming!
But suppose you would really like to know whether miracles occur. How would you go about finding out? For historical miracles, the evidencecannot be any stronger than historical evidence. For fulfilled prophecy, we can at least begin such a programby trying to locate predictions where the fulfillment would come after thelatest date possible for prediction. That is why we chose the particular examples we did, which Falesdismisses by claiming that a prophet can=tbe referring to events so far from his own time period. Of course if we choseevents close to the prophet=stime, Fales would then claim the prediction was actually made after thefulfillment!
Let me respond to some of Fales=particular objections. I suggestthat the late date which critics assign to Daniel is merely because offulfilled prophecy in the book, and that other alleged evidences are not suchas would be convincing by themselves. In fact, Josephus reports that Alexander the Great was shown theprophecies of Daniel about himself, a century and a half before critics arewilling to date the book. On the critical late dating, theearliest manuscripts of the book are breathing down the neck of the author.[4] The author of Daniel knows (about theBabylonian period, even before the Persian) what critics have only recentlydiscovered, that Belshazzar could only offer Daniel the third position in thekingdom because he himself only held the second.
In our Hosea prophecy, the phrase Amanydays@ is rather vague. Since this prophecy is based upon an acted parable of the marriagebetween Hosea and Gomer, analogy might provide some clarification. The various events in their marriageinclude the births of several children, Gomer subsequently running off to herother lovers, falling into slavery (or prostitution), and then being purchased(or hired) by Hosea for many days. This occupies a rather significant fraction of their life together. So perhaps the fulfillment involves arather significant fraction of the time that God and Israel have been incovenant. A couple of thousandyears would not be out of line, though the prophecy says nothing specific aboutjust how long this peculiar relation (of being without king or prince,sacrifice or pillar, ephod or idols) would last, only that it would end in thelast days. As I suggested, itlooks like it has.
The term AIsrael@ as used in the Old Testament sometimesrefers to the whole nation and sometimes to the northern kingdom (often AEphraim@)as contrasted with the southern, Judah. John Bloom has thoroughly researched the subsequent history of both, andboth fulfill the prophecy of Hosea.
Yes, the twin cities are not a random sample. One has to go with the data provided bythe Bible, not to mention trying to pick examples where the fulfillment is lateenough that Fales and others cannot claim prophecy after the fact. But neither are double-blindexperiments strictly random. Oneoften picks paired samples to have one receive the real medicine under test,the other the placebo. Yes, someof these prophecies are rather brief. We have to take the data provided. Stock curse formulas that are literally fulfilled would be striking inany age; it is no cultural anachronism to think that people who pronounced acurse on others really hoped it would literally happen to them.
Yes, the Ezekiel prophecy about Tyre was falsified if Ezekiel intended us to understand that Nebuchadnezzarwould be the one to fulfil it all. Since we have no time machines to go back and interview Ezekiel, we haveto be satisfied with what he tells us. Since (as Fales notes) Ezekiel does tell us that Nebuchadnezzar didn=t fulfill this, he must have had someoneelse in mind! In any case, the fact is that few ifany other cities have ever had their sites scraped bare to the bedrock and therubble cast into the sea Band that is what Alexander did at Tyre.
Regarding Babylon, Isaiah 13 and Jeremiah 50 are allegedlywritten long before the return from exile, so how do we know their context isjust after the return? Cyrus wasnot (apparently) a Mede ethnically, but he did become king of the Medes, andthey were a part of his army when he took Babylon, destroying its politicalpower.[8]Yes, Babylon physically lasted several more centuries (as I pointed out), butis it really inconceivable that Isaiah had any interest in the future historyof Babylon? Only if (1) biblicalprophets have no connection with God (the real point at issue) and (2) God hasno interest in the distant future, which the Bible (at least) categoricallydenies.
So we come to Jesus, the only Jewish messianic claimant whohas unarguably founded a world religion of Gentiles. Yes, Jesus violated Jewish expectations of Messiah in somefundamental ways, but not (I think) the ones Fales lists. We should, of course, distinguishbetween Jewish expectations and biblical (Old Testament) expectations. The Gospels clearly represent Jesusbeing condemned by the Jewish high court for blasphemy, but his claims fit theparadoxical character of several Old Testament predictions about the person ofthe Messiah. As for Jesus becoming a Jewish king, anearthly monarch, who expels the foreign overlords, conquers foreign powers andrules everyone like Egypt, Babylon and Assyria did, I agree with the Jewish(and biblical) expectations, though I cannot claim to speak for my brethren whohold to an amillennial view of the future. Time will tell whether Jesus fulfils these in a secondcoming,[10]but we would do well to try and make the correct decision in this one life wehave been given, rather than betting on the predictions of a biblicalscholarship dominated by Hume=sdictum.
.See S. R. Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, 9th ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,1913); Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction, trans. P. Ackroyd.. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965); Richard E. Friedman, WhoWrote the Bible? (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1987). For critiques of the JEDP theory in particular, see WilliamHenry Green, The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch (New York: Scribners, 1895); Oswald T. Allis, TheFive Books of Moses (Philadelphia:Presbyterian and Reformed, 1949); Umberto Cassuto, The DocumentaryHypothesis, trans. Israel Abrahams(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961); Allan A. MacRae, JEDP: Lectures on theHigher Criticism of the Pentateuch(Hatfield, PA: IBRI, 1994).
.See R. W. Funk, R. W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1993); John Shelby Spong, Liberatingthe Gospels (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1996); E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying theSynoptic Gospels (London: SCM, 1989); forresponses, see Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of theGospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,1987); Eta Linnemann, Is There a Synoptic Problem? trans. Robert W. Yarborough. (Grand Rapids: Baker,1992); William R. Farmer, The Synoptic Problem (Dillsboro, NC: Western North Carolina, 1976).
.Josephus, Antiquities 11.329-339(11.8.5).
.There are now eight manuscripts of Daniel known from Qumran, more than for anyother Old Testament book but the Torah, Psalms and Isaiah – prettyimpressive for a book which (on critical dating) was very recently written! With the earliest of these manuscriptsdated by Frank Moore Cross to the late 2nd century BC, the distancefrom origin to first surviving text for Daniel is now (from the criticalperspective) small than for any other Old Testament work, and for any other NewTestament work but the Gospel of John! Yet somehow this book was viewed and accepted as the work of a prophetfrom the Babylonian and Persian period, not only by the sect of Qumran, but byancient Israel in general. See theinformation provided (and concessions made) by Eugene Ulrich in the sectionÒHebrew and Aramaic TextÓ of the article ÒDaniel, Book ofÓ in Encyclopediaof the Dead Sea Scrolls (2000), 1:170-74.
.Raymond Dougherty, Nabonidus and Belshazzar(New Haven, CT: Yale, 1929); Alan Millard, ADanieland Belshazzar in History,@Biblical Archaeology Review 11:3(May/June, 1985): 72-78. Foradditional discussion of historical problems with a late, Maccabean dating ofDaniel, see Bruce K. Waltke, ÒThe Date of the Book of Daniel,Ó BibliotechaSacra 133 (1976): 319-29; Gleason L.Archer, Jr., ÒModern Rationalism and the Book of Daniel,Ó BibliotechaSacra 136 (1979): 129-47; Edwin M.Yamauchi, ÒThe Archaeological Background of Daniel,Ó BibliotechaSacra 137 (1980): 3-16.
.John A. Bloom, AHosea=s Adulterous Wife: A Portrayal ofIsrael,@ IBRIResearch Report 14 (1982).
.See Xenophon, Cyropaedia 4.2.10-11;8.3.18; 8.4.28.
.Robert C. Newman, ATheTestimony of Messianic Prophecy,@in Evidence for Faith: Deciding the God Question (Dallas: Probe/Word, 1991), 203-14.