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Old Testament Prophecies not fulfilled in the New Testament
Any challenge to the integrity of the Bible will very likely draw
the familiar prophecy-fulfillment
response. "If the Bible is not inspired of God,"
Christian fundamentalists will ask, "How do you
explain all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled ?" The
answer to this question is quite simple. The
so-called prophecy fulfillments that the New Testament writers
claimed in the person and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth were
prophecy fulfillments only in the fertile imagination of the
writers. The famous virgin-birth prophecy (Isaiah 7:14 and Matt.
1:23), the prophecy of the messiah's birth in Bethlehem (Micah
5:2 and Matt. 2:6), the prophecy of King Herod's slaughter of the
children of Bethlehem (Jere. 31:15 and Matt. 2:18) - these and
many like them became prophecy fulfillments only through the
distortions and misapplications of the original Old Testament
statements. [or were created out of whole cloth with NO reference
to other scripture whatsoever].
To discuss these in depth would require an entire book, so
instead I will concentrate on another aspect of the
prophecy-fulfillment argument: New Testament claims of prophecy
fulfillment for which no Old Testament sources can be found. An
example would be John 7:37-38, where Jesus allegedly said,
"If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who
believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart will
flow rivers of living water." At that time, the only
scriptures were the Old Testament, yet try as they have, Bible
inerrantists have never found this statement that Jesus said was
in the the scriptures of his day. The prophecy was nonexistent.
Similar to this is a "prophecy fulfillment" that was
referred to in Matthew 2:23. Here it was claimed that when Joseph
took his family to Nazareth, he fulfilled that "which was
spoken by the prophets, 'He [Jesus] shall be called a
Nazarene.'" In all of the Old Testament, however, neither
the word Nazareth nor Nazarene is even mentioned, so how could it
be true that the prophets (plural) had predicted that the messiah
would be called a Nazarene? To avoid admitting that a mistake was
made, inerrantists point out that Matthew did not say that this
prophecy had been written; he said only that it had been
"spoken" by the prophets.
A weakness in this "explanation" is the fact that
Matthew routinely introduced alleged prophecy
fulfillments by saying that thus-and-so had been
"spoken" by the prophets. He claimed, for example,
that the preaching of John the Baptist fulfilled what had been
"spoken" by Isaiah the prophet: "The voice of one
crying in the wilderness, Make ye ready the way of the Lord, Make
his paths straight" (2:3). However, this statement that
Matthew said Isaiah had spoken is a quotation of what had been
WRITTEN in Isaiah 40:3.
Other written "prophecies" that Matthew introduced by
saying that they had been "spoken" can be found in
4:14-16 (Isaiah 9:1-2), 12:17-21 (Isaiah 42:1-4), 13:35 (Psalm
78:2), and 21:4-5 (Zechariah 9:9). Since all of these alleged
prophecy statements can be found in the Old Testament, we can
only assume that Matthew's style was to use the word spoken to
introduce statements that had in fact been written. Undoubtedly,
he intended the expression to mean the same thing in 2:23 as it
did elsewhere when he referred to things that had been
"spoken" by the prophets. Hence, he made a mistake in
2:23, because no prophet (much less prophets) had ever written
ANYTHING about Nazareth or Nazarenes.
In telling the story of Judas's suicide, Matthew erred again in
claiming that Jeremiah had prophesied about the purchase of the
field where Judas was buried. After casting down in the sanctuary
the thirty pieces of silver that he had been paid for betraying
Jesus Judas went away and hanged himself.
The priests then took the money and bought the potter's field to
bury Judas in. Matthew claimed that
this was a prophecy fulfillment" "Then was fulfilled
that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet, saying, And
they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was
priced, whom certain of the children of Israel did price; and
they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed
me" (27:9-10). In reality, however, no statement like this
can be found in the book of Jeremiah. Inerrantists will sometimes
defend Matthew by referring to the book Zechariah 11:12-13, which
makes mention of thirty pieces of of silver but in a context
entirely different from the statement that Matthew
"quoted". Besides, even if Zechariah had obviously
written the statement that Matthew quoted, this would hardly
acquit Matthew of error, because he said Jeremiah, not Zechariah,
had made the prophecy.
A more serious nonexistent prophecy concerns the very foundation
of Christianity. On the night of his
alleged resurrection, Jesus said to his disciples, "Thus it
is written, that the Christ should suffer,
and rise again from the dead the third day" (Luke 24:46).
The Apostle Paul agreed with this claim that the scriptures had
referred to a third-day resurrection of the messiah: "For I
delivered unto
you first of all that which also I received: that Christ died for
our sins according to the scriptures;
and that he was buried; and that he hath been raised on the third
day according to the scriptures" (I Cor. 15:4-5).
Two New Testament writers, then, claimed that the scriptures had
spoken of a resurrection of the messiah on the third day. The
problem that this claim poses for the prophecy-fulfillment
argument is that no one can cite a SINGLE Old Testament scripture
that mentions a third-day resurrection. As a matter of fact, no
one can even cite a resurrection of the messiah, PERIOD, but that
is another article for another time.