Farrell Till has been having a good time eating biblical literalists for lunch on the issue of prophecy fulfillment. For all of that, though, I think he's been too easy on them. He's listed 4 tests which a "fulfilled" prophecy needs to meet. I think he should add 2 more to the list.
Let me lead up to the 1st of these with a story. It was told to me as true, but it sure has all the earmarks of an urban legend. Regardless, it doesn't need to be true in order to illustrate the point I'm trying to make. Say that you're a relatively well-to-do professional person. One day you receive a plain envelope in the mail. In it is a single sheet of paper bearing only 2 sentences: "The closest game in the NFL this week is Cincinnati vs. Tampa Bay. The Bengals will win." "Huh!" you think to yourself as you throw the paper into the recycling bin. But, out of curiosity, you check the sports scores Sunday night and, sure enough, the Bengals did win.
Same thing next week, as the mystery letter names the Vikings to beat the Lions, and they do. The 3rd week's letter carries another prediction, but this time there's an added paragraph: "You have probably figured out that I'm working on a system for predicting winners of sports contests, and I'm sure you understand the implications of being able to do so consistently. It is in your interest as well as mine to keep these letters confidential."
The letters continue to arrive every week. In week 5, it's pointed out that you are free to place bets based on the predictions.
In week 7, the letter predicts that the Raiders will beat the Chargers. As it turns out, the game is tied at the end of regulation time, and the Chargers win on a field goal in overtime. The Week 8 letter acknowledges that the system isn't perfect but goes on to correctly call the winner of that week's game.
Eventually an explanation arrives: "Five years ago I was a college student who lived for only two things: sports and computers. I found that the best way to combine these passions was by playing computer-simulation football games, but, as a computer engineer, I was sure I could write better simulation routines than the commercial software then on the market, so I started doing my own programming. After I graduated, I got a job with a company that has its own supercomputer, and I've been using it after hours for the tremendous amount of number-crunching needed to run my very elaborate simulation program. I've been testing and improving it for the last three years, and I think it's up to the task of calling winners of even the tightest football games over 90% of the time.
"My problem is that my use of the supercomputer has technically been illegal, and if my employer ever found out about it, I'd lose my job. I'm looking for financial backing so that I can legitimately rent the computer time I need, and I'm coming to you because, to be blunt, you have lots more money than I do. I'm sure you'll understand when I say I'd like to remain anonymous."
The letter goes on to propose that you front the computer geek the money needed to go legit, and in return the geek will keep providing you with predictions. You have some reservations, but there's that fabulous 90% track record to go on, so you come up with the requested amount of money.
That's the last you ever hear of the geek, who actually turns out to have been a con artist. When eventually you swallow your pride and contact the cops, you find out exactly what the scam was. All that was necessary was a list of 1024 names of people as well off as you. The first week, 512 of them got a letter just like yours, predicting the Bengals would win; the other 512 got a letter predicting the exact opposite, that the Buccaneers would win. Needless to say, in week 2 it was only the people in the 1st half of the original list who got the next letter, and 256 of them were told, like you, that the Vikings would win, while the other 256 letters named the Lions. Keep dividing by 2, and you drop to 128, 64, 32, 16, and 8 suckers in successive weeks. The con artist could string the entire 8 along for an extra week on the strength of the overtime game.
Eventually, though, the list is whittled down to a couple of people who will be absolutely convinced that this is the fabled "sure thing"--so convinced that they will fork over thousands of dollars. The con artist, meanwhile, has invested about 2000 letters and stamps in the scam, so any return over about a thousand bucks represents a profit.
In fact, the so-called "fabulous track record" reflects nothing more than the workings of sheer chance. If 1024 people independently flip a coin 10 times, the expectation--the norm, the typical result-- is that one of them will get 10 straight heads. And a good statistician (or a good con artist) can tell you that this happens about once in a thousand tries--no big deal, certainly not a great rarity. But, if you don't understand the math behind it, it seems like a big deal. Guess which one of the coin-flippers will be talking about it at the office for the next week. (Actually, there'll probably be another one as well, the 1 out of 1024 who got 10 straight tails.)
Same story with prophecy fulfillment. It could well be that there were a thousand "prophets" making predictions about how long the Chosen People would remain in captivity in Babylon. Some said 5 years, some said 100, some said forever. Which one gets remembered? The one who came closest.
So I propose Rule 5, which is designed to eliminate the lucky guess: ALL of the prophet's predictions, not just a few of them, must be shown to be true. After all, if infallible inspiration from God is the source of this wisdom, why should there be any exceptions to the ability to foretell the future? Anything less than perfection could otherwise be explainable by sheer chance.
Moving along, consider the opinion of most linguists that almost every sentence you speak or write is unique. Neither you nor anyone else has ever spoken that exact combination of words before or is likely to do so again. That's because there are over 800,000 words in the English language and a bazillion different ways of combining them. And yet I'd be willing to lay even money that everyone reading this article has, at one time or another, uttered the sentence, "To be or not to be; that is the question." Why? Because this is the beginning of the most famous soliloquy in the most famous play in English literature. The words come from a script, people are expected to recite them verbatim every time, and they do. Plays, quotations, and rituals are all examples of exceptions to the "unique sentence" generalization.
This leads us to Rule 6, which can be stated as a metaphor: The "fulfillment" cannot be a cake. You know how to bake a cake, right? Start with a recipe, an exact list of ingredients and procedures, and do exactly what it tells you to do. Voila! A cake!
Want a messiah? Start with a recipe, a script, and follow all the steps. Voila! A savior!
Now, I'd be willing to believe that Nebuchadnezzar had no particular reason to go out of his way to fulfill a prophecy of some obscure Hebrew fanatic that he'd probably never even heard of. But how about Jesus and his merry band? They certainly knew what the messianic prophecies were and what it would take to fulfill them. All they had to do to appear messianic was to follow the script.
Of course, not just anyone was likely to do this, especially given the prophecies involving suffering and death, but we've certainly seen plenty of recent examples of people in the Middle East willing to commit suicide for their favorite cause, so there's every reason to think that their counterparts existed 2000 years ago as well.
So does it count as prophecy fulfillment if someone says, "The messiah will do so-and-so," and a couple of centuries later someone comes along, wanting to be thought of as that very messiah, and says, "By golly, then, I'd better do so-and-so"? Obviously not. Unless, of course, you believe without questioning that the Lord works in mysterious ways.
(Richard S. Russell, 2642 Kendall Avenue, Madison, WI
53705-3736; e-mail RSRMadison@aol.com)
