Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999

Jesus Prophesies Today

Now we come to lessons in Jesus as a prophet beginning with Matthew:

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations.

Matthew 24:14

Dr Ernest Phibber seeks to impress us totally by telling us that when Jesus spoke these words he only had a handful of simple working-class disciples. He had been rejected by his own nation and was hated “like poison” by Jewish leaders. Within “a few weeks”, he says, Jesus would be dead. Now this astonishingly erudite and highly qualified student of the bible, our instructor in truth, apparently reads a different bible from ours. When Jesus speaks the words quoted in Matthew’s gospel it is only two days before the Passover but our tutor seems to think it is a few weeks away. This, I admit tells us nothing about God’s Truth. It must be simply an error, but does serve to show how careless our professor is despite his lifetime of biblical study.

Never mind, the quoted prophecy sounds amazing. Phibber tells us that within the lifetime of Jesus’s tormentors, his gospel “was being preached over most of the Roman Empire”. And only a few pages earlier Phibber maintained that the Roman Empire was a world empire, whereas the British Empire was not. Since Matthew was written about sixty years after the crucifixion the prophecy of Matthew was already true before the gospel of Matthew was written. How then is it a prophecy? The gospel writer has put into the mouth of Jesus what he knew to be a historical fact at the time he wrote the gospel.

After a little philosophical homily on fashion our guide, Phibber, tells us it might not be fashionable to believe in the second Coming of Christ today but the facts remains that:

• Jesus promised that he would come again
• when he came the world would be a mess
• the world is in a mess today.

Phibber digresses to explain what the nature of the mess is. Before continuing, he tells us not to be put off by a lot of cranks who claim they are Jesus returned. “There have always been plenty of unbalanced people in the world, but their foolish actions are best forgotten”, he assures us. All I can say is “!?!"

Jerusalem Besieged

After all this we come to the next prediction. It is the apocalypse of Mark 13, but Dr Ernest Phibber prefers the fuller quotations from the corresponding passages in Luke. It is a bit tortuous so read carefully!

Jesus says there would be trouble for Judaea and persecution for his followers then Jerusalem would be besieged and many terrible events would follow. When this happens the Son of Man will come in a cloud with power and glory. This is Jesus returning.

Nothing is very explicit in this discourse so our Phibber tells us we have to delve a little deeper. Jesus says, at Luke 21:21, that “these are the days of vengeance that all things which are written might be fulfilled”.

Of course, the Old Testament is full of gloomy and woeful utterances about the state of Israel and God’s punishments for their transgressions. As we have seen, many are historical references to the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the “return” of the Jews form captivity. Now Phibber tells us that all of these are prophecies—“all things which are written”—because Jesus says so. So the gist of Phibber’s argument is that when the Jews return to Jerusalem the Second Coming will follow.

In 1967, the Jews returned to Jerusalem, so Christians have been looking out for likely looking clouds. However Christianity is full of mirages which fade as you get nearer to them. So believe it if you will.

The curious thing is that not all of Jesus’s discourse is so opaque, but our mentor does not mention it. Luke 21:31-32 quotes Jesus as saying toward the end of his speech:

When ye see these things coming to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh. Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away, till all things be accomplished.

Here we have as explicit a prophecy as anyone could wish. Jesus prophesies that the kingdom of God would arrive before his own generation died. Jesus was about thirty according to the gospels. A man’s lifetime according to the scriptures is three score years and ten, so the Son of Man should have returned on a cloud within forty years of Jesus speaking in around 30 AD. Either it did not happen, or it did but nobody noticed, and we are all now living in the kingdom of God. I take it no one believes we are. So Jesus’s prophecy was unmistakable—and it was wrong! It is therefore not mentioned by Phibber. God’s Truth!

Meanwhile, the good Doctor returns to the Lucan apocalypse to tell us a few signs of the times. In Luke 21:25-26 Jesus echoes Old Testament prophets in describing the tribulations to come. Our guide seems to think they are clear references to the present as, no doubt, every Christian in the last two thousand years has thought.

In fact, though the apocalypse is confused, it is simply a description of what happened to Judaea between the time of Jesus and the time the gospel was set down. After years of foreign oppression a war of liberation against the Romans broke out, the Romans won and the Temple was destroyed. Luke 21:25 says plainly “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the gentiles”. There is nothing mysterious about it. Luke’s gospel was written after the Jewish War. The gospel writer was using the old stylistic trick of Jewish chroniclers. They were writing history as prophecy. Our tutor ought to know this but does not tell us.

Peter

Phibber now tells us something about the apostle, Peter, described as Jesus’s right hand man. He begins with God’s Truth—“Peter followed Jesus as leader of the Church”. If this be true why then does the Acts of the Apostles tell us that Jesus’s brother, James, followed Jesus as leader of the church? Indeed every leader of the church of Jerusalem was allegedly a relative of Jesus until it was destroyed with the final destruction of Jerusalem. “Don’t trouble me with facts”, I can hear our teacher saying. It suits the story better that the henchman of Jesus in the gospels should become the leader of the church when he dies, but the bible says it is not true. Peter remained important, because he had been Jesus’s right hand man, but he was not the leader.

Nevertheless, Dr Ernest Phibber asks us to consider the words of Peter as expressed in the epistle 2 Peter 3:3-7,10. Our mentor is, of course, a fundamentalist—he believes every word of the bible is literally true. That is why he prefers not to mention passages in the bible that are difficult for him—they are obviously wrong! He has less trouble with epistles like 2 Peter. If the bible says it was written by Peter then so it was. Except that it is quite unlikely to have been written by Peter. Still let us not get involved in that. Dr Ernest Phibber draws our attention to four features of “our age” highlighted by 2 Peter. In fact, 2 Peter says they are features of “the last days”—a minor application of God’s Truth!

First is that men would mock at the idea of Christ’s return. And they do mock don’t they? Interestingly men mocked the idea of Christ’s return right from the start of Christianity. If they had believed it right from the start the world would have become Christian within a few years or at, most, decades of the first missionaries going out. In fact, it took three hundred years for the “world” (the Roman Empire) to become Christian by the adoption of Christianity as the official religion by the emperor and another hundred years at least to wipe out all rival religions. So the author of 2 Peter could have written this at any time at all in several hundred years after the crucifixion. If it is a sign of the last days they are a long time acoming. 2 Peter is aware of this and tells us that a thousand years to God is as a day. But why then did the Son of God tell us it would be within his own generation that the kingdom would come? It might serve as God’s Truth, but it is not truth.

The second is even more amazing, our guide tells us, 2 Peter predicts the modern laws of geology and evolution! What he actually says is that the scoffers argue “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation”, and he goes on to point out that they did not continue as they were during the flood. Now Phibber considers the views of the scoffers reported in 2 Peter as totally opposed to the thinking in the world in which Peter lived. It is difficult to imagine why that should be or why a fairly banal observation which coincides with most people’s experience should be considered so amazing or be thought to anticipate evolutionary theory. Still our teacher’s conclusion is that Peter had foreseen modern scientific theories two thousand years ago and that must be a miracle. If he had, it would, but all we get is God’s Truth.

a Prophecy of Denial of the Flood

The third prophecy of 2 Peter was that men would deny that the flood had occurred. This fresh prophecy is really part of the argument of the previous one as I noted above, but once again it contains no marvels. Today, most people are rightly skeptical of the biblical deluge and Noah’s ark but this is one of the things that continue as they are. It is a fair bet that in the dark ages most people believed in the myth of the flood because the only teaching they ever got was that of the bible.

When Christianity started, a better bet is that the vast majority of people in the Roman Empire thought the idea of a world flood was monstrous. Classical mythology placed no emphasis on any flood, although several were described, the one related by Ovid—who wrote about the time that Jesus was growing up—being closest to that of Noah’s and doubtless from the same source. It came from Babylonia in the land between two rivers where a devastating flood was a real possibility and evidently had happened of old because it is recorded in the legend of Gilgamesh. It was brought back to Israel by the Jewish colonists said to have been “returning” from exile, and their scribes liked the story so much they wrote it into their own scriptures. Once again the analytical brain of our scientific biblical interpreter fails to notice that the prophet was recording what was reality in his own day and not getting out his scrying bowl to look into the twenty first century.

Fourth and last we have the prophecy that the heavens and the earth have been “stored up for fire”. Our tutor informs us that this is a “surprising” prophecy because the Old Testament with which Peter was familiar usually predicted destruction by warfare. Ergo, the fire of the day of judgement must be the fire of war and refer to nuclear weapons! For our tutor, this is confirmed in verse 10 where 2 Peter adds:

the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat and earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

It is not true that there is anything surprising about a prediction that the day of judgement would be accompanied by fire. In the Old Testament, which our learned teacher has supposedly mastered, we find it in Zephaniah 1:18 and in Malachi 4:1. But the real surprise is that a Christian who boasts of his lifetime of study and his vast professional qualifications seems not to notice that Jesus was announced by John the Baptist as the one who would baptise with “the Holy Ghost and with fire”. So 2 Peter warms to this theme and becomes poetic and describes a few rocks melting and Lo! the Holy Ghost becomes a nuclear weapon.

In fact, the idea of the earth being purged by fire seems a perfectly natural one and it stems from the same source as the flood—the emergence of the Jews from Babylon in the Persian period. In the Persian religion, judgement is effected by the earth being flooded with molten metal. The wicked are burnt up in agony but the righteous bathe in it as if it were warm milk. You could argue, I suppose, that all of these instances are prophecies of nuclear weapons. But, if you do, you have to admit that God does not only work through Christianity because the Zoroastrians made the prophecy centuries before Christ. So, indeed, did the pagan Sibylline Oracles which adopted the philosophy of Heraclitus in respect of the primordial fire, and that is also going way back.

Perhaps you cannot expect a man who spends every moment of his non-professional day fundamentalising over the bible to know these things. He is reminiscent of the Sadducees of the gospels. They were not the arch enemies of Jesus. That spot was reserved for the Pharisees who, unlike the Sadducees, survived the destruction of 70 AD. Sadducees were the fundamentalists of their day. For them, only the first five books of the bible counted and they were literally true. They therefore needed no scholars, because there need not be any interpretation, but simply people who would study the same five books all day long and seek the one way to salvation—through Temple ritual.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History