How does the messianic prophecy prove the Bible is true?

Answer 1

AnswerThe supposed prophecies in the Old Testament, of the coming of Jesus Christ, would certainly prove the Bible is true if those prophecies were themselves true. Burton L. Mack (Who Wrote the New Testament) tells us how it is done.

Burton says that at first the study of a text may not seem to support a traditional Christian conviction, or the answer one hopes to find in the Bible. But with a little ingenuity, one can set up the comparison again with other emphases and make the answer come out right.If the first answer does not appear to be helpful, one can look for another answer to the same question, until the right answer appears. This is a trick that Mack sees happen all the time, in the classrooms of the School of Theology at Claremont.

The first to use this trick was the author of Matthew's Gospel. He found what he thought was a prophecy of a virgin birth in Isaiah 7:14. Some of the problems with using this are:
It does not mention Jesus by name, so whom does it refer to?

The 'prophecy' was fulfilled just a few verses later in Isaiah chapter 8.

Most significantly, the Book of Isaiah never said that a child would be born to a virgin: it refers to "the young woman" and it was the young woman who had the baby a few verses later. Matthew was using the Septuagint (LXX), an early Greek translation of the Greek scriptures, and the LXX had mistranslated "the young woman" as "a virgin".

In another case, at 12:17-18, Matthew quotes Isaiah (Esias) 43:10 entirely out of context to suggest that Jesus had been prophesied.

Others see Messianic prophecies in a series of verses known as the Servant Songs (Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6,50:4-11, 52:13-53:12). In these passages, God promises to choose a servant who will teach his true way to the nations. In some verses, the servant appears to be a person, in others a group, in some a real figure and in others imaginary. The only time the 'servant' is named, the reference is to Israel. It is even possible that Second Isaiah is, in places, putting himself up as the servant. Whatever Second Isaiah had in mind, it was not Jesus, who is never decribed as a servant in the New Testament, other than by Matthew himself.