Características de los casos 1. Edad y sexo

collection of books merely of human origin.

4.11 To be sure, for prophetic evidence to be compelling, the

proph-4.111 They must not be in the nature of the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle, who declared on one occasion when her advice was sought that “the army to cross the river on the way to battle would win” (but both armies had to do so to reach the battle-field).

4.112 Nor can they be of the kind represented by the quatrains of Nos-tradamus, where competent interpreters have come to irresolv-able, mutually contradictory positions as to their meaning.

4.113 Nor can they be so trivial and limited in character that they could be accounted for either by human inference from known events in the past or present, or by a seer’s extrasensory “tuning in” on other human minds.

4.12 The biblical prophecies are not subject to these difficulties (cf.

J. Barton Payne, Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy); exam-ples:

4.121 The future of the twin cities of Tyre and Sidon (the former to be utterly destroyed with its stones and dust laid in the sea; the latter to continue—Ezekiel 26 and 28), confirmed by secular history (J. Urquhart; R. C. Newman).

4.122 The multitude of prophecies of the coming of Messiah—proph-ecies interspersed throughout the Old Testament books (A.

Keith; E. A. Edghill); for example:

4.1221 Daniel’s prophecy of the “seventy weeks” (Daniel 9), offering a precise chronological prediction of the date of commence-ment of Jesus’ public ministry (cf. Sir Robert Anderson, The Coming Prince).

4.1222 The Messiah’s lineage through the tribe of Judah and King David (Genesis 49 and Isaiah 9).

4.1223 His birth in the little village of Bethlehem (Micah 5; cf. Sir W.

Ramsay, Was Christ Born at Bethlehem?).

4.1224 His birth to a Virgin (Isaiah 7).

4.12241 A modern English translation of the Isaiah prophecy, such as the RSV, which substitutes “young woman” for “virgin,” does violence to the original text—since well before the Christian era the Jews themselves, in translating from Hebrew to Greek (the Septuagint, produced in Alexandria, 300-100 B.C.),

em-ployed the Greek parthenos to translate the Hebrew almah;

parthenos means “virgin,” not merely a young woman.

4.1225 The massacre of infants at his birth and his flight into Egypt (Jeremiah 31 and Hosea 11).

4.1226 His betrayal for thirty pieces of silver and the money used to buy a potter’s field (Zechariah 11).

4.13 The force of the Messianic prophecies can be specified mathe-matically, employing the statistician’s “product rule.”

4.131 The product rule states that the probability of the common oc-currence of several mutually independent events is equal to the product of the probabilities that each of those given events will happen, i.e., if the probability of one event’s occurring is l/x, the probability of a number of similar but mutually independent events will be l/.xⁿ , where n = the number of events.

4.132 If one arbitrarily sets the probability of the occurrence of a sin-gle valid Old Testament prophecy of Christ at 50-50 (1/2), then the probabilities against twenty-five of them happening by chance is 1/2²⁵, or 1 in 33 million. But since the likelihood of any one of these prophecies succeeding is considerably less than 50-50 ("Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,”

etc.), we can legitimately lower the probability of one occur-rence to 25 percent (1/4). The probability against 25 similar events transpiring by chance would then be 1/4²⁵, or 1 in a thousand trillion.

4.133 “Since there are many more than 25 prophecies of events sur-rounding the birth and life of Christ, and a compromise chance of success is undoubtedly less than 1 to 4, then the chance of success, if these predictions were all mere guesses, would be so infinitesimal that no one could maintain that these prophecies were mere guesses! The alternative must be true—these proph-ecies were all foreseen events, in which ‘holy men of God spake as tbey were moved by the Holy Ghost.’ The prophecies were given by revelation—divinely inspired” (H. O. Taylor).

4.134 Can it be said that this application of the product rule is im-proper, owing to the fact that the rule should only be applied to

“mutually independent” events? No, for

4.1341 The prophecies of the Old Testament are indeed mutually inde-pendent, in that they were set out by diverse authors at diverse times, and their fulfilments were recorded by more than one Gospel writer.

4.135 But are we not assigning an arbitrary value for the probability of the occurrence of any one prophecy?

4.1351 We are indeed, but the values we assign are exceedingly con-servative: ours is the a fortiori position that even if the likeli-hood of the success of a single prophecy were but 50 percent or 25 percent, the conclusion would be inescapable that the total-ity of fulfillments must not be attributed to chance.

4.136 Is it not logically the case—since probability reasoning does not in itself establish causation—that the “success” of what we have regarded as predictions could be due, not to divine inspi-ration but to (1) Jesus having conformed his life to the prophe-cies to “make” them come true, and/or (2) the New Testament writers having “fudged” the life of Christ to fit the Old Testa-ment prophecies?

4.1361 These arguments face overwhelming difficulties:

4.13611 As for Jesus’ making his life fit the prophecies, he might have been responsible personally for the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy when he said on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?,” but he could hardly have set up the time, place, and manner of his own birth, the number of pieces of silver for which he would be sold, etc.

4.13612 As for the Gospel writers’ making the life of Jesus fit the proph-ecies, had these writers altered the facts of Jesus’ life to accord with Old Testament predictions, they could never have gotten away with it.

4.136121 We have already stressed that the preaching of the facts of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, as well as the circulation of the Gospel narratives of these events, took place while hos-tile witnesses of Jesus’ career were still alive (the very Jewish religious leaders who had brought about his demise); it is un-thinkable that they would not have easily refuted such claims to fulfilled prophecy when (a) they knew the Old Testament and

4.14 The presence of statistically significant numbers of highly spe-cific prophecies across the span of the Old Testament which come to concrete fulfillment in the New lends powerful support to the contention that the Bible is a collection of books having a divinely revelatory character.

4.15 And since the most significant of those prophecies, both quan-titatively and quanquan-titatively, refer to Jesus Christ himself, they also provide powerful reinforcement to the case for his Divin-ity.

4.2 It has already been pointed out that Jesus’ attested claims to