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3.4 — Messianic Expectations Before Jesus Before examining the individual prophecies, it is helpful to understand what many Jewish people expected before Jesus’ public ministry. The belief in a coming Messiah did not originate with Christianity. It developed over centuries through the Hebrew Scriptures, which describe a future king, deliverer, shepherd, servant, and ruler through…
Conversations about Christianity often begin with a single question. Was Jesus a historical figure? Can the Bible be trusted? Does archaeology support Scripture? Is there evidence for God? Are near-death experiences genuine? Why does the universe appear finely ordered? Each of these questions is important, yet discussions often remain confined to a single subject. As…
3.6.3 — Born in Bethlehem “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah… from you shall come forth for Me one who is to be ruler in Israel.”— Micah 5:2 The Passage Written approximately seven centuries before the birth of Jesus, Micah speaks of a future ruler who would come from Bethlehem Ephrathah, a small town in Judah closely…
3.2 — What Makes a Prophecy Meaningful? Not every prediction deserves to be called prophecy. Some statements are so broad that they could apply to almost anyone. Others are so symbolic or ambiguous that they can be interpreted in countless ways. Meaningful prophecy can be examined because it makes claims that are capable of being…
4.1 — The Shroud of Turin One of the most closely examined artifacts associated with Christianity is the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is a linen cloth bearing a faint front and back image of a man who appears to have suffered injuries consistent with crucifixion. Over the past several decades, it has been examined…
1.3 — The Dead Sea Scrolls The previous section examined the manuscript evidence for the New Testament. An important question naturally follows: does the Old Testament display the same degree of textual stability? One of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century provides an opportunity to examine that question. In 1947, a young…
1.2 — Manuscript Evidence When historians evaluate the reliability of an ancient document, they begin with the manuscript evidence. They ask several straightforward questions: How many copies survive? How close are those copies to the originals? And how consistently has the text been preserved over time? Measured by these standards, the New Testament is among…
3.1 — Why Prophecy Matters For thousands of years, people have claimed to know the future. Ancient oracles, astrologers, psychics, and modern-day predictors have all asserted that they possess knowledge of events before they occur. Most such predictions, however, share a common characteristic: they are either so broad that they could describe many different outcomes…
2.2 — Non-Christian Sources One way to evaluate the New Testament’s historical setting is to examine writers outside the Christian tradition. If Jesus and the early Christian movement were purely legendary or invented long after the events they describe, we would expect little acknowledgment from non-Christian authors writing near that period. Instead, several Jewish and…
3.6 — Exploring the Messianic Prophecies The passages that follow are among the best-known Messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures and have been discussed by both Jewish and Christian scholars for centuries. Christians have traditionally understood these texts as pointing to Jesus Christ, while Jewish interpretations have often understood them differently, applying them to other…
