Justified True Belief

(P1) Scripture sets its own test for a false prophet. + The rule for catching a prophet who is making it up was not thought up by skeptics. It was written into Israel's own law, and it was written plainly enough for a farmer to run it himself. (1) Moses answers a question he expects ordinary people to ask. - He puts the question in their mouths before he answers it: "And if you say in your heart, How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?—" (Deuteronomy 18:21) - The answer is short, and it has teeth. "when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him." (Deuteronomy 18:22) • To speak "presumptuously" is to speak on your own authority while stamping God's name on it, the way a clerk might sign a contract in his employer's name without ever having been asked to. - Notice who is standing in the dock in that sentence. Not the man who asked the question. The prophet. And the farmer who asked it is being told, in so many words, that he is free to walk away from any preacher whose word does not land. (2) A standard that cannot convict is not a standard. - Picture a safety inspector who has never once failed a building. He is not running a strict inspection. He is running a formality, and every man on the site has worked that out by the end of the first week. - So the test has to be run for real, on the hardest cases, with some of them lost. Quoting the rule and then declining to be measured by it gives away the only thing that made the rule worth quoting. - Run that way, the test does not win every case. Two of them come out contested: an oracle announcing that Damascus will become a heap of ruins, when Damascus is a lived-in capital city today, and a promise of forty empty years over Egypt that no ancient writer ever confirmed or denied. Therefore, Scripture supplies the standard by which a failed prophecy would be caught.

(P2) A prophecy is measured against its own wording. + Most alleged failures turn out, on inspection, to be failures of a paraphrase. The paraphrase is usually one that nobody ever wrote down. (1) The charge and the text are two different things. - Take the sentence critics normally lead with. "Ezekiel said Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Tyre" is a sentence about the oracle rather than the oracle itself. An oracle is the message a prophet delivers as God's own word, and this particular one runs to twenty-one verses and names more attackers than one. - Think of a forecast that says a storm will reach the coast overnight and push the worst of its rain inland by Tuesday. A man who remembers all that as "they said it would flood on Monday," and then complains that it did not, is arguing with his own memory. The forecast is still sitting there, unread. - None of that is a technicality about how to read. Until the passage has been read whole, the test in (P1) has nothing to be run against. (2) Prophetic books do not tidy themselves. - Ezekiel's editors kept the oracle against Tyre. They also kept the admission, written sixteen years later, that the siege paid nothing (P4). Nobody quietly deleted the awkward half. - Jeremiah spends decades on the record being shouted down. Jonah ends with its own prophet sitting on a hillside east of a city he had wanted flattened, sulking because it was still standing, and it is God rather than the prophet who gets the last word. - A tradition that files the disappointing sequel next to the oracle is not a tradition that trims its predictions to fit. That tells you a good deal about what kind of documents these are. (3) The burden runs both ways. - The claim "this prophecy failed" comes in two halves. The text predicted some particular thing, and that particular thing did not happen. Both halves have to be argued for. - Think of a complaint against a builder. Showing that the kitchen is unfinished proves nothing on its own. Somebody has to produce the contract and read out what was actually promised. - A critic who has established only the second half has established nothing. Neither has a defender who has established only the first. Therefore, a charge of failure has to survive contact with the passage it is aimed at.

(P3) God revokes an announced judgment when the nation warned turns from its evil. + The obvious suspicion here is that defenders invented this rule because they badly needed one. They did not: God states it in his own voice, in a prophetic book, about prophecy. (1) Jeremiah states the rule in both directions. - Here it is running the way a defender would want it to run: "If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it." (Jeremiah 18:7-8) - Now the same rule running the other way, which is the half that shows it is not special pleading: "And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it." (Jeremiah 18:9-10) - A rule that only ever excused failure would be a convenience. This one can cancel a promise as well, and that is an expensive thing for a religion to write into its own scriptures. (2) Jonah is the worked example. - Jonah's message carries no conditions on its face: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4) The city repents anyway. - "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it." (Jonah 3:10) - Jonah's own reaction is the tell. He is not puzzled. He is furious, and he says he saw the whole thing coming: "for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster." (Jonah 4:2) • A prophet who runs from an assignment because he expects God to relent is a prophet who understood the rule before anybody handed him the message. The book is four chapters long, and its entire plot turns on this. (3) A warning is not a schedule. - A doctor tells a patient he has two years unless he stops drinking. The man stops, and lives another thirty. Nobody says the doctor was wrong. He was heeded. - Warnings of that kind carry an unstated "unless," and all of us understand it in ordinary speech without having to be told. - The name for it is conditionality: an announcement that carries an unspoken condition inside it, so that what actually happens depends on what the hearer does next. Nineveh is what a heeded warning looks like from the outside, centuries later, to somebody working down a list of threats that never arrived. Therefore, an announced judgment that does not fall may be a warning that worked.

(C1) Therefore, a judgment that does not fall is not by itself a failed prophecy. + A judgment God announced and then did not send is not, on its own, a word that failed (P1, P3). The reasoning is deductive, which means the premises work like links in a chain: if each link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. A link holds when it is more plausible than its denial, and that is a good deal less than proof beyond all doubt. (1) Jeremiah's rule covers announced judgments on nations and cities. - That is the category Jeremiah 18 is explicitly about, and Nineveh is the case it works through (P3). - It does not cover unconditional promises, or predictions about a named individual, or anything God swears to. Those stand or fall on the event, and nothing anybody does afterwards changes that. - Tyre and the deadline in Mark 13 fall outside it too. Neither one has anything to do with anybody repenting (P4, P5). (2) The rule cannot be stretched to cover everything. - The obvious worry is that conditionality becomes a skeleton key, opening whatever lock a defender happens to be standing in front of. It does not, and the reason is that the condition Jeremiah names is a narrow one: a nation turning from its evil. - Where nobody repented, the key does not fit. Tyre, Damascus and Mark 13 all have to be argued without it, and they are. (3) Clearing this category does not clear every case. - Not every alleged failure dissolves. Damascus, and the forty empty years announced over Egypt, are still open (C2, D8, D14). - Nor does any of this establish that Scripture is inerrant, which is the claim that it contains no error of any kind anywhere. That is a far larger claim and it rests on far more than three premises about warnings to nations.

(P4) Ezekiel hands the demolition of Tyre to many nations rather than to one king. + Tyre was two places wearing one name: a town on the mainland shore, and an island fortress about half a mile out to sea. Critics lead with this case, and the answer to it is printed in the chapter's own grammar rather than carried in by a defender. (1) The oracle opens by naming more than one attacker. - "therefore thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am against you, O Tyre, and will bring up many nations against you, as the sea brings up its waves." (Ezekiel 26:3) Waves, plural, one after another. - The next sentence keeps that plural cast on stage and hands it the demolition work: "They shall destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers, and I will scrape her soil from her and make her a bare rock." (Ezekiel 26:4) - Only then does the named king arrive, as the first of those waves: "Behold, I will bring against Tyre from the north Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, and with horsemen and a host of many soldiers." (Ezekiel 26:7) • The two settlements are kept apart from the start. Verse 6 gives the mainland to the sword: "and her daughters on the mainland shall be killed by the sword." (2) The oracle switches from "he" to "they" at verse 12. - Verses 7 to 11 run on singular verbs without a break. He will set up a siege wall. He will direct the shock of his battering rams. His horses. He enters your gates. He will kill your people with the sword. - Then, at verse 12, the subject quietly goes plural: "They will plunder your riches and loot your merchandise. They will break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses. Your stones and timber and soil they will cast into the midst of the waters." (Ezekiel 26:12) - The switch is in the Hebrew itself, five plural verbs in a row where the five verses before had singular ones, and every English translation carries it over. Whatever else is disputed about the chapter, that feature was sitting in the book before Alexander was born. (3) The demolition the oracle describes did happen, in 332 BC. - Nebuchadnezzar besieged the mainland city for years, on the usual reconstruction from about 586 to 573 BC, and he never took the island. • The famous figure of thirteen years rests on Josephus alone, quoting Phoenician records, and no Babylonian document confirms it. Recent work on the manuscripts of Josephus found that the reading copied most often through the Middle Ages was three years and ten months, and no siege works or destruction layer from that period has yet been dug up at Tyre. As it happens, none of that matters much. Nothing in the fulfillment turns on how long the siege lasted; it turns on what somebody else did two and a half centuries later. - Alexander the Great took the island in 332 BC by building a causeway out to it, a raised road pushed through the water. He built it out of the ruins of the old mainland town: its stones, its timber, its rubble, shoved into the sea until his engineers had a road. Arrian describes the work. - Stones and timber and soil cast into the midst of the waters is not a stock phrase for ruin. It is an odd, specific sentence about an odd, specific piece of labor, and an odd, specific piece of labor answered it. (4) The book keeps its own unpaid invoice. - Sixteen years after the oracle, Ezekiel writes the awkward sequel and makes no attempt to hide it: "Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon made his army labor hard against Tyre. Every head was made bald, and every shoulder was rubbed bare, yet neither he nor his army got anything from Tyre to pay for the labor that he had performed against her." (Ezekiel 29:18) - Read what the complaint is actually about. Bald heads and shoulders rubbed raw are the marks of men who hauled siege baskets and timber for years, and what the verse says is that they went home without their wages. It does not say the oracle was withdrawn. Therefore, the demolition of Tyre belonged from the opening line to many nations, and never to Nebuchadnezzar alone.

(P5) The deadline in Mark 13 was set by a question about the temple. + The hardest case in the New Testament is a sentence of Jesus with a time limit attached to it. Everything turns on what the time limit was about. (1) The conversation starts with a building. - A disciple stops on the way out to admire the stonework, and the reply he gets is flat: "Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down." (Mark 13:2) - Four of them follow him up the Mount of Olives and ask the question that the rest of the chapter answers: "Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished?" (Mark 13:4) - "These things" has an antecedent, which is simply the thing a phrase points back to. Here the antecedent is the temple. So everything that follows is an answer to a question about a building, unless something in the text changes the subject. (2) The deadline is attached to that question. - "Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place." (Mark 13:30) The phrase "all these things" is the disciples' own phrase, handed back to them. - Roman legions destroyed the temple in the summer of AD 70. If Jesus spoke in about AD 30, that is roughly forty years. A man of twenty standing on that hillside would have been sixty when the smoke went up, which is comfortably inside any ordinary meaning of the word generation. - The building never went back up, either. There has been no temple in Jerusalem for nineteen centuries, so this is not a prediction still waiting on the outcome. It came true, and then it stayed true. (3) The passage draws its own line two verses later. - Right after the deadline comes a sentence that would be very strange if the deadline covered everything in sight: "But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Mark 13:32) - One subject is datable inside a generation. The other is explicitly undatable, and undatable on the speaker's own admission. Putting both under a single deadline means walking straight past the sentence that separates them. - A foreman can tell you the roof will be on before winter and, in the very next breath, that nobody knows when the owner is going to visit. Two timetables, one conversation, no contradiction. (4) The cosmic language a few verses earlier is a separate dispute. - Everything the disciples actually asked about is accounted for: the destruction of the temple, the wars and rumors of wars, the persecution, the flight from Judea, and the deadline itself. - What remains unsettled is the language about the sun darkened and the Son of Man coming on the clouds (Mark 13:24-27). Serious readers divide over it. Some take it as enthronement imagery drawn from Daniel 7, meaning a picture of a king being crowned and vindicated rather than a figure descending out of the sky. Others take it as looking past AD 70 altogether. - That dispute is live, and nothing established about the deadline settles it. What matters for the charge of failure is narrower: the deadline was attached to the temple, and the temple fell inside it. Therefore, the deadline had a subject, and its subject arrived on time.

(C2) Therefore, Tyre's demolition and the temple's fall both occurred as announced. + The two cases critics lead with do not show a failed prophecy. Tyre's demolition happened and the temple came down, four centuries apart, and both events are on record from writers who had no interest whatever in defending a Hebrew prophet. (1) Each case turns on something printed in the text. - Tyre turns on a switch from "he" to "they" that had been sitting in the chapter for centuries before anybody thought to argue about it (P4). - Mark 13 turns on the antecedent of a phrase the disciples themselves supplied (P5). - Nineveh, and every case shaped like it, turns on a rule God states in his own voice about his own prophecies (P3). (2) Some clauses in both passages are still unsettled. - Ezekiel 26 also says Tyre will never be rebuilt and will never be found again, and a Lebanese port city stands on that ground today. Those sentences get their own answer, and the answer is not decisive (D1). - The cosmic language of Mark 13:24-27 is not settled by anything established about verse 30 (P5, D6). (3) Damascus and Egypt stay contested. - Isaiah opens an oracle by saying "Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city and will become a heap of ruins." (Isaiah 17:1) The setting is the crisis Isaiah 7 belongs to, when Syria and Israel marched on Jerusalem together in about 735 BC. Assyria answered by taking Damascus in 732 BC, killing its king and deporting its people. - The kingdom did end, and that is what the third verse goes on to say: "The fortress will disappear from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus." The city itself, though, did not stay a heap of ruins. Assyria kept it on as the seat of a province, and people have lived on that ground continuously ever since. - Readers who take prophetic ruin-language as hyperbole, meaning deliberate overstatement of the kind anybody uses about a beaten football team, find the oracle satisfied by 732 BC. Readers who take the words flatly do not. That is a genuine standoff between competent people, and calling it anything else would be dishonest (D8). - Ezekiel's forty empty years over Egypt sit in the same column, for a different reason. Nebuchadnezzar's march on Egypt is recorded on a Babylonian tablet. What came of it was never written down by anybody, so the clause can be neither checked off nor struck out (D14). (4) "Not established" is not the same as "impossible." - The answer is a narrow one. The cases critics lead with do not establish a failed prophecy, and the stronger of the two fails on evidence that was printed in the text long before anyone had a reason to need it. - Anyone who holds that Scripture contains a failed prophecy is entitled to keep looking. Deuteronomy 18:22 is the standing invitation to do exactly that (P1). - A clean sweep would be less believable than a defense willing to name the cases it cannot close. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Were the Messianic Prophecies Written Before Jesus? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: The Messiah Had to Come Before AD 70

On Ezekiel and Tyre: Block, Daniel I. The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. (On the distribution of the oracle's actors and on the wages passage.) Dixon, Helen. "Reexamining Nebuchadnezzar II's 'Thirteen-Year' Siege of Tyre in Phoenician Historiography." Journal of Ancient History 10, no. 2 (2022). (The manuscript readings of Josephus, and the absence of siege evidence at the site.) Greenberg, Moshe. Ezekiel 21-37. Anchor Bible 22A. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Katzenstein, H. J. The History of Tyre. Jerusalem: Schocken Institute, 1973. Wiseman, D. J. Nebuchadrezzar and Babylon. Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 1983. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1985. (On the Babylonian evidence for the Tyre siege and the campaign against Egypt.) Zimmerli, Walther. Ezekiel 2. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983. (The critical standard, which reads the wages passage as a correction.) On Mark 13 and the sayings about the Son of Man's coming: Allison, Dale C., Jr. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. (Argues that Jesus expected an imminent end.) Beasley-Murray, G. R. Jesus and the Last Days: The Interpretation of the Olivet Discourse. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993. Dodd, C. H. "The Fall of Jerusalem and the 'Abomination of Desolation.'" Journal of Roman Studies 37 (1947): 47-54. (Argues that Luke's siege language is drawn from the Greek Old Testament rather than from AD 70.) France, R. T. The Gospel of Mark. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. (Reads 13:5-31 as answering the temple question and 13:32 onward as the second coming, with the change of subject marked by peri de.) France, R. T. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. (On the mission charge of Matthew 10 and the horizon of 10:23.) Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. (On the coming of the Son of Man as enthronement language from Daniel 7.) On prophetic conditionality: Fretheim, Terence E. The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Kaiser, Walter C., Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, and Manfred T. Brauch. Hard Sayings of the Bible. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996. Pratt, Richard L., Jr. "Historical Contingencies and Biblical Predictions." In The Way of Wisdom, edited by J. I. Packer and Sven K. Soderlund. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000. On Isaiah and Damascus: Oswalt, John N. The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986. Wildberger, Hans. Isaiah 13-27. Continental Commentary. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. On Paul and the expectation of the Lord's return: Bruce, F. F. 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Word Biblical Commentary 45. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1982. (On the content of the word from the Lord at 4:15, and on Paul's own reckoning with dying before the return.) Critic sources engaged: Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian. London: Watts, 1927. (The objection that Jesus set a deadline and missed it.) Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Translated by W. Montgomery. London: A. & C. Black, 1910. Ancient sources: Arrian. Anabasis of Alexander, book 2. (The siege of Tyre and the causeway built from the ruins of the mainland city.) Curtius Rufus, Quintus. History of Alexander, book 4. Diodorus Siculus. Library of History, book 17. Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History, books 2 and 6. (Preserves Clement of Alexandria's account that Mark wrote while Peter was still preaching in Rome.) Irenaeus. Against Heresies, book 3. (Mark wrote Peter's preaching down after the deaths of Peter and Paul.) Josephus. Against Apion, book 1. (Phoenician records of Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen-year siege of Tyre.) Josephus. The Jewish War, books 6-7. (The destruction of the temple in AD 70.) Biblical citations: Numbers 14:33-34; Deuteronomy 18:21-22; 2 Kings 16:9; 17:6; 22:20; 23:29-30; 2 Chronicles 34:28; 35:20-25; Isaiah 13:10; 17:1-3; Jeremiah 18:7-10; 26:17-19; 28:1-17; Ezekiel 26:1-21; 27:25; 28:2; 29:8-20; 32:7, 17-32; Daniel 7:13-14; Jonah 3:4-10; 4:1-2; Micah 3:12; Matthew 10:16-23; 16:28; 28:19-20; Mark 9:1-2; 13:1-4, 14, 24-32; Luke 9:28; 21:20-24; 1 Corinthians 7:1, 25, 29-31; 8:1; 12:1; 16:1; 2 Corinthians 4:14; Philippians 1:23; 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17; 5:1-2; 2 Peter 1:16-18; 3:3-9.

+ Ezekiel 26:14 says Tyre will never be rebuilt. Tyre is a working Lebanese port city today, and you can fly into Beirut and drive there in ninety minutes.

1. Verse 14 is addressed to a particular Tyre. Read verse 14 together with the verse just before it, and the city being spoken to is the mainland one, the town whose stones have this moment gone into the water: "I will make you a bare rock. You shall be a place for the spreading of nets. You shall never be rebuilt, for I am the Lord; I have spoken, declares the Lord God." (Ezekiel 26:14) - That old mainland settlement, the one Alexander pulled apart for building material, was never rebuilt. Its causeway silted up into a permanent neck of land, and the ancient site today is an archaeological park rather than a town. - The modern city sits on what used to be the island, joined to the shore by the sand that piled up against Alexander's ramp. 2. Verse 14 is not even the hardest sentence in the chapter. The strongest form of this objection leaves verse 14 alone and presses two other lines in Ezekiel 26. Both are harder than the one usually quoted. - The bare rock and the spreading of nets have already turned up once, eight verses earlier, and there they sit out at sea: "She shall be in the midst of the sea a place for the spreading of nets." (Ezekiel 26:5) That is the island rather than the shore, and it puts real strain on reading verse 14 of the mainland. - The oracle's closing line goes further than verse 14 does: "I will bring you to a dreadful end, and you shall be no more. Though you be sought for, you will never be found again, declares the Lord God." (Ezekiel 26:21) A reader who takes that to mean the name will vanish off the map has not misread carelessly. He has read the sentence. - The chapter does hold the mainland and the island apart, at verse 6 and again at verse 8, so the distinction is not invented for the occasion. Even so, Ezekiel elsewhere uses sea-language of Tyre as one city, calling its prince the man who sits "in the heart of the seas" (Ezekiel 28:2) and its fleet the ships laden "in the heart of the seas" (Ezekiel 27:25). The evidence points both ways here, and pretending otherwise would be a cheat. 3. Verse 21 is the closing line of a descent into the underworld. The last three verses of the chapter open with their own "thus says the Lord God," and what they describe is where Tyre goes rather than what is left standing on the shore. - "then I will make you go down with those who go down to the pit, to the people of old, and I will make you to dwell in the world below, among ruins from of old, with those who go down to the pit, so that you will not be inhabited; but I will set beauty in the land of the living." (Ezekiel 26:20) - The pit is the Old Testament's name for the grave and the world of the dead. Ezekiel likes to march whole nations down into it and lay them out side by side, Assyria and Elam and Edom and the princes of the north, and he spends sixteen verses doing it over Egypt alone (Ezekiel 32:17-32). "You will never be found again" is the last line of that descent. - The passage announces itself as a comparison, besides. "When I make you a city laid waste, like the cities that are not inhabited, when I bring up the deep over you, and the great waters cover you," (Ezekiel 26:19) A simile is not a survey of a building site, and neither is a sea rising over a town. 4. None of this closes the case. - Prophetic ruin-language routinely reaches for absolute terms to describe a decisive ending rather than a site left permanently empty (C2, D18). - Tyre as a power did end, and it ended for good. The Phoenician sea empire that founded Carthage is now a Lebanese town of some tens of thousands of people with a ruin field lying beside it. - Verse 12's demolition, the switch to "they" and the causeway all stand whatever a reader finally concludes about verses 14 and 21 (P4, C2). - A reader can grant every one of those observations and still find verses 14 and 21 harder than these answers make them out to be. That reader has noticed something real. Nothing offered here in reply is decisive.

+ The oracle says Nebuchadnezzar will break down the towers, trample the streets and enter the gates. He besieged Tyre for years, never took the island, and so the specifics failed.

1. The specifics are quoted correctly. Verses 8 through 11 really are all about one man, and their verbs are singular the whole way through: the siege wall, the mound, the battering rams, the axes against the towers, the horses trampling the streets. Nothing in that list gets softened here. 2. The oracle assigns him the mainland. - Two verses before he is even named, the text has already split the target: "and her daughters on the mainland shall be killed by the sword" (Ezekiel 26:6). "Daughters" is the ordinary Hebrew way of naming the smaller settlements that live off a larger one, roughly what we would call the outlying villages. - He is then handed exactly that work: "He will kill with the sword your daughters on the mainland." (Ezekiel 26:8) Everything in his section follows on from there. And the mainland town, of course, is where the walls and the gates and the streets were. 3. What the siege achieved is genuinely uncertain. Nobody should claim Nebuchadnezzar stormed the island, because nobody knows that he did. Some historians read what followed the siege as a negotiated submission in which Tyre's king was replaced. Others read it as a plain stalemate. - The mainland is no clearer than the island. No Babylonian record of the outcome survives, no destruction layer from those years has been dug up, and Ezekiel's own sequel says the army came away with nothing (Ezekiel 29:18). Whether the towers came down while he was there is simply not something the sources tell us. - That is an honest gap, and it is worth sitting with rather than filling in. What the case rests on instead is the demolition in verse 12, which is dated, described, and carried out by somebody else entirely (P4). 4. The oracle's own sequel says he got nothing. Ezekiel 29:18 does not embarrass this reading. It confirms it. The prophet who wrote that Nebuchadnezzar would come is the same prophet who wrote, sixteen years on, that he came away empty-handed, and that is exactly the behavior of a man reporting rather than inventing.

+ The plural in verse 12 is just Nebuchadnezzar's army, which verse 7 has already brought on stage as a host of many soldiers. Reading it as a later conqueror is a grammatical loophole found after the event.

1. The strongest form of this objection has three parts. - Verse 7 introduces the king "with horses and chariots, and with horsemen and a host of many soldiers," so a plural subject is already standing there in the very sentence that names him. - Commentators who work on how the book of Ezekiel was assembled go further and treat verse 12 as a later expansion, with the change of number marking the seam where a second hand took over. - And any reading of a hard text is, by definition, produced after somebody found the text hard. So the charge of convenience is fair to raise against any answer at all, including this one. 2. Two things in the objection should simply be granted. - The chapter is not laid out as a schedule with two neat columns. Verse 4 has plural actors breaking down Tyre's towers, and verse 9 has Nebuchadnezzar breaking down the same towers. The two casts overlap; they do not divide the work cleanly between them. - Hebrew does slide between a commander and his forces, and number by itself never forces a change of actor. If the pronoun were the whole case here, the objection would win outright. 3. The plural is not doing the work alone. Four features of the chapter have to be explained together, and only one of the four is the pronoun. - The chapter is built in panels, each one opened by the messenger formula, which is the set phrase a prophet uses to mark where a fresh word from God begins. "Thus says the Lord God" stands at verses 3, 7, 15 and 19. Verses 3 to 6 announce the whole business in summary, and verses 7 to 14 walk through it in stages, which is why the towers can appear in the summary and again in the king's own stage without the two casts being in competition. - The oracle announces "many nations against you, as the sea brings up its waves" (Ezekiel 26:3) before Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned at all. The plural cast is established in the opening line rather than smuggled in at verse 12. - Verses 7 through 11 then hold the singular for five verses running, which is precisely what makes the switch visible when it comes. A writer who was not distinguishing between actors had no reason to keep that up so carefully. - The content of verse 12 is not, in any case, what a besieging army does. Armies plunder and burn. Pushing a city's stones and timber and soil out into the sea is a specific, back-breaking piece of engineering, and it was done once, for an engineering reason, in 332 BC. 4. Treating verse 12 as a later insertion does not rescue the objection. An editor who adds a verse after the fact adds it to account for what happened, not to leave a prediction dangling in the wind. - If a second hand did write verse 12, that hand knew perfectly well that the plunder and the stones in the water were still outstanding when Nebuchadnezzar packed up and went home. Either way the work ends up divided between one king and many nations (P4). - The expansion theory also rests on the change of number, and the change of number is the very feature the theory was proposed in order to explain. 5. Reading "they" as the army costs the objection its force. Suppose "they" really is Nebuchadnezzar's army. The objection now needs that army to have thrown Tyre's masonry into the sea, which nobody claims it ever did. So the critic's own reading does not produce the failure he came to argue for. It produces a different unfulfilled clause, and the same answer applies to it. 6. An open-ended reading really would be a loophole. If "they" can be anybody at all at any date at all, then the oracle absorbs any demolition in any century and can never fail. That is the real worry behind the word loophole, and it is a fair one. - Two things keep this from being a free pass. The oracle names a man with a lifetime, and he came. And its strange clause about stones and timber in the water either happened or it did not, which makes it exactly the kind of sentence that can be checked against the record. - Tyre is not the strongest fulfilled prophecy in Scripture, and nobody should hold it up as one. An undated prediction is weaker evidence than a dated one, and what this case does is answer a charge of failure rather than prove foresight.

+ Ezekiel 29:18 is God conceding the oracle did not come off, and Egypt is offered as a consolation prize. A prophecy that needs a severance payment has failed.

1. The published version of this objection is stronger than the popular one. Walther Zimmerli's commentary, the critical standard on Ezekiel, reads 29:17-20 as a later oracle correcting an earlier one. On that account, the circle behind the book saw that the Tyre campaign had not produced what chapter 26 led people to expect, and issued a replacement redirecting the payment to Egypt. The awkwardness is then not a matter of wording at all. It is a prophetic tradition adjusting a prediction that came up short, and that is a serious proposal from a serious scholar rather than a debating point. 2. The text says what the objection says it says. Nebuchadnezzar labored hard against Tyre, his men were worn to the bone, and "neither he nor his army got anything from Tyre to pay for the labor that he had performed against her" (Ezekiel 29:18). That is a flat statement of an outcome nobody involved wanted. 3. The subject of the sentence is payment. What the passage says did not happen is that Nebuchadnezzar got paid. What it does not say is that Tyre survived, or that the oracle was cancelled, or that God had been mistaken about anything. And the next verse gives the reason for the Egypt grant in plainly commercial terms: Egypt's wealth "shall be the wages for his army" (Ezekiel 29:19). - Ezekiel 26 never promised the king any plunder in the first place. It promised him the mainland by the sword and handed the plundering to the plural "they" (P4). - A demolition contractor who clears a site and never gets his invoice paid has still cleared the site. 4. A correction that leaves the original standing is a strange kind of correction. Ezekiel 29:17 carries the latest date in the whole book, 571 BC. Whoever assembled the scroll set the new oracle down after the Tyre material and kept both of them. - A tradition covering up a shortfall had the obvious remedy available, which was to drop chapter 26 quietly, and it did not take it. The two texts have now sat side by side in the same scroll for two and a half thousand years, and the second one is the only reason anybody knows how the siege ended. - Whether the Egypt grant was itself made good is a separate question, and it gets its own answer (D14).

+ "This generation will not pass away until all these things take place." Jesus set a deadline and missed it, and ever since Schweitzer the mistaken apocalyptic prophet has been a mainstream reading of him.

1. This objection has the best pedigree of any brought against Scripture's prophets. Albert Schweitzer reconstructed Jesus as a mistaken apocalyptic prophet, a preacher announcing that God was about to wind up history within a few years, and the reconstruction reshaped New Testament study for a century. Bertrand Russell counted the mistaken expectation against Christ's wisdom in his 1927 lecture. Dale Allison and Bart Ehrman argue versions of the case in print today. It cannot be waved off, and any answer that does not feel its weight is not really answering it. - Schweitzer's own load-bearing text, as it happens, was not this verse but Matthew 10:23, and the sayings about some standing here not tasting death belong with it. Both are answered on their own terms (D15). 2. "All these things" is a phrase the disciples introduced. They asked, "when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished?" (Mark 13:4) They were asking about a building whose demolition Jesus had just announced. So when the same phrase comes back at verse 30, the natural thing for it to point at is the thing the conversation had been about all along (P5). 3. The temple fell inside the window. The Roman general Titus and his legions burned it in AD 70, roughly forty years after that afternoon on the Mount of Olives. On this reading the deadline was not missed. It was met, publicly, in a way Josephus describes at length, and the site has stood without a temple from that summer to this one. 4. The remaining dispute does not by itself win the objection. Serious scholars hold that Jesus expected the end of the age itself within that generation, and they point to the cosmic language a few verses earlier. That is a live dispute (D6). The objection needs its own side of it to win, rather than merely to exist. - Verse 32 settles less here than it first appears to. A man can know the year without knowing the day, so "no one knows the day or the hour" does not on its own refute an imminent expectation, and claiming that it does would be far too quick. - What the verse does instead is change the subject, and it changes it with a set phrase. "But concerning that day or that hour" opens in Greek with peri de, which is the ordinary way a writer of that period announces a new topic. • Paul walks through the Corinthians' questions with it five times in a single letter, moving from marriage to the unmarried to food offered to idols to spiritual gifts to the collection (1 Corinthians 7:1, 7:25, 8:1, 12:1, 16:1). He reaches for it again to raise "the times and the seasons" (1 Thessalonians 5:1). • What stands after the phrase in Mark is "that day," not "these things" (P5).

+ Mark 13:24-27 has the sun darkened, the stars falling and the Son of Man coming on clouds. None of that happened in AD 70, so "all these things" plainly did not take place.

1. This is the real difficulty. Everything before verse 24 fits AD 70 without any strain at all. These four verses are the reason the debate continues, and pretending otherwise would be selling something. 2. One published reading takes the language as a coronation rather than a descent. The imagery comes from Daniel 7, where "one like a son of man" comes to the Ancient of Days, which is Daniel's title for God seated on his throne, and receives a kingdom from him. On that reading the coming is a movement toward God's throne rather than down toward the earth: an enthronement, a king being crowned and vindicated in front of the court. The sun-and-stars language is then the standard prophetic way of announcing that a great power has fallen. Isaiah uses it of Babylon (Isaiah 13:10) and Ezekiel of Egypt (Ezekiel 32:7), and nobody supposes either of them expected the sky to go out. 3. Another published reading draws the line at verse 32. On this view the discourse answers the temple question through verse 31, and then turns to the return of Christ, which is left undated on purpose. The abrupt "But concerning that day or that hour" is the hinge between the two subjects. 4. Neither reading requires a failed prediction. Two mainstream readings are on the table, and on either one of them nothing failed. There is also a third position, held by capable scholars, that Jesus expected the end of the age within that generation and was simply wrong about it, and that position has not been refuted. What can be said is this: on the enthronement reading, and on the reading that draws the line at verse 32, the deadline in verse 30 was attached to the temple, and the temple fell inside it (P5).

+ "This generation" gets quietly redefined: some apologists make it mean the Jewish race, others the generation alive at some future sign. That is not interpretation, it is escape.

1. Those readings exist and they are weak. Genea, the Greek word behind "generation," ordinarily means the people alive at one time, so stretching it to cover a whole race strains it badly. Reading it instead as some future generation that will one day see the signs drains the sentence of the urgency it obviously carries. Neither move is needed here. 2. The word is taken in its ordinary sense. "This generation" means the people Jesus was talking to and their contemporaries, and the deadline is the ordinary span of a human lifetime. Nothing whatever is being redefined. What is being identified is the subject of "all these things," and the disciples' own question supplies it (P5). 3. Taking the word plainly is what makes the answer work. Loosen "this generation" and AD 70 stops being a fulfillment and turns into a coincidence. The reading in (P5) draws its whole strength from the phrase meaning exactly what a critic says it means.

+ Isaiah 17:1 says Damascus will cease to be a city and become a heap of ruins. Damascus has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years and is a capital today.

1. This case is contested, not closed. Part of the oracle came true. Part of it is left over, unaccounted for, and that leftover is real. Anybody who tells you this one is settled is overstating it in one direction or the other. 2. What did happen is on the record. The oracle belongs to the crisis of about 735 BC, when Syria and Israel marched on Jerusalem together. Assyria answered them. Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria, took Damascus in 732 BC, "carrying its people captive to Kir, and he killed Rezin" (2 Kings 16:9), Rezin being the king of Damascus himself. Samaria followed ten years later, in 722 BC. The kingdom ended, and an end to the kingdom is what the third verse of the oracle says would happen: "The fortress will disappear from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus." (Isaiah 17:3) 3. What did not happen is also on the record. The site was never abandoned. Assyria turned Damascus into the seat of a province and kept it running, people have lived on that ground ever since, and Damascus is a functioning capital city today. - One reading takes prophetic ruin-language as heightened speech for a decisive defeat, in which case 732 BC satisfies the oracle. - The other takes the words at face value and finds the oracle unfulfilled. - Both readings are held by competent people, and what they are disagreeing about is how this kind of writing works, not what happened on the ground. 4. A real test has cases you do not win. Answering four charges and then quietly dropping the fifth would rightly earn distrust on the other four. Deuteronomy 18:22 is a real test (P1), and a real test is one you can lose.

+ Conditionality is an unfalsifiable escape hatch. Any failed prediction can be rescued by announcing after the fact that the conditions changed.

1. The worry is legitimate. An unfalsifiable claim is one that no possible outcome could ever count against. Used loosely, conditionality would make every prediction in the Bible unfalsifiable: whatever happened, the prediction would be safe, and Deuteronomy's test would be worth precisely nothing. So the limits on the rule have to be stated out loud rather than assumed. 2. The condition Jeremiah names is narrow. It is a nation turning from its evil (Jeremiah 18:8). Not a change of circumstances, not divine second thoughts, not anything a defender gets to nominate after the fact. Where nobody repented, the rule is simply unavailable, and it is not invoked for Tyre, for Damascus, or for Mark 13. 3. The rule costs Deuteronomy's test something real. Grant the objection this much, and grant it without wriggling. For an announced judgment on a nation, non-occurrence by itself can no longer convict, because repentance is always a live possibility and the ancient record usually does not tell us one way or the other whether it happened. That is a genuine price to pay, and it is paid here. In exchange, the test keeps its teeth in four places the rule cannot reach. - Predictions about a named individual, whose recorded life either fits the prediction or does not (D17). - Oracles of blessing, which Jeremiah 18 lets a nation forfeit only by doing evil, never by God changing his mind. - Oracles that name an event rather than merely a fate: a causeway, a burnt temple, a king dead inside the year. - Cases where the outcome contradicts the oracle instead of merely failing to arrive, which is how the false prophet in Jeremiah 28 was caught (D13). 4. Jeremiah states that cost out loud, against his own interest. The asymmetry is not a modern retreat. One prophet says it to another prophet's face, in front of a crowd, at a moment when he himself is the one preaching doom. - "The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet." (Jeremiah 28:8-9) - Look at what that concedes. Announcing disaster is the ordinary business of a prophet and settles nothing by itself. The man promising good times is the one whose word has to land before anybody should believe him. Jeremiah was the doom prophet in that room, and he had just handed the lighter standard to his opponent. - Then he put a checkable claim of his own on the table anyway. Hananiah was told he would be dead within the year, and the chapter names the month it happened (Jeremiah 28:16-17). 5. The rule cuts against Scripture as well as for it. Jeremiah states the reverse in the same breath. A promise of blessing can be revoked if a nation does evil (Jeremiah 18:9-10). A religion inventing an escape hatch for itself does not build one that can also cancel its own promises. 6. Judah's own officials used the rule in open court. Micah announced that "Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins" (Micah 3:12), and Jerusalem went on standing. A hundred years later, the elders of Judah quoted that very sentence in open court to keep Jeremiah from being executed, and they explained the outcome in exactly the terms of Jeremiah 18: "Did he not fear the Lord and entreat the favor of the Lord, and did not the Lord relent of the disaster that he had pronounced against them?" (Jeremiah 26:19) - Those men were not apologists with a problem on their hands. They were officials arguing to save a prophet's life, and the reading was sitting there available to them without anybody having to invent it. - Jerusalem fell anyway, in 586 BC. The rule bought a delay rather than an exemption, and buying a delay is the behavior of a real rule rather than a hatch.

+ Jonah announced forty days and destruction with no conditions attached, and the city was not overthrown. By your own test that is a false prophecy, whatever the sequel says about mercy.

1. The words really are unconditional on their face. "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4) There is no "unless" anywhere in that sentence, and pretending one is hiding in it would be reading in. 2. The book treats the unstated condition as obvious to everyone in it. Not one person in the story is surprised by the outcome. The king of Nineveh reasons that God may yet relent, the people fast on exactly that hope, and Jonah announces that this is the whole reason he ran in the first place: "for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster." (Jonah 4:2) - A prophet who flees an assignment because he expects the threat to be withdrawn has told you what he thought his own words meant. 3. The book was written to make this point. Jonah did not stumble into the problem by accident. It is four chapters built around it, and it ends with God patiently explaining to a sulking prophet why sparing a repentant city was the right thing to do. Read the book as an accidental failed prediction and you have the plot running backwards. 4. Threats work this way in ordinary speech. A parent who says the trip is cancelled unless the room gets cleaned, and who then takes the trip, has not lied to anybody. Neither has the parent who leaves the "unless" unsaid because the child knows perfectly well that it is there.

+ Paul writes about "we who are alive, who are left" and tells the Corinthians the appointed time has grown very short. He expected the end within his own lifetime, he was wrong, and the New Testament records it.

1. The texts say what the objection reports. Paul writes of "we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:15) and tells the Corinthians that "the appointed time has grown very short" (1 Corinthians 7:29). Reading those as the expectation of a return inside his own lifetime is a serious position and it is not going away. The first passage is the harder of the two, because Paul introduces it as a word from the Lord, which puts it squarely inside the category Deuteronomy tests. 2. The revealed content of that word is a claim about order. "For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep." (1 Thessalonians 4:15) - What the word from the Lord declares is everything after the word "that": the living will not go ahead of the Christian dead. There were people in the church at Thessalonica grieving over members who had died before the Lord came back, and this sentence is Paul's answer to that grief. - "We who are alive" is how a living man refers to the living. It sets up the comparison rather than being the thing declared, and reading it as the prediction turns a pronoun into an oracle. 3. Expectation is not prediction. Deuteronomy's rule concerns a word spoken in the Lord's name that then does not come to pass, so prediction is what the test examines (P1). Paul is not announcing a date anywhere. In the same letter he says the day comes "like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2), which is a claim that nobody can time it at all. A man can hope to live to see something without predicting that he will. - He also writes himself onto the other side of his own comparison. To the Corinthians he says he knows "that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence" (2 Corinthians 4:14), which puts him among the dead who are raised rather than among the living who are left behind. To the Philippians he says his own preference is to go first: "My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better." (Philippians 1:23) - Neither of those is what a man writes if he has predicted that he will still be breathing on the day. 4. The earliest Christians wrote about the delay instead of hiding it. 2 Peter 3 takes up the complaint head on. It quotes the scoffers accurately ("Where is the promise of his coming?") and answers with a claim about how God reckons time. Whatever anybody makes of that answer, the passage shows the question being asked and addressed inside the New Testament rather than centuries afterwards. 5. Some scholars hold that Paul was simply mistaken. On that view he expected the return within his own lifetime and was wrong. It is a real position with real texts behind it, and it has not been refuted. Even granting it, an expectation is not a word spoken in the Lord's name that failed to come to pass, and it is that word Deuteronomy's test examines (P1).

+ You picked the cases you could handle. The lists of failed prophecies run to dozens, and answering a chosen handful of them proves nothing.

1. These are the cases critics lead with. Tyre and Mark 13 are here because they are the hardest, not because they are the easiest. Damascus and the forty empty years over Egypt are here because they do not resolve, and Josiah because that case lands in the one category no rule about nations can rescue (D8, D14, D17). Nobody picking for comfort picks that list. 2. Most of the long lists collapse into the categories already covered. Take one of those lists and run a finger down it, and the entries sort themselves into four piles. - Warnings to nations that then repented, Nineveh being the standard entry, which Jeremiah 18 addresses in God's own voice (P3). - Charges that quote a summary rather than the passage, which come apart the moment the chapter is read whole (P2). - Genuine disputes about what a passage means and what kind of writing it is. Damascus is one of these, and it stays unresolved. - Predictions that were fulfilled and are disputed on other grounds, such as when the text was written, which is a different argument altogether. 3. Deuteronomy 18:22 stays open to a better case. Not every item on every list has a reply attached to it, and saying otherwise would be a bluff. What can be said is that the cases critics lead with do not establish a failure, and that Scripture's own test remains open to anyone who thinks he has turned up a stronger one (C2).

+ Deuteronomy's test is worthless if every apparent failure gets reclassified as a misreading. What would you accept as a failed prophecy?

1. Three things would show a prophecy had failed. A test nobody can fail is not a test at all, so the question deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug. - A public prediction of an event that demonstrably did not occur, and that no repentance was reported to have cancelled. Micah names Jerusalem and says the city "shall become a heap of ruins" (Micah 3:12). Hezekiah's generation was spared, and Jeremiah 26:19 says why (D9). Had Jerusalem then come through the Babylonian wars untouched as well, there would be no reading of Micah's sentence left standing. - A prophecy about a named individual that the person's own recorded life contradicts (D17). - An oracle that its own book later withdraws as mistaken, rather than reporting an unpaid bill the way Ezekiel does (D4). 2. Scripture convicts its own false prophets. Jeremiah 28 tells the story of Hananiah, who prophesied in the Lord's name that Babylon's grip on Judah would be broken inside two years. Jeremiah told him to his face that he would be dead that year, and the chapter reports that he was. A tradition that names its own false prophets and records the verdicts against them is not a system built so that nothing could ever count against it. 3. The verdicts are read off records the church did not write. Whether an oracle came off is decided by what happened, and what happened is on file outside the Bible. Arrian and Diodorus describe Alexander's causeway. Josephus describes the burning of the temple. The Assyrian royal annals record the campaign that took Damascus. In every one of those cases Scripture supplies the claim and somebody else entirely supplies the outcome, which is what keeps the test from being the defendant marking his own paper. 4. The cases usually brought forward do not show a failure. That is a narrower thing to say than that no failure could ever be shown, and the difference is worth keeping straight. Two of the cases here stay contested (D8, D14), and the test stays open for anyone who arrives with a better one (C2).

+ Read the next verse. Ezekiel hands Nebuchadnezzar Egypt as his wages and promises forty years there with no foot of man passing through, and none of that happened either.

1. The wages verse comes with a promise attached. Anyone who leans on Ezekiel 29:18 as evidence of an honestly kept record has to be willing to read on to the next verse, and the next verse is a promise: "Behold, I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and he shall carry off its wealth and despoil it and plunder it; and it shall be the wages for his army." (Ezekiel 29:19) Earlier in the same chapter the language is heavier still. Egypt will be "an utter waste and desolation, from Migdol to Syene, as far as the border of Cush. No foot of man shall pass through it, and no foot of beast shall pass through it; it shall be uninhabited forty years." (Ezekiel 29:10-11) 2. The tablet breaks off before the outcome. - A fragmentary Babylonian tablet records Nebuchadnezzar marching against Egypt in his thirty-seventh year, about 568 BC, in the reign of Pharaoh Amasis. That campaign is real, and it is the one the oracle is pointing at. - What the tablet does not record is how the campaign ended. No Babylonian or Egyptian source describes a conquest, or a stripping of the country, or forty empty years, and nothing in the Egyptian record looks remotely like a land emptied of its people. - Anybody who says the outcome is settled, in either direction, has gone out past the evidence. The honest thing to say is that the campaign happened and nobody wrote down what came of it. 3. The oracle states its own bottom line. Three verses past the forty years, the passage says what it is finally after. Egypt will be restored, "and there they shall be a lowly kingdom. It shall be the most lowly of the kingdoms, and never again exalt itself above the nations. And I will make them so small that they will never again rule over the nations." (Ezekiel 29:14-15) - Egypt after Ezekiel's century belonged to Persia, then to Alexander's generals, then to Rome. The last pharaoh born in Egypt, Nectanebo II, fled south when the Persians came back in 343 BC, and apart from a handful of short-lived rebels the country was governed from somewhere else for the next twenty-three centuries. - That much is not a rescue reading. It is the summary the oracle supplies for itself, about a kingdom older than Israel, and it can be checked against the whole span of time since. 4. The forty years are an interval the oracle itself closes. The desolation is not the last thing this chapter has to say about Egypt, and the text sets a term on it long before anybody needed a term set. - "At the end of forty years I will gather the Egyptians from the peoples among whom they were scattered" (Ezekiel 29:13). The scattering and the gathering have the same shape as Judah's own exile and return. - Forty is the Bible's round figure for a stretch of time under judgment. It is the count of years Israel walked the wilderness because one generation would not go up (Numbers 14:33-34). A span with a stated end and a stated sequel is a very different kind of sentence from "you will never be found again." - The clause about no foot of man is still the hard part, and it should be said plainly. A flat reading empties the Nile valley for two generations in a way that no ancient writer anywhere seems to have noticed, and readers divide over it exactly as they divide over Isaiah 17 (C2, D18). 5. What stays contested is the forty empty years, not the whole oracle. Ezekiel 26 has a change of number printed in the text and a causeway sitting in the historical record. The forty empty years have a campaign whose outcome nobody bothered to write down, so that clause sits beside Damascus among the cases that do not resolve, and it is not counted here as fulfilled. - The outcome the chapter names as its own, a permanently reduced Egypt, is a different matter, and that one is on the record. - The wages passage itself is a statement about spoil rather than a retraction of the oracle against Tyre (D4).

+ Jesus told the crowd that some standing there would not taste death until they saw the kingdom come with power, and told the Twelve they would not finish the towns of Israel before the Son of Man came. Both deadlines passed.

1. These are Schweitzer's own texts. Matthew 10:23 carried the weight in his reconstruction, and for good reason. It is short, it is addressed to named men on a specific errand, and it looks very much as though it puts a term on that errand. Answering Mark 13:30 and then stopping would be answering the easier verse (D5). 2. Matthew 10:23 sits inside a charge about a mission under persecution. "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes." (Matthew 10:23) - The sentence is spoken to men who are about to be run out of towns, and what it hands them is a promise that the work will not outlast the help. Read that way it is an assurance rather than a date. - Five verses earlier, the same charge has those men flogged in synagogues and "dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles" (Matthew 10:18). Governors and kings were not on the itinerary of a preaching tour around Galilee. The charge is already reaching well past that summer, and reading its closing sentence as a stopwatch on one walking trip reads it smaller than it was written. - Readings of the coming differ, and four of them are current. • Some take it of the resurrection and the commissioning that followed it. • Some take it of the judgment that fell on Jerusalem in AD 70. • Some read it alongside Daniel 7, where the Son of Man comes to God's throne to receive a kingdom rather than down out of the sky (D6). • Some take it of the end of the age. - Only that last reading can produce a failure, and even it splits in two. Taken as a term set on the errand, it is Schweitzer's miss, and that reading has not been refuted. Taken as a statement that the mission to Israel will still be unfinished whenever the Son of Man comes, it fixes no deadline at all, and every century since has left it standing. - The other three are ordinary readings of ordinary words, and not one of them requires a failure. 3. Matthew kept the sentence long after the towns had been walked. Whatever date anybody gives the Gospel, it was written well after the Twelve had finished going through Galilee, and it was written by a man who ends his book by sending them somewhere else entirely. - The last words in Matthew are a commission to every nation, closing on a promise that runs out past the horizon: "And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:20) - An author who read 10:23 as a deadline his own congregation had watched come and go had the simplest remedy in the world available to him, which was to leave the sentence out. He copied it down instead, and then wrote an ending that takes for granted that the work is still running. 4. Mark 9:1 has its answer in the next paragraph. "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power." (Mark 9:1) - Six days later in Mark and Matthew, about eight in Luke, three of the men standing there climb a mountain and watch Jesus transfigured. All three Gospels set that scene immediately after the promise, which is the arrangement of writers who thought the two belonged together. - An early Christian letter reads the scene the same way, and it uses both of the words the objection turns on, power and coming. "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2 Peter 1:16) Then the writer names the setting: "for we were with him on the holy mountain." (2 Peter 1:18) • Who wrote that letter is argued over, and the argument does not touch the point being made here. Somebody very early took the coming in power to be something three men had already been shown. - Others take the coming in power as Pentecost, or as the judgment on Jerusalem. Every one of those readings falls inside the lifetime the sentence specifies, which is all the sentence commits anybody to. - Notice too what it does not say. It does not say the end of the world. It says the kingdom of God arriving in power, and the New Testament says at considerable length that this happened while those men were still alive. 5. A short horizon is not a dated prediction. The first Christians did live as though the end might come soon, and denying it would be silly. But Deuteronomy's test asks after a word spoken in the Lord's name that did not come to pass (P1), and an expectation held by men who also insisted that nobody can know the day is not that word (D11). See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: The Messiah Had to Come Before AD 70

+ Mark was written around AD 70 or later, so the temple saying is not a prediction at all. Writing down what has already happened and calling it prophecy explains the fit perfectly.

1. If this is right, the failed-prophecy charge has been abandoned. The charge in dispute is that Jesus set a deadline and missed it. A Gospel written after the event is a Gospel whose deadline was not missed. That is a different objection carrying a different burden, and the two cannot be pressed at the same time: either the saying failed, or it was written down by a man who knew perfectly well that it had not. 2. The date of Mark is genuinely disputed. Proposals run from the 50s to the years just after the fighting stopped. Most of the arguments on both sides are drawn from inside the text, and no manuscript settles the question. - The second-century testimony pulls in both directions. Irenaeus says Mark wrote Peter's preaching down after Peter and Paul had gone, which puts the book in the middle 60s at the earliest. Clement of Alexandria says Mark wrote while Peter was alive and still preaching in Rome, which puts it earlier again. Eusebius preserves both reports without choosing. - So nobody is in a position to treat the late date as established and then reason forward from it. 3. The wording is a poor fit for a man describing what he had watched. - "There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down" (Mark 13:2) is the answer to a disciple pointing up at the temple buildings. What the legions actually did was burn the sanctuary and then pull down the buildings on the platform. A writer working from memory leads with the fire, and this discourse never mentions a fire at all. - Mark 13:14 tells readers in Judea to flee to the mountains, which is advice with a shelf life on it. It reads as instruction for people who still have time to take it rather than as a report about people who already ran. 4. Luke 21:20 is not the clincher it looks like. Luke is the exhibit critics usually produce here. Where Mark has the abomination of desolation, an Old Testament phrase for a defiling thing set up where it has no business standing (Mark 13:14), Luke 21:20 has "Jerusalem surrounded by armies," and the swap is regularly read as Luke quietly bringing Mark up to date once the war was over. Taken on its own, though, that phrase is ordinary siege language of the kind the Greek Old Testament uses about the Babylonians. It was available to any writer who had read the prophets on the first destruction of the city. 5. A manufactured prophecy is usually tidier than this one. A writer inventing a fulfilled prediction after the fact does not leave in the sentence where the speaker admits he does not know the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Nor does he leave the one detail that every ancient account of AD 70 leads with, the burning of the sanctuary, out of the prediction altogether. See also: • CE / NT Criticism: Early Dating and Eyewitness Proximity of the New Testament • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: The Messiah Had to Come Before AD 70

+ Huldah told Josiah he would be gathered to his grave in peace, and he was shot by archers at Megiddo and died in a war. By your own test that is a named individual contradicted by his own recorded life.

1. The objection is aimed at the right category. A prediction about a named man, whose death the same history reports a chapter later, is exactly the kind of case no rule about repentant nations can reach (C1, D9). It deserves the whole sentence rather than the half of it that usually gets quoted. 2. The oracle says what "in peace" means in the clause that follows it. "Therefore, behold, I will gather you to your fathers, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring upon this place." (2 Kings 22:20) - That last clause is not a second promise tacked on to the first. It is what the peace consists of. Josiah would be dead before the disaster reached Jerusalem. - And he was. Josiah died in 609 BC. The city fell in 586, twenty-three years he did not live to watch. 3. The same history reports that he was warned off the battlefield. Josiah did not stumble into Megiddo by accident. He rode out to intercept an Egyptian army that was on its way to fight somebody else, and Chronicles records the message Pharaoh Neco sent back down the road to him. - "What have we to do with each other, king of Judah? I am not coming against you this day, but against the house with which I am at war. And God has commanded me to hurry. Cease opposing God, who is with me, lest he destroy you." (2 Chronicles 35:21) - The verdict on the next line is blunt. Josiah "did not listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God, but came to fight in the plain of Megiddo." (2 Chronicles 35:22) He went in disguise, which is the small telling detail of a man who knew he had no business being there. - A promise of a quiet death is not a charm you wear into somebody else's war after being told to go home. And the book that reports the oracle is the same book that reports the disobedience. It does not seem to think the second embarrasses the first. - Somebody will answer that Chronicles is later than Kings and that the warning was put there to smooth over the problem. Fair enough, except that Chronicles also copies out Huldah's oracle in full a chapter earlier (2 Chronicles 34:28), which a writer smoothing that particular problem would have done far better to trim. 4. What happened to his body is on the record as well. - "And his servants carried him dead in a chariot from Megiddo and brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb." (2 Kings 23:30) Chronicles adds that all Judah and Jerusalem mourned him, and that Jeremiah composed a lament for him. - Set that beside the kings who came after him. Jehoahaz died a prisoner in Egypt. Jehoiachin was carried off to Babylon. Zedekiah was blinded and taken there in chains. Jehoiakim had a prophet promise him the burial of a donkey. - Being gathered to your grave is an Old Testament expression about where a man is laid and whom he is laid beside. What it marks is the difference between your fathers' tomb and a foreign field. 5. The answer is not free. Reading "in peace" as covering a king shot dead by archers takes work, and a reader who finds that strained is not being difficult. He has noticed something real. What carries the answer is that the oracle states its own terms inside its own sentence: Josiah would be dead before the disaster reached Jerusalem, and he was.

+ Ruin-language counts as hyperbole whenever the city survives and as literal whenever it does not. Between conditionality, misquotation and hyperbole there is a key for every lock.

1. The objection describes a real abuse. A reading chosen after the outcome is known, and chosen because of it, is not interpretation at all. If prophetic ruin-language means "destroyed" wherever a city was destroyed and "defeated" wherever one survived, then the words have stopped carrying any information and Deuteronomy's test has become a formality (P1). That worry deserves a test rather than a denial. 2. The test is whether the same reading gets applied where it costs something. - Ezekiel 26 is read flatly here, and the flat reading is what creates the difficulty at verses 14 and 21 rather than dissolving it (D1). - Isaiah 17 is read flatly enough to leave Damascus in the contested column instead of the answered one (C2, D8). - Ezekiel 29's forty years over Egypt are left open rather than counted as fulfilled (D14). - A key that opened every lock would have opened those three. It was not reached for on any of them. 3. The genre is identifiable from cases nobody argues about. Genre here means simply the kind of writing a passage is, and what a reader of that kind of writing is entitled to expect from it. - Isaiah announces the fall of Babylon like this: "For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light." (Isaiah 13:10) Ezekiel says almost exactly the same thing over Egypt (Ezekiel 32:7). - Neither writer expected the sky to change. No ancient reader thought he did. And no critic anywhere argues that Isaiah failed because the sun kept on rising over Babylon. - Think of a match report saying the home side was annihilated. Nobody goes looking for casualty figures, and nobody had to be told the rule beforehand. - That is what makes this a reading rather than an excuse. The pattern is established from passages where the outcome is not in dispute, and only then carried across to the passages where it is. 4. Hyperbole cannot rescue a checkable claim. "Your stones and timber and soil they will cast into the midst of the waters" is not overstatement about anything. It is an odd engineering detail, and it either happened or it did not (P4). "This generation will not pass away" is a span of years, and years are the kind of thing a person can count. Where an oracle says something checkable, the genre reading has nothing to work with, and the case has to be won or lost on the event itself.