Justified True Belief

(P1) A text can be a prediction only if it existed before the event. + Before a prediction is a claim about content, it is a claim about timing. Whatever the words say, they forecast nothing at all unless they were fixed before the thing they describe. (1) A forecast written after the fact is not a forecast at all. - Think of it this way. A friend hands you a sealed envelope before kickoff and tells you not to open it until the game is over. You do as you are told, and when you finally tear it open you find the final score on a card inside, exact, both teams. That is worth something. You would probably spend the rest of the evening asking how it got there. - Now change one detail and leave everything else alone. You learn that your friend wrote the card during the fourth quarter and sealed the envelope on the way out of the stadium. Not a letter on the card has changed. The evidence is simply gone. - Notice what was doing the work. Timing carried the whole weight the entire time, and it is easy to miss, because the content is the part you can see and the timing is not written anywhere on the card. (2) Israel's law makes prior announcement the public test of a prophet. - Moses gives the people a way to catch a man who is speaking for himself rather than for God: • "And if you say in your heart, How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?—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." (Deuteronomy 18:21-22) - It is a test an ordinary Israelite could run without help from a scholar. Listen to what the man says, mark it, wait, and see whether it happens. - What gives the rule its teeth is that it can convict. A standard that only ever confirms is no standard at all, and this one was written so that it could go the other way. - The same law is careful not to let the test do too much, though. Deuteronomy 13:1-3 imagines a prophet whose sign does come true, and who then tells Israel to go after other gods, and it says to reject him anyway. Coming true is what a true prophet has to do. It was never all he had to do. (3) Israel's God stakes his own identity on announcing the future in advance. - Isaiah stages a courtroom. God summons the gods of the nations, and once they are assembled he gives them a single task to perform in front of the court: "bring your proofs... Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods." (Isaiah 41:21, 23) - Five chapters later the same claim arrives without the courtroom: "Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done." (Isaiah 46:9-10) - So the claim on the table is not that fulfilled prophecy is impressive. It is that nothing else can do this, which is a far riskier thing to say and a far easier thing to disprove. (4) A prophecy written after its event is not weak evidence but none. - A tip on a horse that arrives after the race is not a poor tip. It is not a tip at all, and naming the winner correctly does nothing whatever to make it one. - There is a temptation here worth resisting. Counting a late text as a little bit of evidence anyway is the fastest way to lose a hearing from someone who came in willing to listen. A standard is worth most in exactly the places where it costs something. - All of this fixes the order in which the questions have to be asked, and it is not the order most people start with. The first question about a disputed passage is not what it means. The first question is when the words were written down. Therefore, priority in time is not one consideration among several but the condition a prediction has to meet before its content matters at all.

(P2a) Copies of the prophetic books survive from more than a century before Jesus. + The dating question has an unusually concrete answer: the copies are still here. (1) The Great Isaiah Scroll is a complete copy made around 125 BC. - Bedouin shepherds found it in a cave above the Dead Sea in 1947, stored in a tall clay jar. It runs twenty-four feet unrolled, about the length of two small cars parked end to end, in fifty-four columns carrying all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah. - It is kept at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, and the Israel Museum has photographed it column by column and put the images online. Anyone who wants to see the letters can go and look at them tonight. - The part that matters most comes near the end of the scroll. It carries Isaiah 52:13 through 53:12, the passage the whole dispute over the suffering servant turns on, in substantially the form a reader finds in a Bible today. (2) The other books at issue came out of the same caves. - Daniel is the one people ask about, and eight copies of it survive: two from Cave 1, five from Cave 4, and one written on papyrus from Cave 6. Every one of those caves sits above Qumran, the ruined settlement beside the shore. - The earliest is catalogued as 4QDan-c, which is a shelf label and nothing more: cave 4 at Qumran, the book of Daniel, the third copy on the list. Its handwriting belongs to the late second century BC, and since critical scholarship dates the book itself to about 165 BC, that copy was made roughly fifty years later. - Fifty years is a very short gap for an ancient book. Picture something published the year you were born being copied out by hand while you are still going to work. - The others are there in quantity as well. Twenty-one copies of Isaiah came from the same collection, and Micah and Zechariah belong to the Twelve, the twelve shorter prophetic books copied together on one scroll, which goes back to about 150 BC. No book survives in more manuscripts than the Psalms. (3) The prophets were circulating in Greek before the first century. - Around 130 BC a translator in Egypt, grandson of the man who wrote the Jewish wisdom book Ben Sira, mentioned in his preface that the Law, the Prophets and the rest of the books were already in Greek. That ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures is what scholars call the Septuagint. • He is not arguing that it exists. He mentions it in passing, the way you would mention a bus timetable, and that is what makes the remark worth so much. - A Greek scroll of the Twelve turned up in a cave at Nahal Hever, dated by its editors to the last century BC. Refugees carried it into that cave a century and a half later, by which time it was already an antique. - A translation proves the original was there first, since nobody translates a book that has not been written yet. (4) Handwriting is not the only clock in the room. - Those dates come from palaeography, which means dating a manuscript by the shape of its letters, much as handwriting from 1890 does not look like handwriting from 1960. The scale is anchored to contracts and deeds that carry their own dates. - A second clock runs on entirely different principles. Radiocarbon dating measures how much of a radioactive form of carbon is left in the parchment or in the linen it was wrapped in, since that carbon decays at a known rate once the animal or the flax plant dies. - Two laboratories ran that test on batches of the Judean desert manuscripts in the 1990s, and for the Great Isaiah Scroll the answer came back in the last two centuries BC. Two clocks with nothing in common, pointing at the same stretch of time. Therefore, the physical evidence puts the Hebrew and the Greek prophets in circulation more than a century before Jesus was born, and it does so without anyone taking a position on who wrote them.

(P2b) Every dating scheme anyone defends places the prophetic books centuries before Jesus. + The manuscripts settle one half of the dating question. The other half is when the books were composed, and there the striking thing is that the answer holds whichever side of the scholarly dispute turns out to be right. (1) Even the latest date anyone publishes falls centuries before Jesus. - The standard critical position, meaning the view taken in the mainstream academic commentaries, divides Isaiah in two or three. Chapters 40 through 55 are assigned to the Babylonian exile around 540 BC, and 56 through 66 to a period later still. The two-part division goes back to the late eighteenth century, and the three-part version was set out in an influential commentary of 1892. - Daniel's usual critical date is about 165 BC, in the middle of the Maccabean crisis, when the Greek king Antiochus IV outlawed Jewish worship and a Jewish family called the Maccabees led a revolt against him. - Traditional dating, by contrast, puts Isaiah in the eighth century BC and Daniel in the sixth. The disagreement between the two camps is real and it is serious, and specialists have spent well over a century on it. - A minority school goes later than anybody: it dates the formation of much of the Hebrew Bible to the Hellenistic period, the centuries after Alexander's conquests in the late fourth century BC. That is the latest position anyone publishes, and even it lands before the copies in the caves were made. - For the question of priority, then, the whole dispute is about nothing. Every one of those dates sits centuries before the events at issue. (2) Who wrote a book and when its text was fixed are two different questions. - Think of an anonymous letter. You may have no idea whose hand held the pen and still know to the day when the envelope went into the box, because a postmark does not care who wrote what is inside. - The dispute over Isaiah is a dispute about the pen. The manuscripts answer the postmark question, and they answer it the same way whichever direction the first dispute finally goes. (3) The narrowest gap in the whole dispute is still about two centuries wide. - Daniel is the tight case, and even there the numbers are not close: roughly 165 BC on the critical dating, against a ministry in Jerusalem around AD 30. - Two centuries, give or take. That is about the distance from now back to the 1830s, which is to say well outside anybody's living memory in either direction. (4) Granting the critical dates makes the case stronger rather than weaker. - Anyone who has met this subject before comes in braced for a fight about who wrote Isaiah 40 through 66. That fight can be handed over in full, for the sake of the argument, without costing anything at all. Granting a date to see what follows from it is not the same as holding it. - Think of an alibi that holds even when you accept the prosecution's own timeline. It is worth far more than an alibi that first requires the timeline to be changed, and the case for priority is the first kind. - There is a further benefit, and it matters most to a reader who holds no particular view of Scripture. Priority turns out not to require one. Therefore, on every dating scheme currently defended by anyone at all, these books were finished long before the events they are said to describe.

(C1) Therefore, the messianic texts meet the condition every genuine prediction must meet. + The messianic texts clear the gate. They were written, copied and circulating in public long before the events they are said to describe, so nothing about their timing disqualifies them from counting as predictions. The reasoning that gets there is deductive, and deductive reasoning works like links in a chain: if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. This chain is a short one. (P1) sets the condition every prediction has to meet, and (P2a) and (P2b) show that these texts meet it. A link holds when it is more plausible than its denial, which is a good deal less than proof beyond all doubt, and that is the standard each of these premises has to clear. Two lines converge on the same answer, and neither leans on the other. The manuscripts are physical objects with a measurable age. The composition dates come from specialists working on the books' language and contents, and the latest of those dates were set by scholars with no interest whatever in the Christian conclusion. Either line would carry the point on its own. Together they leave the dating charge with nowhere to stand. So the claim that these passages were composed after the events they describe is false, and it is not a close call. Now for the part that is easier to overclaim, and more interesting anyway. Being early is a necessary condition for a prediction, which is to say that no text lacking it can be a prediction at all. It is nowhere near a sufficient condition, the kind that settles a matter by itself. A text can be old, well attested, and still not be about anybody in particular. Whether Isaiah 53 describes an individual, whether Micah's line about Bethlehem names a birthplace, whether Daniel's sequence lands where Christians say it lands: those are separate questions with separate answers, and not one of them is settled by a date. Clearing this gate wins nothing. What it does is make the rest of the case possible.

(P3) The Hebrew prophetic text was preserved by people with no stake in the Christian claim. + Dating answers one charge. A second and better one is still standing: that the words were quietly adjusted later, by people who already knew how the story turned out. (1) Nobody could reach the scrolls between the first century and 1947. - The copies are older than the church. The Great Isaiah Scroll was written around 125 BC, and the jars went into the caves by about AD 68, when Roman troops reached the settlement during the first Jewish revolt. - Nobody opened them in between. A text already a century and a half old when it went into the ground, and untouched there until a Bedouin shepherd's stone rattled inside a jar, is a text no Christian hand ever reached. - Think of a sealed time capsule. It is not good evidence because the people who filled it were honest. It is good evidence because nobody could get at it afterward, honest or otherwise. (2) The Hebrew was copied for centuries by scribes who reject the Christian reading. - The Masoretes, the Jewish scholars who standardized the Hebrew Bible between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries AD, counted things obsessively. They counted the letters in a book, and the words, and the verses, and they noted the middle letter of a book in the margin so a copyist could check his own work against it. • The text they fixed is what scholars call the Masoretic text, and it is the Hebrew standing behind the Old Testament in an English Bible today. - A scribe who knows the middle letter of the book in front of him is not quietly adding lines to it. - And the community keeping those counts is the community that does not accept the Christian reading of the passages in question. Lawyers call the unbroken record of who held a piece of evidence its chain of custody, and this is about as hostile a chain of custody as evidence ever gets. - Hostile custody is worth more than friendly custody, for a plain reason. These scribes had no motive to help the Christian case and every motive to trim it, and the disputed passages are still sitting there in their text. (3) Three separate lines of transmission agree. - There is the Hebrew sealed in the caves, the Hebrew copied down the centuries by the Masoretes, and the Greek translated by Jews before Christ. Three routes out of antiquity, with no opportunity anywhere along the way for the three to be coordinated. - Where they differ, the differences are visible and small, which is the assessment of the textual specialists rather than of apologists. The Great Isaiah Scroll is a thousand years older than the oldest medieval Hebrew Bible and is still recognizably the same book. • The Greek line needs one qualification, and it is a real one. The Septuagint as it survives in the great codices, the bound volumes with pages that eventually replaced the scroll, was copied mainly by Christians. So when the question is specifically whether Christian hands shaped the text, it is the Hebrew lines that carry the weight. (4) The same text turns up at sites with no connection to Qumran. - Masada, the desert fortress that fell to Rome in AD 73, produced fragments of seven biblical scrolls: Genesis, two of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel and two of Psalms. Different site, different people, no connection to the sect at Qumran. - They agree with the Masoretic text as well. So does the biblical material from the Bar Kokhba caves, the hiding places used in the Jewish revolt against Rome of AD 132 to 135, a good sixty years later still. Therefore, the text of the prophets reached the first century through hands that had no interest in making it fit Jesus, and left the first century in the keeping of people who deny that it does.

(C2) Therefore, the prophecies were written before the events and were not altered to fit them. + The words were fixed before the events, and the Hebrew was never in the keeping of anyone with a motive to adjust it toward Jesus. The first half of that rests on physical copies and on the latest composition dates any scholar defends. The second rests on sealed caves and on copyists who did not believe the conclusion. Between them they leave no moment at which a helpful hand could have gone to work. Copying by hand left its ordinary marks, of course. Spellings drift, an eye slips, an occasional different word turns up, and every bit of it is visible in the manuscripts and argued over in the technical literature. What is missing from that record is a passage that arrives late. The result is a modest one, and it is worth stating modestly. It does not show that any particular passage is a messianic prophecy. It does not show that Jesus fulfilled one. What it closes is the shortest road out of the whole subject, the one that says the predictions were written up afterward by people who already knew the ending. That road is closed by dated manuscripts rather than by any Christian reading of the texts, and it stays closed however the remaining questions come out. Every claim about what the prophets said has to stand on that ground before it can stand anywhere else. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Who Is the Servant of Isaiah 53? • CE / NT Criticism: Textual Transmission and Manuscript Evidence