> You cover the issue of retro-fitting after
>this, but there is one problem I have with all
>of it. Everything you say here is contingent on
>one simple fact--that there *was* a historical
>Jesus, that all of the events recorded in the
>Gospels about him happened, just as they are
>recorded. It would be very hard to massage
>details from the life of a real man and make
>them fit prophecy if they don't. It would be
>quite easy to take the prophecies and make up
>out of whole cloth a man to fit them.


I posted this and immediately shut down my computer at work and left. As I was standing there watching the computer shut down, I realized that this last accusation doesn't hold water, even with me, and wasn't really what I was aiming at anyway (I got closer to what I was trying to say in my second paragraph, anyway) So let me try again.

Obviously it *would* be easier just to make up a man and fit his fictional life to Old Testament prophecy. But then I'd have to assume that the men who wrote the Gospels (both canonical and non-canonical) were deliberately trying to make up a fiction about a man who never existed and foster it upon the rest of the world. And that's just stupid.

No, here's the idea I was really trying to get across and failed miserably at. We all pretty much agree that there was a man called Abraham Lincoln who existed about 130 years ago and was President of the US during the American Civil War. If you'd never heard of Abraham Lincoln though, you could pick up any number of history books on the era and find him mentioned.

If I then wanted to set out to prove that Abe is actually the Messiah, I'd have a pretty tough go of it. Because the prophecies from the Old Testement don't jive with all the other literature written about Abe. He wasn't born in Bethlehem. It's a good bet he never rode a donkey anywhere, much less into Jerusalem. Perhaps most damning of all, he wasn't, technically, a Jew. So it'd be pretty much impossible to prove that Abe was actually the Son of God to any rational person.

However, from what I understand, (and again I'm not even an amateur historian) Judea was almost literally overrun with men who claimed to be the Messiah around the first century AD. It was a strong Jewish belief of the period that the Messiah was coming and coming soon, and He was gonna run the Romans out of town when he showed up. Consequently, the "Messiah of the week" would come to prominance, usually attempt to lead a revolt, get crushed by the Romans, and then the cycle would repeat itself with a new man claiming to be the Messiah.

So let's say one of these many Messiah claimants was a man called Jesus. He was a diffent kind of Messiah, and didn't attempt to lead a revolt. Instead, he tought a sort of passive resistance and built up a decent following. In the end, he gets crushed by the Romans anyway, and life in Judea goes on.

But stories have a way of propagating, and changing drastically over time. Perhaps the more literal stories of this man changed over time into something more fantastic. And since, at the time, he was just Yet Another Messiah, the factual truth of what he did was never written down. But the *legend* grows out of all proportion, until you end up with people who honestly and faithfully believe the stories they've heard about this man, and record them as they "know" them to be.

What I'm trying to get at is that it'd be hard to take a famous figure like Abe Lincoln and retrofit his life to fit the prophecies of the Old Testement. But it'd be a heck of a lot easier to do it with the stories and oral traditions about a man about which very little (or perhaps nothing) was written about during his own lifetime. The Romans may not have written about him because to them, he was just another Jewish nuisance, another fraudulent claimant to the title of King of the Jews. The Jews may not have written about him for much the same reasons. And if you don't have anything to corroborate or disprove the stories about a man, you can choose to believe whatever you like. And if all you know of him are the fervently told stories from true believers, well then, it's easy to construct a bio for the man that fits with what you expect him to be anyway.

Anyway, my real question is still about historical references to Jesus outside of religious writings about him. If those exist, then much like Abe Lincoln, it'd be much harder to retro-fit prophecy to his life. But if they don't, it becomes nearly impossible to tell for certain what is true about him and what isn't if you're not already a true believer.

-- Dave