Messianic Prophecy - Part 5

According to Peter Stoner, Micah 5:2 makes the following prediction:

(1) The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem.

If this interpretation is correct, then Stoner has given us a good reason to believe that Jesus was not the Messiah, because it is probably the case that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem:


(1) The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem.
(2) Jesus was not born in Bethlehem.
Therefore:
(3) Jesus was not the Messiah.

Before we can conclude that Jesus was not the Messiah, we need to determine whether Stoner’s interpretation of Micah 5:2 is correct.

The first thing to note about Micah 5:2, is that it does not specifically state that “The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem”. Consider the New Revised Standard Version translation of this verse:

But you, O Bethlehem of
Ephrathah,
who are one of the little clans
of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old,
from ancient days.

Note that the word “Messiah” does not appear in the verse. Nor does the synonym “Christ” appear in this verse. In fact, the word “Messiah” and the word “Christ” do not occur anywhere in the book of Micah.

Furthermore, the word “Christ” and the word “Messiah” do not occur anywhere in the entire Old Testament in the New Revised Standard Version, nor in the Old Testament of the Revised Standard Version, nor in the OT of: the English Standard Version, the New International Version, nor the Contemporary English Version.

In order to find the word “Messiah” in the Old Testament, you will need to look in either the New American Standard Bible or the King James Version. The word “Christ” does not appear anywhere in the entire Old Testament of either of those versions, but the word “Messiah” does occur in just one passage in the Old Testament, in the book of Daniel, the last book of the Old Testament to be written (see Daniel 9:25 & 9:26).

According to Stoner the Old Testament contains hundreds of Messianic prophecies:

More than three hundred prophecies from the Old Testament which deal with the first advent of Christ have been listed. Every one of them was completely fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
(Science Speaks, Chapter 3)

If there are three hundred prophecies in the Old Testament about Christ then why does the word “Christ” never appear in the Old Testament? and why does the word “Messiah” appear in only one passage of the Old Testament (and in only a few translations of that passage)?

You will not find the statement that “Christ will be born in Bethlehem” anywhere in the Old Testament, because the word “Christ” does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament! Nor will you find the statement that “The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem” anywhere in the Old Testament, because the word “Messiah” is either never used in the Old Testament, or is used only in one single passage (Daniel 9:25-26), which does not talk about where the Messiah will be born.

We see here one fundamental problem with alleged “Messianic Prophecies” in the Old Testament. The Old Testament never clearly and explicitly makes a prediction about “Christ” or the “Messiah”, with the possible exception of Daniel 9:25-26. So, in at least 299 of the 300 alleged prophecies about Christ, one must make inferences in order to interpret the passage as one that is making a prediction about the Messiah.

This means that the door is opened wide for the problem of confirmation bias.

Experiments have repeatedly found that people tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, by searching for evidence consistent with the hypothesis they hold at a given time. Rather than searching through all the relevant evidence, they ask questions that are phrased so that an affirmative answer supports their hypothesis. They look for the consequences that they would expect if their hypothesis were true, rather than what would happen if it were false.
(From the Wikipedia acticle “Confirmation bias”, viewed 3/17/12:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias )

One can search through the Old Testament looking for predictions that fit with the life of Jesus, and then, upon finding such passages, work at interpreting the passage to be a prediction about the Messiah, whether or not that was the actual intention of the author of that passage. The lack of clarity of the Old Testament on this matter makes it difficult to determine which passages are talking about Christ and which are not.

If an omniscient deity wanted to communicate specific detailed predictions about Christ or the Messiah through the Old Testament prophets, then we would expect to find many (perhaps hundreds) of Old Testament passages that clearly make statements about Christ or the Messiah by using the word “Christ” or “the Messiah”. The fact that there is (at most) one single passage in the entire Old Testament that specifically refers to “the Messiah” indicates that it is NOT the case that an omniscient deity was trying to communicate numerous detailed predictions about Christ.