Biblical prophecies rely on postdiction and selective reading

The argument from fulfilled prophecy is one of the oldest apologetic claims for the Bible's divine inspiration: the Bible contains predictions made centuries before the events they describe, and these predictions came true with remarkable specificity, pointing to an omniscient author.¹ Christian apologists from the early church fathers to modern writers like Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel have presented fulfilled prophecy as decisive evidence for the supernatural origin of Scripture. McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict lists over 300 messianic prophecies allegedly fulfilled by Jesus alone.^{2, 3}

Mainstream biblical scholarship, however, has identified several fundamental problems with this argument: writing "prophecies" after the events they describe, the inherent vagueness of prophetic language, selective highlighting of apparent successes while ignoring failures, retroactive reinterpretation of passages that were not originally messianic, and the deliberate construction of Gospel narratives to match earlier texts. Under the historical-critical method — the standard scholarly approach at seminaries and universities worldwide — the argument from prophecy does not withstand scrutiny.^{4, 5}

Prophecy after the fact

The single most significant finding of modern scholarship on biblical prophecy is that many prophetic texts were written after the events they purport to predict. This practice, known as vaticinium ex eventu ("prophecy from the event"), was common throughout the ancient Near East.⁶ Oxford Reference defines the term as applying "to passages which have the form of a prediction but [are] in fact written in the knowledge of the event having occurred."⁷ The Babylonian "Marduk Prophecy" and "Dynastic Prophecy" demonstrate that this was a recognized literary genre, not unique to the Bible.⁶

The Book of Daniel is the most thoroughly studied case. It presents itself as the work of a sixth-century Jewish exile in the Babylonian court who receives visions of future empires. Apologists cite Daniel's apparently precise predictions of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece as among the strongest evidence for biblical prophecy.² The scholarly consensus, however, dates Daniel's apocalyptic visions (chapters 7-12) to approximately 167-164 BCE, during the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes.^{8, 9}

John J. Collins, who wrote the standard critical commentary on Daniel for the Hermeneia series, concluded that "there is no mistaking the allusions to the Maccabean era" and that the visions are "the product of anonymous authors in the Maccabean period."⁸ This dating is so broadly accepted that even John Goldingay, writing in the evangelical Word Biblical Commentary, acknowledged the visions reflect the Maccabean crisis.^{8, 10}

The evidence converges from multiple independent lines. Daniel 11 narrates Hellenistic history with specificity matching known events through Antiochus IV's desecration of the Temple in 167 BCE.⁸ But Daniel 11:40-45, describing the death of Antiochus, gets it wrong: the text predicts a final campaign between Egypt and Palestine, whereas Antiochus died during a campaign in Persia.^{8, 9} This pattern — precise accuracy up to a date, then inaccuracy beyond it — is the hallmark of vaticinium ex eventu and pins the text's composition to where accuracy ends. Further evidence includes Greek and Persian loanwords, historical errors about sixth-century Babylon, and Dead Sea Scroll fragments dating to the mid-second century BCE — too close to the proposed composition date for a long prior manuscript tradition.^{8, 9}

The Olivet Discourse (Mark 13, Matthew 24, Luke 21), in which Jesus predicts the Temple's destruction, is another widely discussed case. Most New Testament scholars regard these passages — particularly Luke 21:20-24, with its specific reference to "Jerusalem surrounded by armies" — as reflecting knowledge of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.^{5, 11}

Vague language and flexible interpretation

Many cited prophecies are written in language so vague and metaphorical that they can be applied to a wide range of events — a feature not unique to Scripture but characteristic of prophetic literature across cultures.⁴

Isaiah 53, the "Suffering Servant" passage, is among the prophecies most frequently cited as predicting the crucifixion of Jesus.² Yet the servant's identity has been debated for millennia. In the broader context of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), the servant is repeatedly and explicitly identified as Israel. Isaiah 49:3: "You are My servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified." Isaiah 41:8: "But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen."¹² The dominant Jewish interpretive tradition, codified by Rashi (1040-1105 CE) and maintained by mainstream Judaism, understands the servant as a collective representation of Israel suffering at the hands of the nations, not an individual messianic figure.^{12, 13} Some earlier Jewish interpreters did read the passage messianically, but the text never names the servant, and it can be applied to Jesus only if its original literary context is set aside for a later theological framework.^{5, 13}

This tendency to find specific meaning in ambiguous language relates to what psychologists call the Barnum effect (or Forer effect): people readily accept vague, general descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves or specific situations.¹⁴ Prophecies about suffering, exile, conquest, and restoration describe experiences so common in the ancient Near East that nearly any historical episode could be matched to them. Predictions about a future ruler from a specific lineage, born in a particular region, are broad enough to encompass countless candidates across centuries.⁴

The philosopher Antony Flew articulated the underlying logical problem in his influential 1950 paper "Theology and Falsification": a claim that is compatible with any possible state of affairs has no real empirical content.¹⁵ If a prophecy is so vague that no conceivable outcome could count against it—because any event can be interpreted as its fulfillment—then it has no predictive power. It is, in Flew's terms, unfalsifiable, and therefore cannot serve as evidence for anything.¹⁵

Failed and unfulfilled prophecies

Apologists who cite fulfilled prophecies invariably engage in selective presentation, highlighting apparent successes while passing over predictions that plainly failed. The Bible contains prophecies that, by any straightforward reading, were not fulfilled. If fulfilled prophecy proves divine authorship, unfulfilled prophecy should raise equally serious doubts.^{4, 5}

Ezekiel 26 predicts that Nebuchadnezzar would completely destroy Tyre, its stones and timber thrown into the sea, and it would become a bare rock "never to be rebuilt" (Ezek. 26:14). In fact, Nebuchadnezzar besieged mainland Tyre for thirteen years (585-572 BCE) but never captured the island city.¹⁶ The Bible itself acknowledges this failure. In Ezekiel 29:17-20, written sixteen years later, the prophet notes that Nebuchadnezzar's army "got no wages" from Tyre and offers Egypt as compensation. The Protestant Theological University observes that "the final prophecy assumes the earlier one in Ezekiel 26 did not come to pass; in the Hebrew text, words from the earlier prophecy are repeated: in Tyre the Babylonian army would 'plunder' and 'rob,' but since that did not happen, it would be compensated by 'plundering' and 'robbing' in Egypt instead."¹⁷ Tyre continues to exist today as a city of approximately 200,000 in modern Lebanon.¹⁶

Ezekiel 29:8–12 predicts that Egypt would be made "an utter waste and desolation" for forty years, during which "no foot of man shall pass through it and no foot of beast shall pass through it," and that the Egyptians would be scattered among the nations. No such forty-year period of total Egyptian desolation or diaspora is attested in any ancient source, Egyptian or otherwise.^{16, 18} Some commentators acknowledge the difficulty, suggesting the prediction should be understood as hyperbole rather than literal forecast, but this concession undermines the very premise of the prophecy argument, which depends on taking predictions as precise and literally fulfilled.¹⁸

Selected failed or unfulfilled biblical prophecies^{4, 16, 18}

In the New Testament, Jesus declares, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (Matt. 24:34), predicting cosmic upheaval and the coming of the Son of Man. Mark 9:1 records a similar saying: "There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." Albert Schweitzer argued in Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who genuinely expected the end within his generation — and this expectation went unfulfilled.¹⁹ Bart Ehrman, building on Schweitzer, has argued that Jesus was "an apocalyptic preacher whose main message was that the end of history was near, that God would shortly intervene to overthrow evil." That generation passed away without the predicted events occurring, which is why mainstream scholars classify Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet whose end-time expectations proved mistaken.¹¹

The case of Isaiah 7:14

Perhaps no verse better illustrates the problems with the prophecy argument than Isaiah 7:14, cited in Matthew 1:22-23 as predicting the virgin birth. The KJV reads: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." Apologists present this as a prediction made seven centuries before Jesus's birth.²

The difficulties are numerous. First, the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is almah, meaning "young woman," not "virgin." Hebrew has a specific word for virgin — betulah — used consistently when virginity is meant (e.g., Deut. 22:19, Judg. 11:37).^{20, 13} The word almah appears seven times in the Hebrew Bible, and none demands the meaning "virgin." In Proverbs 30:19, "the way of a man with an almah" appears in a context where virginity is clearly not implied.²⁰ The "virgin" translation entered Christian tradition through the Septuagint, the third-century BCE Greek translation that rendered almah as parthenos. While parthenos can mean "virgin," modern Hebrew scholars widely agree the original does not require or primarily suggest that meaning.^{20, 21}

More fundamentally, the context of Isaiah 7 makes clear that the prophecy concerns events in Isaiah's own time. The passage occurs during the Syro-Ephraimite War (c. 735 BCE), when King Ahaz of Judah faced a military alliance between Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel. Isaiah offers reassurance: before the child Immanuel is old enough to "know how to refuse the evil and choose the good" — a few years — the two threatening kings will be removed (Isa. 7:16).^{20, 21} The sign has immediate relevance to Ahaz's crisis. A prophecy about an event seven centuries away would have been meaningless to a king facing invasion now.^{5, 21}

Joseph Blenkinsopp, in his Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on Isaiah 1–39, situates the Immanuel prophecy firmly within the political crisis of 735 BCE, noting that the significance of the sign lies not in a miraculous conception but in the timeline: the threat will be gone before the child matures.²¹ Raymond Brown, the eminent Catholic New Testament scholar, addressed this problem directly in his authoritative The Birth of the Messiah. Brown concluded that Matthew's infancy narrative drew upon Old Testament passages not because they were predictions awaiting fulfillment but because the evangelist, writing in the light of a post-resurrectional theology, searched the Scriptures for passages that could be theologically connected to the story of Jesus.²² The movement was from event to text, not from text to event.

Self-fulfilling prophecy in the Gospels

The Gospel authors, particularly Matthew, explicitly shaped their narratives to match Old Testament passages. Matthew contains roughly ten "formula citations" introduced with phrases like "this was to fulfill what had been spoken by the prophet" (Matt. 1:22, 2:15, 2:17, 2:23, 4:14, 8:17, 12:17, 13:35, 21:4, 27:9).^{22, 23} These are not incidental allusions but explicit statements that the evangelist constructed his narrative to match earlier texts. When an author tells the reader an event happened "to fulfill" a prophecy, the correspondence cannot serve as evidence of independent supernatural prediction.^{4, 22}

The triumphal entry into Jerusalem provides a vivid illustration of this process. The prophecy in Zechariah 9:9 describes a king arriving "humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." In the original Hebrew, this is an example of synonymous parallelism, a standard feature of Hebrew poetry in which the second line restates the first using different words. The "donkey" and the "colt, the foal of a donkey" refer to the same single animal.²⁴ Mark (11:1–7), Luke (19:28–35), and John (12:14–15) all describe Jesus riding a single animal, understanding the parallelism correctly. Matthew, however, appears to have read the Hebrew parallelism as describing two separate animals: he has the disciples bring both a donkey and a colt, and places Jesus on both of them (Matt. 21:7: "they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them").^{24, 5} Most scholars regard this awkward scene—a person sitting on two animals simultaneously—as the result of Matthew adjusting the narrative to produce a more literal match with his reading of Zechariah, sacrificing narrative plausibility for the sake of prophetic correspondence.^{23, 24}

Matthew's birth narrative provides further examples. The story of the flight to Egypt (Matt. 2:15) exists in order to cite Hosea 11:1, "Out of Egypt I called my son"—a passage that in its original context unambiguously refers to the Exodus of the nation of Israel, not to a future messiah. The verse begins, "When Israel was a child, I loved him," making the national reference explicit.^{22, 5} Matthew 2:23 claims that the family's settlement in Nazareth fulfills a prophecy that the messiah "would be called a Nazorean," yet no such prophecy exists anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. Scholars have proposed various explanations for this phantom citation, including a wordplay on the Hebrew netzer ("branch") in Isaiah 11:1, but none can identify an actual prophetic text that Matthew is quoting.²²

Matthew's formula citations and their Old Testament sources^{22, 23}

The Bethlehem birth tradition illustrates the dynamic especially well. Micah 5:2 states that a ruler will come forth "from you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah," understood as referring to the ancestral home of the Davidic dynasty.²⁵ Both Matthew and Luke place Jesus's birth in Bethlehem, but they do so through entirely different and mutually incompatible narratives. In Matthew, Mary and Joseph appear to live in Bethlehem already and relocate to Nazareth only after the flight to Egypt. In Luke, they live in Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem for a census. Scholars have noted that the census of Quirinius took place in 6 CE, at least ten years after the death of Herod the Great, under whom Matthew places the birth; moreover, Roman censuses registered people where they lived and worked, not where their ancestors had lived a thousand years earlier.^{22, 23} Brown concluded that the most likely explanation is that Jesus was from Nazareth and that the Bethlehem birth traditions were developed independently by both evangelists to connect Jesus to the Davidic prophecy in Micah.²²

Inflated counting and the typology distinction

The claim that Jesus fulfilled "over 300" prophecies, popularized by McDowell, relies on counting methods that inflate the total. Lists count the same event multiple times when it connects to more than one text: the crucifixion may be counted for Psalm 22, again for Isaiah 53, and again for Zechariah 12:10.² Lists include generic characteristics (being male, being Jewish, having a body) that would apply to millions of people. Many listed "prophecies" are simply New Testament quotations of the Old Testament, regardless of whether the original passage was messianic. Matthew 2:23 claims Jesus's settlement in Nazareth fulfills a prophecy he would "be called a Nazorean" — but no such prophecy exists in the Old Testament.^{22, 33}

A fundamental distinction that apologetic lists routinely obscure is the difference between prophecy and typology. A prophecy, in the strict sense, is a prediction of a future event. Typology, by contrast, is a method of interpretation that finds symbolic correspondences between earlier and later events without claiming the earlier was a prediction of the later.³⁴ When the New Testament presents Jesus as the Passover lamb (1 Cor. 5:7) or as a high priest like Melchizedek (Heb. 7), these are typological interpretations that find theological significance in patterns, not claims that the original texts were predictions. Similarly, when Matthew draws parallels between Jesus and Moses (both escaped a massacre of infants, both came out of Egypt, both gave a new law from a mountain), he is employing typology: presenting Jesus as a "new Moses" figure, not recording fulfilled predictions.^{22, 34} Even evangelical scholars have acknowledged this complexity. Walter Kaiser, a conservative Old Testament scholar, has argued that only a subset of the commonly cited "prophecies" should be understood as genuinely predictive, while others involve typology or sensus plenior (a "fuller sense" not intended by the original author).³⁵

Retrofitting and reinterpretation

Even when prophecies were not deliberately crafted into narratives by the Gospel authors, apologists routinely engage in retroactive reinterpretation, reading later events back into texts that were originally about something else entirely. This approach treats the Hebrew Bible not as a collection of texts with their own historical contexts and intended meanings but as a coded message whose true significance was hidden until the coming of Jesus.^{5, 22}

The practice of searching the Hebrew Bible for passages that could be applied to a new situation was, in fact, a standard feature of ancient Jewish interpretation, known as pesher. The Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran used exactly the same technique, reading the prophets as coded predictions of their own community's experiences. The Qumran Commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab), for instance, reinterprets the seventh-century prophet Habakkuk's words as referring to the Teacher of Righteousness and the sectarian struggles of the second and first centuries BCE.⁹ This method does not demonstrate that the original prophecies were about the later events; it demonstrates that ancient interpreters were skilled at finding connections between texts and contemporary circumstances, a hermeneutical practice that bears no relationship to supernatural prediction.^{9, 4}

Daniel 9:24–27, the "Seventy Weeks" prophecy, provides a particularly instructive example of retrofitting. Apologists have constructed elaborate chronological calculations to show that the prophecy predicts the exact year of Jesus's crucifixion.² However, the text itself refers to "seventy weeks of years" (490 years) for the completion of various eschatological goals, and scholars note that the "anointed one" who is "cut off" in Daniel 9:26 fits the assassination of the high priest Onias III in 171 BCE far more naturally than the crucifixion of Jesus.⁸ The chronological calculations required to produce a match with Jesus's death involve assumptions about starting dates, calendar systems, and the counting of prophetic versus solar years that are not supported by the text itself and that vary wildly among different apologetic reconstructions.^{8, 4}

Probability and cherry-picking

Apologists sometimes attempt to quantify the argument from prophecy by calculating the probability of one person fulfilling multiple predictions by chance. Peter Stoner's Science Speaks (1958) famously claimed that the probability of one person fulfilling just eight messianic prophecies was 1 in 10¹⁷, and for 48 prophecies the odds were 1 in 10¹⁵⁷. These staggering numbers continue to circulate widely in popular apologetics.²⁶ However, such calculations commit several fundamental statistical errors.

First, they assume that each prophecy is an independent, precisely defined prediction with a calculable probability of chance fulfillment. As the preceding sections demonstrate, many of these "prophecies" were not predictions at all: they were passages about other subjects that were retroactively applied to Jesus, or narratives deliberately constructed to match earlier texts. Including a non-prediction in a probability calculation renders the entire exercise meaningless.⁴ A 2024 paper presented at the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences conference acknowledged this problem, noting that "the probabilities selected do not satisfy" the assumption of statistical independence and that "adjustments using conditional probability are needed to account for interdependencies among events."²⁷

Second, the calculations suffer from what statisticians call the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: drawing targets around bullet holes after the fact. The Bible contains thousands of statements across dozens of books written over centuries. Given this enormous pool of material, finding some statements that can be interpreted as matching later events is not only unsurprising—it is statistically inevitable. The impressive-seeming probability calculations consider only the "hits" while ignoring the vast number of passages that do not match, the failed prophecies, and the ambiguity that allows multiple interpretations.¹⁴

Third, the probability calculations assume that the events in question are independently established historical facts. But as demonstrated above, several of the "fulfilled" events (the Bethlehem birth, the flight to Egypt, the entry on two donkeys) may themselves be literary constructions designed to match the prophecies. Calculating the probability of a narrative matching a text when the narrative was written to match that text is circular reasoning. One does not calculate the odds of a screenwriter's characters doing what the screenwriter wrote them to do.^{22, 4}

Why commonly cited prophecy "fulfillments" are problematic^{4, 5, 22}

Prophecy in comparative context

The argument from fulfilled prophecy implicitly assumes that the Bible is unique in containing successful predictions. In fact, the ancient world was saturated with prophetic traditions, and the same interpretive methods used to validate biblical prophecies can be applied, with equal plausibility, to prophecies from entirely different religious traditions.⁶

The Sibylline Oracles, a collection of prophetic texts composed by Jewish and Christian authors from the second century BCE through the sixth century CE, contain "predictions" of historical events written in the same manner as the Book of Daniel: after the fact, in the guise of ancient foreknowledge. These texts "weave together language and characters from texts that become biblical, Greek mythology, Hesiod, Homer, and other Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts to produce new prophecies."⁶ The Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece issued prophecies whose deliberate ambiguity was legendary. Herodotus records that King Croesus of Lydia, contemplating war with Persia, was told that if he attacked, "a great empire would be destroyed." When Croesus attacked and lost, the oracle's defenders explained that the "great empire" in question was his own—a form of retroactive reinterpretation identical in structure to the methods used to validate biblical prophecy.²⁸

The prophecies of Nostradamus (1503–1566) employ the same dynamics. His quatrains are written in deliberately obscure, archaic language, and their "fulfillment" is always identified retrospectively, never prospectively. Scholars have noted that "the vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote his quatrains selectively after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claim them as fulfilled prophecies," and that "there is no evidence in the academic literature to suggest that any of his quatrains have ever been interpreted as predicting a specific event before it occurred."²⁹

If the interpretive methods used to validate biblical prophecy were applied consistently to the Sibylline Oracles, the Delphic predictions, Nostradamus, or the prophecies of the Hindu Puranas and Baha'i writings, they would produce equally impressive-seeming results. The fact that Christian apologists do not accept these non-biblical prophecies as evidence of divine inspiration—despite using identical methods of validation—reveals a double standard at the heart of the argument. The method works only when the desired conclusion is assumed in advance.^{4, 6}

What mainstream scholarship says

The historical-critical method, the standard approach to biblical scholarship at major research universities and seminaries worldwide, treats prophetic texts as products of their own historical contexts rather than as supernatural predictions of distant future events.^{9, 30} This does not mean scholars dismiss the prophets as unimportant or fraudulent. Rather, they understand Israelite prophecy as a distinctive religious and literary phenomenon in which figures such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel addressed the political, social, and theological crises of their own times.³⁰

Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his landmark study The Prophets, argued that the popular conception of a prophet as "one who accurately predicts the future" fundamentally misunderstands the prophetic vocation. For Heschel, the prophets were not fortune tellers but moral voices: their primary concern was social justice, ethical behavior, and the covenant relationship between God and Israel in the present, not a calendar of future events.³¹ The Hebrew word navi, typically translated as "prophet," means "one who is called" or "spokesperson"—someone who speaks on behalf of God to the people, not someone who sees into the future.^{30, 31}

Joseph Blenkinsopp, in A History of Prophecy in Israel, describes the prophets as social critics who spoke to the political and religious crises of their own time. The oracles against foreign nations in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were not predictions about the distant future but theological commentary on contemporary geopolitics, expressing the conviction that Israel's God was sovereign over all nations.³⁰ When Jeremiah predicted the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, he was not exercising supernatural foresight but analyzing the political situation with acute realism: a small kingdom caught between great empires could not survive its rebellion against the dominant power.³⁰

The prophetic books themselves were not sealed documents preserved unchanged from the moment of utterance; they were living traditions, edited, expanded, and reinterpreted by successive generations. The Book of Isaiah, for example, is widely understood to contain material from at least three different periods: chapters 1–39 from an eighth-century prophet, chapters 40–55 ("Second Isaiah" or "Deutero-Isaiah") from the sixth-century Babylonian exile, and chapters 56–66 ("Third Isaiah") from the post-exilic period.^{21, 32} These later additions were designed to keep the prophetic message relevant to new audiences facing new challenges, not to predict events in the distant future.³²

The argument from fulfilled prophecy rests on a misunderstanding of what biblical prophecy is, how it was produced, and what it aimed to do. When the prophetic literature is read in its original historical and literary context, the argument dissolves. What remains is a rich literary tradition in which later communities found meaning in earlier texts — a thoroughly human process of interpretation that requires no supernatural explanation.^{4, 5, 9}