In this segments of the series in response to R.G. Price’s Case Against Historical Christ, we move on from the Gospel of Mark to the Gospels in general.
Virtually every detail of the life of Jesus comes from “Old Testament” scriptures
I will admit that I am more sympathetic to this argument than many put forward by Jesus Mythicists. At least here we know that the Old Testament predates the story of Jesus and that these texts were known to the writers of the Gospels. That is more than many Mythicist claims.
What Price claims in this section is that the life of Jesus in the Gospels is not history but is a compilation of Old Testament passages.
Some Christians might respond by saying, “Of course it looks this way, the Old Testament is full of prophecies about Jesus!”
Yes and no.
Price points out that many of the Old Testament passages don’t look like actual prophecies. By that, I mean many of them are not in the form: In the future, X will do Y. In fact many of the “fulfillments” seem to be in a completely different context than what we find in the original context.
This is one of the reasons that I use caution when using the fulfillment of prophecy as an apologetic argument. When we look at the original context, it seems to look like something completely different in how it applies to Jesus.
While this may make some Christians uncomfortable, this actually works at dismantling Price’s argument. Looking back at the original Old Testament passages, there is no reason to expect anyone would piece them together to create a new person.
For example, Price points at Isaiah 7:14, a passage that many Christians see as a clear prophecy of Jesus’ virgin birth. Price is correct that while the Greek LXX uses the word for ‘virgin,’ the Hebrew uses the word for ‘young woman.’ In fact the prophecy that is given to the king is not about a messiah that would be born centuries in the future but a child who is born (naturally and not supernaturally) in the time of Isaiah. I will go into more detail on this passage in the next installment.
Price also looks at Hosea 11:1 that talks about Israel being called out of Egypt, which Matthew uses as a word about Jesus and his family in temporary exile in Egypt. Price provides many other parallels from the Old Testament that are found in the Gospels.
We can agree with Price that the Gospel writers plagiarized the Old Testament to create a messiah. Or we can agree with those who see the Old Testament as being straight prophecy of Jesus, no matter what the change in context might look like.
But there is another option.
What if there was a historical Jesus? And what if that Jesus really did claim that the Law and Prophets spoke of him (Luke 24:44)?
Instead of the Gospel writers searching through the Old Testament for material to create a messiah, they may have looked to the Old Testament to explain what they had already known about.
For example, the use of Isaiah 7:14. We will see next week that the passage doesn’t demand a virgin birth. But there seems to have been a tradition that Jesus was born of a virgin (remember that Luke doesn’t mention Isaiah 7:14) and that they saw the LXX of Isaiah 7:14 as giving prophetic language to it.
The same is true for Hosea 11:1. There seems to have been a tradition that Jesus’ family had fled to Egypt and Hosea gave the prophetic language to describe it.
How likely is this?
It is far more likely than a number of Gospel writers (who may have been using other sources as well), grabbing random Old Testament passages and fitting them together into a jig saw puzzle messiah.
Look at those Old Testament passages for your self and ask how likely it is that someone started with that and made up Jesus compared to starting with Jesus and later applying the Old Testament passages to what he actually did.
