by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: July 31, 2010

A popular answer to the question “How did Jesus come to be known as the Messiah” is what I call the “Argument from Overwhelming Probability” which holds that, since Jesus of Nazareth “fulfilled” x number of “Bible prophecies,” Jesus of Nazareth must have been the Messiah. In this essay I will demonstrate why such claims are so absurd as to border on laughable.

According to any number of Christian apologetic web sites such as RaptureReady.com  and ChristianAnswers.net, among many others, Jesus of Nazareth is credited with being the fulfillment of no less than 48 individual “Bible prophecies.” According to an essay published on the RaptureReady site by Mr. John Funk (and essentially repeated on ChristianAnswers.net and every other “Christian web site”), “... the probability of Jesus of Nazareth being the fulfillment of only 8 of those prophecies is 1 in 10^17 (read "10 to the 17th power"), or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.”

As his authority, Mr. Funk cites a little-known work by the late Peter W. Stoner, PhD entitled Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy and the Bible, (3rd ed. Chicago: Moody, 1969). In Chapter 3 of this book, “The Christ of Prophecy,” Dr. Stoner assures his readers that all “Bible prophecies” supposedly regarding Jesus of Nazareth are true and then uses an arbitrarily-derived “set of numbers” to “prove” his argument.

In the interest of editorial brevity, Dr. Stoner's tortured reasoning and mathematics are not reproduced here. In order to fully appreciate the absurdity of Dr. Stoner's contentions, the reader is encouraged to visit the above-given link to the “Christ of Prophecy”  section of that book.

Although Dr. Stoner's numbers sound impressive, they cannot be supported if they are subjected to even the most cursory of examinations. In fact, Dr. Stoner's argument immediately becomes suspect when it is realized that he ignored the real question to be addressed which is “Did Jesus of Nazareth 'fulfill' a given 'Bible prophecy?'” and instead focuses on the estimated probability that any given man selected from a “pool” of all men alive at a given moment would fulfill a given “prophecy.” In actuality, the probability that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled any one of the above-mentioned eight prophecies reduces to either a “yes” or

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