Sorry to cut in, but to help clarify my point, calling it prophecy begs the question. Your entire argument about biblical evidence begs the question. It's not logical, it is not rational to think such an argument needs to be accepted as a statement of truth by anyone.
If you want to promote the irrational, which I'm not necessarily against, that is were religion and faith comes in.
Believe what you want to believe but I'd recommend doing yourself a favor and stop pretending that belief has a rational basis. And I really don't mean that is an offensive way. A lot of things people accept as true have no rational basis.
Ok, internally a personal rationalizes their beliefs. But that is not the same as providing a rational argument that someone else should be compelled to accept as true. In failing to do so, there is no reason to expect someone else to respect that belief.
When I post a tiny fraction of what there is to condemn your claims, like what is included below do people on your side black out or something? Many of those best trained and the most qualified to evaluate the justifications in countless fields for faith have refuted your position by exhaustive scholarship. If you will read the below then restate your claims I will respond to the rest of this.
The noted scholar, Professor Edwin Gordon Selwyn, says: "The fact that Christ rose from the dead on the third day in full continuity of body and soul - that fact seems as secure as historical evidence can make it."
From a letter written by Sir Edward Clarke, K. C. to the Rev. E. L. Macassey:
"As a lawyer I have made a prolonged study of the evidences for the events of the first Easter Day. To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling. Inference follows on evidence, and a truthful witness is always artless and disdains effect. The Gospel evidence for the resurrection is of this class, and as a lawyer I accept it unreservedly as the testimony of truthful men to facts they were able to substantiate."
Professor Thomas Arnold, cited by Wilbur Smith, was for 14 years the famous headmaster of Rugby, author of a famous three-volume History of Rome, appointed to the char of Modern History at Oxford, and certainly a man well acquainted with the value of evidence in determining historical facts. This great scholar said:
"The evidence for our LORD's life and death and resurrection may be, and often has been, shown to be satisfactory; it is good according to the common rules for distinguishing good evidence from bad. Thousands and tens of thousands of persons have gone through it piece by piece, as carefully as every judge summing up on a most important cause. I have myself done it many times over, not to persuade others but to satisfy myself. I have been used for many years to study the histories of other times, and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which GOD hath given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead."
Wilbur Smith writes of a great legal authority of the last century. He refers to John Singleton Copley, better known as Lord Lyndhurst (1772-1863), recognized as one of the greatest legal minds in British history, the Solicitor-General of the British government in 1819, attorney-general of Great Britain in 1824, three times High Chancellor of England, and elected in 1846, High Steward of the University of Cambridge, thus holding in one lifetime the highest offices which a judge in Great Britain could ever have conferred upon him. When Chancellor Lyndhurst died, a document was found in his desk, among his private papers, giving an extended account of his own Christian faith, and in this precious, previously-unknown record, he wrote: "I know pretty well what evidence is; and I tell you, such evidence as that for the REsurrection has never broken down yet."
"This statement of Lord Lyndhurst was sent to Mr. E. H. Blakeney, of Winchester College, by the late bishop H. C. G. Moule. References to the correspondence appeared in a British periodical, Dawn, some few years ago. I have since had it confirmed in a letter from Mr. Blakeney. In Marty Amoy's The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Copley and Reminiscences of His Son, Lord Lyndhurst, High Chancellor of Great Britain occurs the interesting note - 'A record of Lyndhurst's belief in the truth of religion, and his view of the scheme of redemption, was found in his own handwriting after his death, in the drawer of his writing table.' (Lord Lyndhurst died October 11, 1863, at the age of 91.)"
Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853) was the famous Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University, and succeeded Justice Joseph Story as the Dane Professor of Law in the same university, upon Story's death in 1846.
H. W. H Knott says of this great authority in jurisprudence: "To the efforts of Story and Greenleaf is to be ascribed the rise of the Harvard Law School to its eminent position among the legal schools of the United States."
Greenleaf produced a famous work entitled A Treatise on the Law of Evidence which "is still considered the greatest single authority on evidence in the entire literature of legal procedure."
In 1846, while still Professor of Law at Harvard, Greenleaf wrote a volume entitled An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence Administered in the Courts of Justice. In his classic work the author examines the value of the testimony of the apostles to the resurrection of Christ. The following are this brilliant jurist's critical observations:
The great truths which the apostles declared, were, that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in Him, could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling errors that can be represented to the mind of man. Their master had recently perished as a malefactor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. His religion sought to overthrow the religions of the whole world. The laws of every country were against the teachings of His disciples. The interests and passions of all the rulers and great men in the world were against them. The fashion of the world was against them. Propagating this new faith, even in the most inoffensive and peaceful manner, they could expect nothing but contempt, opposition, revilings, bitter persecutions, stripes, imprisonments, torments, and cruel deaths. Yet this faith they zealously did propagate; and all these miseries they endured undismayed, nay, rejoicing. As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigor and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience, and unflinching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact. If it were morally possible for them to have been deceived in this matter, every human motive operated to lead them to discover and avow their error. To have persisted in so gross a falsehood, after it was known to them, was not only to encounter, for life, all the evils which man could inflict, from without, but to endure also the pangs of inward and conscious guilt; with no hope of future peace, no testimony of a good conscience, no expectation of honor or esteem among men, no hope of happiness in this life, or in the world to come.
"Such conduct in the apostles would moreover have been utterly irreconcilable with the fact that they possessed the ordinary constitution of our common nature. Yet their lives do show them to have been men like all others of our race; swayed by the same motives, animated by the same hopes, affected by the same joys, subdued by the same sorrows, agitated by the same fears, and subject to the same passions, temptations, and infirmities, as ourselves. And their writings show them to have been men of vigorous understandings. If then their testimony was not true, there was no possible motive for its fabrication."
Evidence That Demands a Verdict - Ch. 10 p. 2
How do you even read this tiny fraction of the justification for faith by those best able to explain that and claim what you did above. Those people were paid tons of money, educated as best as humans can accomplish, and spent life times specializing in what you dismiss out of hand. I just do not get it. It is as if Isaac Newton personally justified calculus and you stood and said BS.
