I'm just saying that there's nothing stopping God from dropping a sentence in there that would later be changed into Greek, and then rather amazingly applied to a rather amazing incident (assuming that incident happened).
yes, but that would not be fulfilling the prophecy. even if it is some amazing mental gymnastics. it's what we were talking about in the last thread: "double fulfillment."
besides, the christian god traditionally works in three's. the jewish god either works in direct pairs, 7's, or 13's.
Again, my one point being that taking one sentence out of context as a prophecy is not intrinsically bad, as has been suggested in this thread
well, yes. it is. because then it's not prophecy. suppose i took this statement out of it's context, and used it to predict some unkown member taking a sentance out of context. how many times has that been fulfilled, would you say? does it mean you were inspired by god to write that?
That's great. I know you don't agree, and I want you to tell me why. I understand that we are arguing (in a nice way, I hope), and I want that to happen. However, the very reason I made the above statement is that I felt like my side of the argument was being assumed away, not argued away.
because it's hard to argue common sense. if god delivers a message to someone, regarding something specific, and that happens, ok. but if someone later writes that something else fulfilled a tiny part of that unrelated to everything else, then it's not ok.
maybe it's foreshadowing. but it's not prophecy.
It DOES say virgin in the Septuagint. You're right. Isaiah did not say virgin, but the Jews of Alexandria who translated Isaiah into Greek DID say virgin
we spent about a month arguing over this in the other thread. i don't want to bring it up again. but we rather conclusively showed that parthenos does not mean virgin. so the septuagint does not say virgin, even if the word means virgin today.
And the kid born of the virgin would be called "God with us," which is what Emmanuel means.
close. "god IS with us." the child in ahaz's time was the sign that the prophesy would come true. the prophesy was that god was on their side of the war, and would win it for them. so naming the child, a time keeping device really, "god is on our side" makes sense.
it doesn't mean "god on earth as a man."
If you believed God's Son was born of a virgin, and you read that in the Scriptures that belong to the physical race of God's Son, then you would be amazed and you would point that out. You would! I'm telling you. And it would encourage you, and it would make you excited, and you would be more affirmed in your faith than ever.
yes, and this is probably why the confusion happened. but a little research, like reading the rest of the chapter, would have cleared that matter up.
But when you say, "It could not have been a prophecy. It makes no sense, and serves no purpose," then I say you've gone too far, and I'm arguing that you've gone too far, but I don't think you've heard me yet.
i argued a few times last thread about how things were not prophecies. this is not to be insulting to the text -- it's to keep respect for it.
psalms are not prophecies. plain and simple. they are psalms. if we found them in the book of the prophets (nevi'im) maybe you could make a case. but psalms are poetry, and rarely about what god will or will not do. usually it's about what god HAS done, who god is, and various praises amd laments.
And my what if is this. If the event is true, and the people who experienced that event find a remarkable reference to the event, out of context, in ancient writings, then then it is reasonable to think that God might have put it there for the encouragement of those who experienced the remarkable event.
but we don't have those events. we have accounts from later authors, and consistently unreliable ones at that. we have matthew saying something happened to fulfill a prophecy that is entirely unrelated. purpledawn suggests he might have been trying to be funny. and that would be one way to do it.
Are they? I don't think they are. I think the writers of the Gospels are describing events first and foremost.
ever read matthew?
They are trying to convert you by the events they describe, and they are adding to the events the prophecies they have found. But the events are first and foremost as proof for them, not the prophecies.
i agree in some cases. but other are clearly manipulating events to fulfill prophecy. like matthew.
As an aside, I think this has no merit, because it makes no sense historically. If it was a satire, then NO ONE got it,
how do you know? maybe a bunch of the jews it was addressed to got a real kick out of it.
because no enemies of Christianity picked it up to use it against them
really? pay attention to this board much? i know i've made the two-donkeys-from-zechariah point a number of times.
and Christians made it one of their cornerstone books.
*shrug* i could make some kind of derrogatory statement here, but i won't. it'd be uh, unchristian.
It would make it the most unsuccessful satire in history.
i'm sure i could find ones equally as unsuccessful. like i think swift's modest proposal (the one about eating babies) didn't go over too well.
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