Summations Only

Absolutely. Jesus’ birth plays a minor role in two of the Gospels and isn’t in the epistles at all. The resurrection is the sole reason for the rise of the early church. Let’s look at that in context. The verses right ahead of that (Romans 10: 1-8) say this.

quote:

---

1 Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. 2 For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. 3Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. 4 Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. 5 Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law: "The man who does these things will live by them." 6 But the righteousness that is by faith says: "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?' " (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 "or 'Who will descend into the deep?' " (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? "The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming:

---

Paul is clear here, as in many other places in his epistles that we aren’t to judge or worry about who wind up where, but that our faith is about the word of God living in our hearts. The word of God is not the Bible. The Bible itself says that the word of God is in Jesus. Paul also writes this in Romans 2.

quote:

---

13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15 since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

---

Paul is saying that God’s word can live in the hearts of people who naturally follow the law. Even Jesus said that he came for sinners. This is from Matthew 9.

quote:

---

9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth."Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. 11When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?" 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

---

Your faith essentially makes it all about what it is that you believe or more accurately, what you give intellectual assent to. I suggest that is why you feel that it is so important to make the case for the fulfillment of all the prophesies. Just read through what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. It isn’t about belief. It is about the heart. This is Matthew 7.

quote:

---

21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' 23 Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'

---

Again it is about the heart. The message of salvation is actually a side issue, and again, both Jesus, (again in Matthew 7,) and Paul tell us that we aren’t to judge who winds up where. That doesn’t really make sense. In the first place He was to be from the line of David through the father and as you have just said Joseph wasn’t His biological father. More importantly though, Jesus preached a specific message which was vindicated by God the Father through the resurrection. It is the resurrection that justified His messianic claim. Yes, I believe in the immaculate conception but it isn’t important to my Christian faith. It is my belief in the resurrection as an historical event that is the basis of Christianity. Without the resurrection Christianity is very much like other world religions. However, you have faith in an inerrant Bible. What happens to your faith in Christ if you could no longer believe in an inerrant Bible? Sure. It is what it is. That doesn’t mean it’s inerrant. A discussion on inerrancy is essential if we are looking at prophesy and its fulfillment. We have to understand the nature of the text. But Jesus was the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets. All through His ministry He clarified and corrected the ancient Scriptures. I agree. The point was that if we understand a perfect Bible the picture we get is of an imperfect God. That pretty much makes my point. Your whole faith stands on an in inerrant Bible. My faith stands on Jesus being the incarnation of God and that the message He espoused is to be the foundation of my life, regardless of whether the Bible is inerrant or not. This is the whole point. With an inerrant Bible you are left in the position of trying to justify a god who would call His people to go out and stone someone to death for picking up some fire wood on the Sabbath. If you want to worship a god like that then so be it. I worship the God that I see in His incarnation who completely repudiates that message.The story is very clear. It doesn’t talk about another course of action. They are to take the poor guy out of town and stone him to death. That’s my point. In one part of the OT we have God saying that prostitutes should be stoned to death and in another part he shows mercy. Does this all sound like the same perfect god? Fine, however it doesn’t take an inerrant Bible to do that. In fact, it doesn’t require a Bible at all. Two points though. As I said earlier both Jesus and Paul tells us not to judge who is to be saved and secondly, I don’t think that either you or I are going to be matching Him anytime soon. Why do you call the Bible his word with that understanding. Yes God speaks to us through the Bible but that does not mean that it has in essence been dictated by God. Jesus was the Word of God. Word is used to denote God’s essence in the world. I’m quite happy to use the term for the Bible as the word of God but not the Word of God.The early Christians only had the Hebrew scriptures and most of the Gentile followers wouldn’t have even had that. It has only been in the last few centuries that the BIble was in any way accessible to the vast majority of Christians. Please explain to me why it is that now, it is important that the Bible be inerrant. Amen to that, but the question is faith in what. I suggest that that the faith is in the message of love that we hear from Jesus, and that isn’t restricted to those who hold particular theological views. Fine, but my thought is that you are teaching people the wrong way to believe in the word of God. Jesus is the fulfillment of the entire OT, including all of the laws and the prophets. The original Abrahamic covenant was that the message was for the world. God spoke through the imaginations, minds and consciousnesses of the early Jews. In the written accounts it is obvious that some of what they wrote could well have been inspired by a loving god but also a great deal of what was written couldn’t have been. All of it is culturally or personally conditioned. In Jesus we can understand how that was fulfilled in a way that no one understood ahead of the event.I guess my main point is that it isn’t crucial whether or not the virgin birth was supernaturally prophesied or not. (It does seem strange that the virgin birth or more accurately the virgin conception is only in the 2 gospels and not mentioned by Paul. Interestingly enough it is in the Qur’an. It does seem a bit of a stretch to tie Jesus to the Davidic line through Joseph and then tell us that Joseph isn’t the actual father.)I go further and say that the virgin birth isn’t important to the Christian faith. However, Jesus certainly did seem to have a divine understanding of the scriptures. He was able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the scriptures in a way that was vindicated by God through His resurrection. The ancient Jews did have a fore-shadowing of the incarnation in their temple. The Temple was where God dwelt but Jesus saw what He was doing as a temple movement in that He would forgive sin essentially saying that they no longer had to go to the temple to be forgiven. In light of the whole story of Jesus and my belief in the incarnation I accept the virgin conception. However, even if it could be shown that it was actually a legend placed into the gospels in order to strengthen the messianic claim, it wouldn’t undermine my Christian faith. Would it yours?The signature I have used is from Micah 6:8. It essentially tells us that what God wants of us is that we be humbly kind and just. That is the straightforward Bible message as it is taught by Jesus. Of course in addition to that there is the story that stretches through creation to the final re-creation. Those are the two distinct elements of the books that make up the Bible. It isn't believing the story that makes us righteous. It is about having a heart that rejoices in humble kindness and justice and that isn't the private domain of any particular belief.Edited by GDR, : typo and small wording change

If you go back to the post you replied to you can see that I didn't claim any of that. I don't make any claim that Jesus fulfilled all prophesies. Most of the prophesies were meant to apply to the Israeli nation and not the messiah anyway.Here is one possible way of looking at it. Let us assume that Jesus is nothing more than a man, the same as any other man. (Personally I believe more that that.)He grows up in an environment where he is immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures. In this study He starts to see Himself in the narratives. Now let's face it, there are many conflicting expectations for a messiah and the most common one was that a messiah would lead the Jews in the defeat of their enemies and rebuild the Temple. That was understood by all of the other aspiring messiahs such as Judas Maccabeus, Simon bar Kokhba and all of the others in between.Jesus however takes a different message from the Scriptures. He says that it is the Romans who are the enemy but that it's evil itself, and that the weapon that defeats evil is not the sword but love. Jesus goes on to say that He is the replacement and that the temple exists in the heart of his followers.So Jesus sees himself as the messiah of the Scriptures but in ways that hadn't been understood previously. He understood the prophesies in a general sense and consciously went around fulfilling them to a degree. He intentionally rode a donkey into Jerusalem so that first century Jews would understand what was going on, and the same for His quote from Psalm 22 on the cross.The psalm 22 quote was obviously meant to be for the Israeli nation but Jesus saw himself as standing in for the nation and took it on himself.The question is then whether or not Jesus was wrong in His understanding or even delusional? He wouldn't be the first or last to have a messianic complex.It all comes back to what happened on the first Easter day. Was Jesus resurrected? If He was then God the Father vindicated and confirmed Jesus' message. If not then Jesus was just another failed messiah.In order to understand what Jesus was doing we need the OT Scriptures but in order to understand God's message for us in the OT we need the NT. All of that though is dependent on whether or not Jesus Christ was bodily resurrected.

I would argue that using OT prophesies as evidence of the messiahship of Jesus really isn't about that at all.Trying to use the OT as evidence for the resurrection is simply a misguided effort to prove an inerrant Bible. Jesus certainly understood His messianic mission from the Hebrew Scriptures and saw Himself as the fulfilment of them. He explained what He was doing to His Jewish audience by using the scriptures but that is another issue.There are only two issues in the Bible that are evidence of Jesus' messaihship and they are both in the NT. The first is Jesus' claim to messiahship and the second is the vindication of that claim by the resurrection of Jesus by the Father. If Jesus was resurrected He was the messiah. If Jesus was not resurrected He wasn't regardless of any prophesies.