Summations Only

Dawn Bertot writes: The liberal or humanist argues (assumes) thusly. The writer of the Old Testament must have been the actual writer of that prophecy. The writer must have been correct concerning the things of which he was speaking. The writer, even thought he claims to have been inspired by God and to speak by thus saith the Lord, he could not actually have been inspired, or was inspired but could not have been refering to ChristAll of these assuances the liberal or humanist either ascribes or assignes to the Old Testament writer, but then with all the power he can muster claims that the writer of the NT must be a fake and a fraude. He does all this concerning the NT writers, but provides no way of distinguishing between his confidence in the Old Testament writer verses the NewIOWs, what is the criteria you are using to know that the Old Testament writer is correct in the first place to know he is not speaking about Christ?Why does the NT writer not get the same confidence you afford the prophet of old?

GDR writes: Firstly, my concern about going down the road of trying to prove an inerrant Bible by using the prophesies in the OT, it appears to me that we are making the Christian faith dependent on an inerrant Bible. Christianity is about worshipping a risen Christ, it is not about worshipping the Bible. If there are errors in the Biblical prophesies so what? That does not mean that Jesus wasn’t resurrected to new life, and that His message, the message that we Christians are supposed to espouse and enact in our lives, isn’t based on truth

GDR writes: Thus encouraged I’ll go further.

If we accept as truth what I wrote in my last post as to the evidence for the bodily resurrection then we can go from there. I started in this vain in Message 15 of this thread. Considering that the writers of the gospels, (including the authors who wrote the original texts on which the Gospels were based be it Q or whatever), believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, then we should be able to fairly safely assume that they wanted to make what they recorded as accurate as possible.

Through this I believe that it is possible to understand what it was that Jesus believed about Himself and about His mission.With a well annotated Bible it is easy to see that Jesus based these beliefs, or at least His way of trying to explain it to others, on the Hebrew Scriptures.In several places He straightforwardly claims the mantle of the Jewish Messiah.

Now we come to the resurrection and as I have said, we have to assume that God could resurrect anyone at any time He might choose but it seems that He chose to resurrect this one man in all of human history. He chose to resurrect the one who made these outlandish claims. If all this is correct then it means that Jesus was fully vindicated and that He truly was the Messiah and truly was the embodiment of God the Father, or at least it is a reasonable assumption to make.