One of the simplest rules of probability states that a conjunction is less probable than any of its conjuncts alone. That is, the probability of A and B is lower than the probability of just A or just B. For example, the probability that [it will rain tomorrow and that a car problem will force you to walk to work] is lower than the probability that [it will rain tomorrow].
This is not how our brains tend to work, though. Even though adding more details to a proposition makes it less probable, we tend to assign probability in precisely the opposite way: the more details a story or prediction has, the more believable we find it. This is called the "conjunction fallacy," for obvious reasons.
Unique among all books ever written, the Bible accurately foretells specific events-in detail-many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur. Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter—no errors.[...] Since the probability for any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 10^2000 (that is 1 with 2000 zeros written after it)!
The claim here is that, based on a certain type of probability calculation, the Old Testament picks out an tiny event in an enormous possibility space. This shows (a) Jesus, the fulfillment of these prophecies, is pretty special, and (b) those who gave the prophecies were pretty special. The authors of this web site are extremely confident in the results of this type of analysis:
Stating it simply, based on these thirteen prophecies alone, the Bible record may be said to be vastly more reliable than the second law of thermodynamics.
Such prophecies, then, are supposed to show the reliability of the Bible and the divinity of Christ.
If all this sounds pretty fishy to you, good. If the chances of one person coming along and fulfilling all these prophecies to the letter is vanishingly small,
how can we be so confident that it happened? After all, the more details you add to the claim, the less probable it becomes. Let's look at two examples and then at their conjunction.
Example 1: the virgin birth. Isaiah prophecies that the Messiah will be born of a virgin, and Jesus was born of a virgin: fulfilled prophecy. How confident are we in this assessment? Playing the skeptic, there are a number of factors that might give us pause.
To begin with, it is not at all clear that Isaiah is giving a Messianic prophecy. The passage reads as follows: "Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, "[...] the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. [...] For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted." Isaiah certainly seems to be talking about the future, but it is the immediate future: the whole point of the prophecy seems to be that King Ahaz will find relief from the enemy kings who confront him. In the next chapter, a prophetess gives birth to a son, and Isaiah repeats that while the child is yet an infant, the King Ahaz's rivals will be defeated. There is considerable debate over whether this child was the one intended by the prophecy, but either way there is a clear time frame given for a prophecy that is not Messianic in scope. Furthermore, Matthew's gospel, pointing to the virgin birth as a fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy, misquotes the passage: where Isaiah had spoken of a "young woman," Matthew's text presumably read "virgin," and he sees Christ's birth as its fulfillment. In other words, the perfect match between an extraordinary event (a virgin birth) and the prophecy seems to be produced by a misreading of the prophecy.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to have reservations, but this is a good start. On the other hand, we might take Matthew's declaration of the link between Isaiah's prophecy and Christ's birth as positive evidence for the connection, thereby increasing our confidence in the proposition that Jesus fulfilled this particular prophecy. And so the process would go, trying to establish a specific level of confidence in the claim of a fulfilled prophecy.
Example 2: the birth in Bethlehem. In Micah, we are told that "you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days." In Matthew and Luke, Jesus is said to have been born in Bethlehem. Again playing the skeptic, how confident are we in this fulfilled prophecy?
The passage from Micah is a much better candidate for a Messianic prophecy than the Isaiah passage, so that is in its favor. There is some confusion over what is meant by "Bethlehem of Ephrathah," since the label would fit both a person and a place, but it is certainly plausible that Micah was referring to the place, so our confidence need not be diminished much by that. The fact that Jesus was known to be from Nazareth, rather than Bethlehem, poses a much more serious problem. Matthew and Luke, who both believe Jesus to be the fulfillment of Micah's prophecy, seem to take two different approaches to the problem. In Matthew, Jesus is born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph. When he is about two years old, the wise men show up in Bethlehem to see Jesus. Herod goes on a murderous rampage, so the Holy Family flees to Egypt. On their way back home to Bethlehem, Joseph hears that Herod's son is ruling and is afraid, so they decide to stay away and eventually settle in Nazareth. In Luke, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth to begin with, but a census requires them to travel to Bethlehem, where Jesus is born. After he is presented in the temple to fulfill the requirements of the law, the Holy Family returns home to Nazareth. The fact that we have two authors taking very different approaches to getting Jesus' birthplace to be consistent with the prophecy might make us suspicious that the match is
post hoc. On the other hand, the duplicity of accounts does not inherently undermine the plausibility of Bethlehem being the birthplace. Furthermore, many people have even come up with ways to combine these two accounts into one; while such combinations are not very convincing, they are not strictly impossible, either, so that can mitigate some doubt.
Again, there are many other factors to consider, but that is a good start.
Conclusion:
The next step would be to actually assign levels of confidence to these claims. Such confidence would be further reduced by a number of factors. For example, how confident am I that I am interpreting the prophetic text correctly when I see it as a Christological prophecy? In the case of Isaiah, probably not too confident, but much more confident in the case of Micah. How confident am I in the integrity of the texts themselves -- how accurately do I think Luke's gospel, for example, survived the process of transcription and transmission? (Answer: highly accurately in the relevant respects.) And what are the chances that e.g. Matthew made some of these details up in order to make the story better fit the Old Testament? The chances are quite low, given the theological context with which I am approaching such matters, but to claim such chances to be absolutely zero would be untenable. Each of these possibilities -- the possibility that I am misreading the text, the possibility of transcription or translation errors, etc. -- may be tiny, but they add up quickly. On the other hand, there are also factors that boost my confidence in the claim that these are fulfilled prophecies. For example, the fact that the great Saints and Doctors of the Church have understood them in this way is a good mark in their favor.
Let's just pick some numbers (and don't quote me on these; I just picked these out of the air):
- I am 80% confident in the claim, "Isaiah 7:14 is a Messianic prophecy fulfilled by Christ."
- I am 97% confident in the claim, "Micah 5:2 is a Messianic prophecy fulfilled by Christ."
Then here is the critical point. How confident can I be in the claim, "Isaiah 7:14 and Micah 5:2 are Messianic prophecies fulfilled by Christ"? Whatever figure I assign, the law of conjunction stipulates that
it cannot be greater than 80%.
There are various figures floating around that quantify the number of prophecies that Jesus is supposed to have fulfilled;
one author says there are 425, although most people just say there are "several hundred." Let's imagine for the sake of argument that they are relatively independent prophecies (for two reasons: first, the calculation that claims "the odds are crazy against Jesus fulfilling all of these, so the Bible is super reliable" requires this relative independence; second, the calculation that comes next is
way easier under the assumption). Let's further imagine for the sake of argument that we are highly confident in every claimed fulfillment of prophecy: after all of the doubts concerning the integrity of the texts, their proper interpretation, the motivations of the authors, the exactitude of the match between them, etc., the evidence is so good that we still assign a 99% level of confidence to every last one.
We can do a quick calculation of 99% confidence over 400 independent prophecies by multiplying 99 by itself 400 times. The level of confidence that we then have in the conjunction -- in the claim that these are all Messianic prophecies fulfilled by Jesus -- comes out to be about 2%.
...the more details you add, the less probable a claim becomes.
(And if you read that behemoth of a post, I am duly impressed.)
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