Home » The Bible and Beyond » Discussions » Discussions Archive » Did Jesus Fulfill Prophecy?

Did Jesus Fulfill Prophecy?

Introduction

Click here to access the article by Dr. Robert Miller, “The Wonder Baby,” referenced near the end of the discussion.

Transcript

Click here for a printable transcript (pdf file, opens in a new tab).

Shirley Paulson 

Welcome, everyone, to the September 2025 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and tonight we’re welcoming back Dr. Robert Miller to chat with us on the Bible and Beyond Discussion. The title for tonight’s program is, “Did Jesus Fulfill Prophecy?” Well, of course he did! At least that’s what I was taught in my growing up years, and that’s what it looks like in the Bible. But Bob is encouraging us to take a closer look at some particular prophecies to discover a far more complex answer than a straight yes or no.

So if you’ve ever read a Fourth R magazine published by Westar, then you know Bob Miller. He is and has been the editor of this outstanding magazine known as “an advocate for religious literacy.” And frankly, that’s what we’re doing here tonight—or if you’re in Australia—this morning. Our Bible and Beyond Discussions also work hard to advance religious literacy. So having Bob with us again is a real treat.

Bob also happens to be the Rosenberger Professor of Christian and Religious Studies at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. He was deeply involved in the Jesus Seminar in the 1990s, and he’s the author of a book we’ll be discussing tonight, which is called Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy. That’s going to be listed in the chat if you want to know more about that book.

All right, so welcome, Bob. So glad you’re with us tonight.

Robert Miller

It’s always a pleasure, Shirley. Thank you.

Shirley

So you’re asking us a very tantalizing question, whether Jesus fulfilled prophecy or not. I can understand that it could be a complex question since everything we see in the Bible seems to be complex anyway. So to get us into the subject, though, I think it would be helpful for you to give us an overview of the connection between the Christian New Testament and the Hebrew Bible—or Old Testament—because prophecy seems to tie them together in a particularly crucial way. Could you start us off by summarizing maybe the goals of the Hebrew prophets and what that might have been? Let’s go there.

Robert

Well, every religion with a book that’s old reads it in the interest of finding something out about the present. I mean, that’s why it’s a holy scripture and not just gathering dust in a library. And so Jewish people, too, I mean, by the time of Jesus, pieces of what we call the Old Testament had been around for many hundreds of years and were part of the past. And so this habit of reading these ancient texts and looking for inspiration or messages or encouragement, whatever, for us – is how these things get connected. It’s how the present readers reach into the past with their own interests and find something that they can apply one way or the other. And if that works for them, all fine and good.

Now, it’s the job of the scholar to sort of come behind and check on that and to see how these old books are being used and to what end and whether or not their uses for the present actually make sense in light of the original intentions or the original contents of those books. And so both Jews and Christians and Romans and Greeks and Egyptians and everybody was in this process at the time of the early Christian movement of looking to old books and finding in them messages for their present, sometimes for their exact moment in history. So this is not something unique to Christians. It’s just a habit of ancient people and of modern people. And so the idea that these ancient writings were intended for future audiences is what makes the prophecies connect in the minds of the people who carry out this kind of search.

Shirley

Wow, that is quite a new concept to think about, but it makes sense. I really appreciate you getting us going there. So what I find kind of confusing about this powerful connection, then, between the two Testaments is that the Gospel of Matthew and I think John, in particular, seem to use an anti-Jewish voice, but Matthew is so full of prophetic fulfillment at the same time. So does that Christianity sort of prove its legitimacy on Old Testament prophecy?

Robert

Both Matthew and John are addressing their own people who are seen increasingly as sort of Jewish people who are moving more and more away from the mainstream Judaism of their time. And they’re finding that their beliefs in Jesus, etc. are being understood as kind of alien. And so they are dealing with the unexpected result that the great message we have about Jesus being the fulfiller of the hopes of Israel is just not to make it – It’s just not selling. People aren’t accepting it. And so some of the, I mean a lot of the heat you pick up in Matthew and John directed against people called the Jews, right, is coming from that place of both hurt and rejection and anger. And I mean that’s a very common dynamic of any sectarian group. You can see that today. For instance, I’m not going to name names of groups, but the further along, the further they are pushed to the margins of a tradition, the more they fight back and say look, we’re not the ones who left the truth. You guys didn’t pick it up and come along with us. And so that combines, well look, all the prophets talked about Jesus and you have rejected him. And that calls forth judgment. And so you see the most scalding statements against Jewish people in the Gospels of Matthew and John for that kind of reason.

Shirley

Wow, that’s a very difficult but interesting way to put that together. Okay, so we’ll digest that a little bit too. And you had given us… by the way, I don’t know if everybody knows, but we always have a text recommended to read in preparation for these meetings on the website at (correction:) earlychristiantexts.com/discussions so you know where those texts are. So Bob had recommended that we read Matthew 1 verses 18 through chapter 2 verse 23, which is all about Jesus’ birth and the fulfillment of prophecy.

So would it be okay if we start with a verse in chapter 2:13 where it says, “I called my son out of Egypt?”

Robert

Yeah, I would prefer to start there because it’s much more direct and simple and a very complicated issue of the birth of Jesus. So this is in Matthew 2 after Jesus is born. And it’s that time when it’s discovered that King Herod is out to get Jesus. So an angel tips off Joseph. He scoops up Mary and the baby, and they get out of town and flee to Egypt. And then at that point, Matthew stops the narrative and says, “Look, this was to fulfill a certain prophecy.” So Shirley, if you would put that up on the screen, we can actually see it.

The prophecy is from Hosea. Okay, so Joseph flees to Egypt with Mary and Jesus. And Matthew says, “This is to fulfill the prophecy, ‘I called my son out of Egypt.’” Now, just think about what that is doing for Matthew. It is showing that this event, which looks like it’s some kind of tragic accident, is actually in God’s plan as revealed to the prophets. And that the ancient prophets pointed towards this event in this thing. So far, so good.

When you look up the actual prophecy in Hosea, you discover it’s not as simple as that. So what I’ve done here is simply give the full prophecy, which is two verses. And you can see the part that Matthew has excerpted. When you look at the prophecy in Hosea’s terms, it’s perfectly clear that the son who’s being called out of Egypt is not an individual, but the nation of Israel. “When Israel was a child, I loved him”. See how we’re referring to the whole nation as a singular there? “I called my son out of Egypt.” Now, that’s clearly a reference to the great story of the exodus when Moses takes the people out.

And then the next one is that, “the more I called them, the more they went from me, they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols.” So Matthew looks up this prophecy, and clearly he cannot use it as is. So he has snipped out of it the one piece that out of context could be made to refer to Jesus – in Matthew’s mind.

So you find this over and over and over again. When you look up these prophecies in their own context, in the ancient Hebrew prophet text, you find out that our authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all do it, so does Paul, that they many times will quote out of context, kind of flagrantly, really, to find something that out of context can apply to Jesus when in context it’s clear.

1. Hosea was—number one—not talking about a single person; talking about a nation.
2. It’s not even a prophecy. It’s talking about the past. It’s in the past tense, right? I have done this already. Referring to by the time Hosea is speakinvg—the exodus had already happened 600 years earlier. So it’s not even a prediction. It’s just a reminder of the great love that Yahweh had had for his people in calling them out of Egypt.

So this idea of quoting out of context, today we would think of that as very dishonest. I mean, one of the most basic tricks in the Bible and I’ve shocked students with this: to say the Bible says, “there is no God.” It says it twice in the book of Psalms! Of course, the whole sentence is, “It is fools who say ‘There is no God.’” Quoting out of context can massively distort what is being said.

Shirley

Bob, talk a little bit about that. I mean, if everybody did it, why would they knowingly be out of context? It didn’t matter? Why?

Robert

Well, because they viewed prophecy very differently than we do. And this is a belief shared across the spectrum. There are other Jews doing this. For instance, that rather unusual community of people out at the Dead Sea in Qumran are doing this kind of thing. Josephus, the Jewish historian, does it. You see it being done by, like I said, Romans and Greeks with their own text. And their belief was that the prophets, the ancient prophets, oftentimes didn’t understand the meaning of what they were saying. That they were channeling a divine voice with a message which was intended for the future.

If you look at Hosea, he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s talking about Israel being God’s son and being a bad son. I mean, a son who was loved, but a son who betrayed that trust and went on. And clearly Matthew can’t use the prophecy as it stands. You find this happening again and again and again.

Sometimes—and if you want to dig into my book, you’ll find examples of this—they actually rewrite the prophecies. Sometimes they change words around.

And in a very mysterious case, at the end of chapter 2 in Matthew, when Jesus ends up as a child again going to Nazareth instead of back home to Bethlehem, he says, “This was to fulfill the prophecy, ‘he shall be called a Nazarene.’” And that occurs nowhere in the Bible. It’s not found anywhere in the Old Testament. And how Matthew came up with it, we don’t know. Maybe he had access to books which are no longer around. Or, I mean, if you want to adopt this, maybe he just made it up. Because it certainly isn’t from the Scriptures.

So we see that immediately. Really, all it takes, this isn’t rocket science. You just look at the passage in the Gospel, you compare it to the real thing, and you see many times that something isn’t right here.

Shirley

Well, can you talk to us a bit about the one in verses Mattthew 2:16-18, about Rachel weeping for her children? Should we talk about that one?

Robert

Okay. Well, that is prophecy Matthew retrieves, to talk about the grief that occurred when Herod’s men slaughtered all these baby boys, hoping to catch Jesus in their murderous net. And so, again, what Matthew’s trying to do is to assure his audience that even these horrifying outcomes are somehow in God’s mysterious plan and fulfill this prophecy.

Now when you look that up from Jeremiah, I think it is, you find out that it’s about the weeping for the tribes of Israel who have been sent into exile, into Babylon. So it’s a very different context with a very different kind of meaning. But once again, Matthew is not interested in historical context. He’s interested in finding those nuggets of divine wisdom that he believes he now has the key to understanding, that they point towards Jesus.

So we can go searching in the Gospels, in the Scriptures, to find the proofs or to find the traces of God sending that message out long before it happened.

Shirley

So shall we skip over then to John? About how “they hated me for no reason”?

Robert

Yeah, that’s another one you can show because it’s relatively short and you can see once again what’s going on with that. So this is after a rather long passage that Jesus goes on and on about how the Jews hate him. And by Jews, he means the Jewish authorities.

Shirley

Oh, that’s helpful. Okay.

Robert

And so when you look at the prophecy, again, you look it up in the Psalms. This is not hard to do. You can do it on your own. And you look at where it comes from.

“The number of the hairs of my head are those who hate me for no reason. O God, you know my foolishness. The wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.”

This cannot be used for Jesus. Because he’s not admitting to his foolishness nor to sins which he has committed.

So John sort of surgically just lifts out this one statement and then says, “Oh, look, it applies to Jesus.” Now, the larger point here about the process, it’s not the case. I mean, obviously, that people reading these ancient prophecies would say, hey, that’s about someone going to come in the future. That’s about some Messiah who’s on the way. That’s not the case.

The case is that Matthew and his people and John and his people and Luke and Mark believe that Jesus was the Messiah. With that in mind, they went hunting, hunting for clues.

So in a way, it’s not that the prophecies being fulfilled produced faith that Jesus was the fulfiller of prophecy. It was the belief that Jesus fulfilled prophecy which then goes back and finds evidence for it.

Shirley

That’s an interesting phrase there. It’s the belief in the prophecy. Talk to us a little bit more about how that works.

Robert

Well, the idea that Jesus fulfilled prophecy is a product of faith. It’s not how the faith got started. See, no one looking at that scene from Psalms would say, “Oh, yeah, that must be about Jesus.” I mean, you can’t do that without admitting that he was foolish and all that. So it’s not as if you read these prophecies and say, “Oh, yeah, that proves it”. What you do is you believe that Jesus is the promised one, is the fulfiller of all the promises to Israel. And then when you look at these texts, you see in them a dimension of truth that was not evident until Jesus came. You do what you have to do. In this case, I mean, it’s amazing the precision with which they lift out just the bits, that they can use and ignore the rest.

Shirley

Yeah. All right, so you had another one on the birth story.

Robert

Yeah, this is interesting too. When Jesus ends up being born in Bethlehem, again, we’re in Matthew, and Matthew quotes then, he says, “Well, this was to fulfill the prophecy in you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, in no way are you least among the leaders of Judah.” And then when you look it up in the prophet Micah, it’s almost the same except in the second line, Micah says about Bethlehem, ”You are the smallest of the clans of Judah”. And then when Matthew writes it, he absolutely contradicts that. He adds words not in Micah to say, uh-uh, no, no, no, in no way are you least? It’s an emphatic negative interjection in Greek. It just means no way. And so sometimes you actually see gospel writers adding words to the prophecy to better adapt to their purpose.

Shirley

So why did Matthew feel the need to do this then if it’s not actually there? What was his purpose here?

Robert

His purpose is to assure his people, right, that they are not crazy for believing that Jesus is the Messiah, that he was actually foretold in the sacred scriptures.

Shirley

Okay, so he needed to find different examples like the word of Bethlehem and so forth to do that.

Robert

Now, of course, suppose you were like a Jewish rabbi debating with Jesus or with Matthew and say, “Well, look, Matthew, you’re rewriting the prophecy. You’re adding words which aren’t there.” And then it’s just not going to work. See, it works. This is really important, folks. It works as a way to testify to your faith. I believe that Jesus fulfills his prophecy. It does not work as evidence in some kind of argument to persuade somebody who’s not already convinced. Matthew’s writing to people who are already in, who are already believers, helping them fortify the faith that they have. He’s not trying to persuade people who are not already on board.

So I have absolutely no problem with people saying, I believe that Jesus fulfills prophecy. The problem happens with “You should believe it too, because this is evidence. This is evidence that proves it.” It doesn’t prove it.

Shirley

So you’re leading us into thinking about the difference between prophecy as proof versus believing because we believe. It’s a kind of circular reasoning then.

Robert

Yeah, it’s the difference between giving testimony to your faith by saying Jesus fulfills prophecy. That’s very different from telling other people, “If you want to be rational, if you don’t want to be illogical, you need to share my faith. And here’s the evidence why.” So the belief is religion, right? The argument that Jesus fulfills prophecy is, I think, subject to this kind of critical scrutiny.

Shirley

I just want to ask you a little bit more about just the Jewish people who, let’s put it the other way around here. If none of the passages that Jesus fulfilled were actually predictions about a Messiah, were Jews actually looking for a Messiah?

Robert

Again, this is complicated. It’s hard to know, but it looks as if most were. Not all, right? But most were. The problem was “the Messiah” meant a bunch of different things to different people.

The word ‘messiah’ just means anointed. I mean, David is a messiah. All the kings of Israel were messiah. Some of the prophets were anointed. And so what it means is someone who’s been given a God-given mission. That’s what it means. And empowered to carry it. It doesn’t mean someone from heaven. It doesn’t mean God. It means like a human being whom God designates as someone who’s going to carry out a special mission to fulfill God’s plan.

So who was this guy going to be? Well, it depends upon what you think needed fixing.

Okay. If what you think needs fixing is that, “Look, we’re Jews and we have our own land and these Romans won’t let us practice our religion completely and fully because they are polluting our land by having their own idols in it?”

So the Messiah is going to be someone who’s going to kick those bad Romans out and cleanse the land of all this foreign worship.

Other people were saying, “The temple, as we now have it, is run by corrupt priests. And so we can’t go there and worship because it’s just corruption.” And so those people thought the Messiah would be somebody who would institute a more perfect form of worship, etc. I mean, there were different varieties of this.

So again, yes, they did. Many of them, probably most of them, anticipate a Messiah. But what that Messiah was going to do was subject to the thing that they think needed to be most fixed.

Shirley

Wow. You sure are bringing us into the heart and mind of people who are involved in thinking about Jesus. We can’t just read facts or history somewhere. It all has to do with what somebody thinks or feels or believes. Very interesting.

So, in addition to feeling a little bit misled about prophecies not actually being prophecies, is there something about this that undermines the Jewish prophets or the people themselves?

Robert

I don’t see how it does. I mean, when you take the prophets in their own context, right? I mean, they’re speaking to their audiences back in the 7th, 8th, 9th century before Jesus, with a message that’s absolutely vital to their times. And sometimes they actually make predictions about the future, almost always in terms of conditions, that if you obey God’s commandments, then blessing will follow. If you disregard God and abandon his ways, then what’s the opposite of blessings? Curses will follow.

And many of the prophets believe there was their mission to wake up these people before things were too far gone. So you have a lot of threatening language in the prophets because of the urgency they feel to get Israel back on the right path.

But if you believe that the prophets are talking about somebody to come in the distant future, that too was going around at the time. And it actually is a Greek idea, not exactly a biblical idea, that prophets would utter words that nobody would understand until they came true.

Okay, there’s a lot of… we can go into stories about Oedipus Rex and the tragedies and the Greek plays, and you see that happening, that these prophecies are cryptic. And only later do people say, “Oh, that’s what they were talking about!”

And so that idea creeps into the way Jews think about their prophecies because you have this mixing of Greek and Hebrew cultures after the time of Alexander the Great. And so this actually very rich and variegated blend of biblical beliefs and Greek ideas take root. And of course, all the gospels are written in Greek. So they’re just swimming in that ocean too.

And so a lot of that, I mean, a lot of what they do with the gospel, with the prophecies would be just like things, everyone was doing that. I mean, in my book, I have big chapters about Josephus and the people down by the Dead Sea. And I mean, they’re making—from my perspective—just wacky predictions. But they really believe all of this history of Israel is kind of leading up to them. And so they read it to find things pointing to them very directly.

Shirley

So, you know, we’re going to turn the microphone over to everybody else here very shortly, but I have one more question that you might think is weird. And if you don’t want to answer, that’s okay. But I’m just curious, is there a way you would be able to characterize a more accurate image of who Jesus was if he wasn’t really, say, a Messiah prophecy? Is that crazy?

Robert

No, it’s not crazy. Again, you got to say, “Well, what does it mean to say that he was the Messiah?” And all versions of messianic expectation were that once the Messiah came, everything would be as God intended it. And the great shock was that after Jesus died, the world was still the same old rotten place it always had been. There was sin, there was death, there was corruption, there was oppression, there wasn’t worldwide peace. And so people would say, “These followers of Jesus, they think he was the Messiah, but he didn’t do anything the Messiah was supposed to do! He was killed. That’s not supposed to happen. He’s supposed to be a victor, not a victim. And the world still, you know, frankly sucks. I mean, the Romans are still here, we’re still getting oppressed, people are still starving to death, there’s still disease, hunger. What did Jesus fix?”

And that was a big challenge of learning, then, to make this transition, which really Christians did sort of internalize that and said, “Well, the outside world is still the way it was, but internally, spiritually, Jesus has opened up the way for us and the stuff he was going to do, he will do when he comes back. He’s going to put on some big boots and kick some serious butt.”

And that’s when you get Jesus from the apocalypse riding down on the horse, right? And that’s when he’s going to do all that good, driving out the Romans and cleaning up and wiping out the bad people.

And so they have these various reinterpretive strategies to explain to themselves why they could still maintain that Jesus was the Messiah. That was the language they used to express their lives being so profoundly and wonderfully changed because of what Jesus had done. The language they said, well, that’s a messianic thing. There’s a very different way of looking at it than their fellow Jews did. Does that make sense now?

Shirley

I really appreciate the way you’re helping us to think about how the purpose of the messianic writings has to do with thinking about Jesus in a different way. That is okay if it’s not the way we thought it was going to be, but there’s something else going on. And it doesn’t matter if we’re picking things out or cherry-picking words, we’re just trying to get an idea of how we’re defending our faith in Jesus. So there’s a lot to think about there.

Okay, so we’re just about ready now for everyone to join. Maureen, go ahead with your question.

Maureen.

I have a couple of questions. It sounds like what you’re saying is that whoever wrote the Gospels, whoever that was, knew this historically present Jesus, but then just invented a backstory to make everybody else believe he’s the promised Messiah.

If the prophecies were all, like you said, cherry-picked out of things, how did they start knowing that Jesus was the one they wanted to invent the backstory for?

Robert

That’s a great question. First, I’m going to answer these questions more briefly than I would like to, so we can get to more than one or two. But the short answer to this is that it would be dishonest if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John believed that what they were doing was cheating. But they did not believe that. They believed that they had been given, as you will, the lenses through which to see these old prophecies. And to spot in them these little gems that are hiding in the rough. You know, a Jewish rabbi reading Matthew would say, “That doesn’t work.” But he would recognize that Matthew’s playing by the same rules that everybody does.

So Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are using tools of the trade of all these ancient writers who mined sacred texts from the past, pulled out what they wanted, left what they didn’t, and sometimes buffed it up, reworded it, sometimes actually putting words in it, which just don’t have any place on it. Because they think that’s really what it means, and I’m helping it to mean what it should mean. I’m helping ordinary people to understand its deeper meaning. So I believe that Matthew, I would say by our standards, they’re cheating, right? When you quote out of context, that’s not fair. That’s distorting. But that’s not how they’re seeing it. And I’ve really had to learn not to judge them by my standards, but by the standards of their own day.

Shirley

Thank you. I know you have a lot more to say on that, too, but that’s a great beginning for the answer to that question.

Margi

I thought there was a prophecy by Moses, or about Moses, of a prophet to come like Moses in the future. Is that one also the case that if we looked it up, we’d find that’s not what it is? Or can we not even find it?

Robert

I’ll tell you, the people at Qumran knew who that was. It was their leader. He was the prophet like Moses. I mean, everybody was going to step in and take over that mantle. That’s a really important thing for them to have. And well, what did that mean that he was a prophet like Moses? Did he lead his people out of slavery the way Moses did? Yeah, so then those questions would have to be asked.

We actually don’t see that specific prophecy being used, I don’t believe, by the four Gospels, even though it’s sitting right there and you would wonder why.

Margi

There was something from Psalms with David saying something about “my Lord.”

Robert

Well, that’s in there too. It’s all in that long and tedious and magnificent book that I wrote that surely held up. So, my retirement condo in Maui is not going to build itself. So buy that book (Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy, Robert Miller). You need to buy the book!

Shirley

Let me just talk about the book then. Really, I read the book several years ago and what he’s saying is right. There’s so much in here. And I felt like we needed a few more years of getting used to these things before we could have Bob actually come talk about this. It’s not an easy subject. But I think we’ve had enough Discussions lately to get into this subject in a way that I think is profitable to us. So I do recommend the book. It’s very readable and you will get some more specifics in the details that he can’t begin to cover right now. But we’ll try.

Pat

I’m always interested in how Christianity went from just a handful of folks to millions of folks in a relatively short time. And I wondered if there was evidence that these prophecies had the sort of propagandistic effect that really created enthusiasm for the Jesus movement and actually attracted people to it.

Robert

That’s certainly possible. And that’s certainly what some of the writers hoped would happen. We don’t have—I can’t think of any testimony from early Christians that said, ”Look, I’m a Christian today because of the prophets.”

What we do know was incredibly powerful and important in spreading Christian influence was how Christians lived. I mean, they actually took care of the poor and the widows and the outcasts. And when the epidemics came to town and all the pagan priests fled, the Christians stayed behind at risk to their lives and nursed the sick. That impressed people immensely. And they said, I want to be part of that. So we know that was like the major attractor. It doesn’t have to do with belief. It had to do with watching these people whose lives had been changed and that example just did its work.

Shirley

That’s a powerful answer. Thank you so much for that, Bob.

Helen

Hi, thank you for talking with us. In the Gospel of Luke, in the walk to Emmaus, they actually have Jesus interpreting the scripture as a way of… which was brilliant, because he does his own interpretation, and he starts with Moses and then the prophets and so on, although we never really get the actual passages. And then he goes and appears to the eleven, the apostles, and then he does it again. And so I’m thinking that Luke’s audience was, maybe mostly Gentile.

And so I’m wondering, and I think I’ve read this, that it was necessary for these early writers to connect Jesus and what was happening in his life with the Jewish tradition as a way of protecting it from the Romans because the Jews had some kind of protection with the Romans. And so it was important that they connect the history and the continuity. It was sort of a continuity and discontinuity. Was that James Dunn or somebody that said that? So you get this sense that it was necessary to make this link not only as a way of a rhetorical case to be made, but also because of a way of protecting the movement and allowing it to actually be attractive to the Jewish community.

And then the last thing is .. interpreting these different prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures and then sort of adjusting them is … maybe that’s kind of a Jewish midrash in the way they work with the text?

Robert

Midrash is one sort of extravagant way of doing this. It’s not about prophecy, so much as it is about retelling stories in ways that make their lessons for the present much more evident. There are Jewish practices where people were just used to people taking the Bible and kind of running with it. And they knew what was going on. That’s not really what the story said, but this was a way to help it make sense for the present.

Now, back to this connection of the importance of connecting up. I don’t know about it being sort of a shield for the Romans, but it was a way of showing, look, this religion of Jesus is not some newfangled, new innovation. It has deep, deep roots. The last thing you want to be in the Roman Empire is innovative.

You want to be traditional, right? And so who’s this religion that’s following a guy who got crucified by Roman authority? What’s up with that? And so the answer is,”Look, it looks like it’s new, but really it’s deeply rooted in the past. And here’s a book of written prophecies many, many centuries old and see how it’s connected to that.” That’s a way of nailing down their claim to be a legitimate religion in the mix of things.

Helen

And I think that’s key to everything that we’re saying today.

Shirley

Very helpful. Thank you so much for bringing that up, Helen.

Martha

I’m wondering if there’s a different sense of time— rather than linear time—that when they’re bringing in these prophecies, it’s really bringing it into the present. It’s just another description of Jesus. So I think in the ancient past, there was not a sense of linear time. It was cyclical. So maybe they’re bringing that into the present. I also like Helen’s idea that it’s protecting the scriptures. It’s protecting the old scriptures that Jesus is tied to these scriptures too. So these are descriptions of Jesus. He’s being called out of Egypt or whatever.

Robert

Yeah, I mean, the funny one about that is that Jesus was fleeing to Egypt. Egypt is a place of safety for Jesus, right?

Martha

But eventually he came back, right?

Robert

Right, but it was a place of slavery and oppression for the Israelites. And so it’s very much of an opposite kind of valence. Okay.

Honor

By the way, I looked up that one about Moses. Yes. And it’s cited in Acts. It is Peter talking to people and he says, “Moses truly said a prophet shall rise up, God shall raise him up.” But I really appreciate this because, you know, I’ve read the Bible all these years and I took those to be prophecies that were honestly being cited and you’re saying they were being used in a different way.

And okay, one thing occurred to me, I knew a man who said he was on a trip and he was late and the airport was crowded and he just prayed to be able to get through. And suddenly he was able to walk through like he said, just like through the Red Sea. Well, you know, you could say he was citing a prophecy and it wasn’t meant for him, but it jolly well worked out.

So it seems to me that there are two things maybe that the gospel writers could be doing and one of them would be like that man in the airport that they’re saying, I experienced this, and this phrase from the scriptures describes it because everybody’s familiar with it and they’re beautiful and they get you in the heart. And the other thing could be that they might have viewed it like, I don’t know, some scientific principle.

Okay, if two apples and two apples coming out of Egypt adds up to four apples, well then two oranges and two oranges in the New Testament add up to Jesus being the one to give us the information we need.

Robert

I’m having a little difficulty with your fruit metaphor there, but I think I get the point behind it, right? That the idea is to notice patterns, right? That patterns get repeated. Is that what you’re intending to say, Honor? I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Honor

Yes. Well, I think what they’re saying—leaving out the fruit—that if God cares for his children in this way with Moses and in this way with Elijah, it’s the same God and the same care and the same sustaining influx of spiritual ideas that is happening with Jesus and with those following him. But you articulated it as a way of saying that it is your faith in Jesus or your faith in the goodness of what he brought to us that enables you to see these patterns.

And that’s kind of like what I’ve been saying, that you don’t start with the prophecies and go, “Wow! That’s Jesus.” What you do is you start historically with people who believe that Jesus has changed the world and changed their world. And that’s what then says, “Let’s go back and see how God has been planting the seeds for this.” And we find those in the Holy Scriptures.

Shirley

Yeah, that’s really helpful. We’re going to get used to thinking in a new way, but this is what we’re wanting to do. So I appreciate you doing that, Bob.

I want to also respond to a question that’s in the chat. I don’t know who it is, but someone’s asking, will we be emailed a copy of this recording? The answer is yes, if you have signed up for our newsletter. So if you have not signed up for our newsletter, you can go to (Correction:) earlychristiantexts.com/.

On the front home page, you’ll see “get email newsletter once a month.” In that newsletter, we’ll have the link to the recording.

If you want to skip our email, you can go directly to the website itself and you’ll find the recording on our page on the website that’s called BibleAndBeyond Discussions/Archives. [Correction: earlychristiantexts.com/discussions-archive/).  So you’ll find all the archives—all of them for the past several years—there. So that’s the answer to that question. And then I think we’ve gone back to Pat. You have another question.

Pat

Yeah, I’m curious about the extent to which the writers of the Gospels did themselves engage in prophecy. And of course, what leaps into my mind is Revelation, where there’s a whole bunch of really extravagant prophecies. And I’ve read that many folks consider that the Jesus movement was kind of an apocalypticist movement, which is itself a kind of prophecy. Can you comment on the extent to which prophecies were viewed at the time as something going forward that had impact, not just referring to something from the past?

Robert

Sure. I mean, as early as Paul, who’s our earliest Christian author, I mean, he’s talking about people giving prophecies, you know, in the assembly of Christians. And he even makes rules for it, that it’s so common, he feels the need to kind of bring some order to it. So the belief that God was sending messages to certain gifted people, whom they would then relay those messages to the people. I mean, that was a common idea in early Christianity. It seldom was about the future. It was about “Here’s a message that God gave to me to give to you about what we’re going to do about this problem we’re facing.” Or, “how we’re going to talk to people who are different from us, or whatever,” right?

The problem with that, of course, is that how do you tell who’s making it up or who’s like sincere but deluded? And this whole thing about how you tell a true prophet from a false prophet, that’s a big problem! It’s in the book of Deuteronomy. They go through all that back and forth thing, how we figure that out. And of course, certainly the book of Revelation, that’s just one example. There were many apocalypses. This is one that happened to be in the New Testament. And these are all about God getting to the final stage of history and sending in the National Guard, you know, with Jesus at the front and making the world the place it always should have been.

Shirley

Bob, I just can’t help but ask, I don’t see any other hands, so I would like to just ask you, could you talk about the big one that we all think about, about Jesus being born of a virgin, prophesied to be born of a virgin?

Robert

To do that in a way that would cause more understanding than confusion, I’m going to need more than 10 minutes. Okay. But with that caveat, right? Yeah. There’s a big piece of the book about that. And there’s an article in the Fourth R that I’ve written, too, about the…

Shirley

Here’s the magazine, everybody.

Robert

Yeah, it was… I forget what it’s called now. I can’t think of it. That Matthew is going back to a prophecy of Isaiah. And Isaiah is addressing this in the 8th century before Jesus. He’s addressing King Ahaz. Ahaz is about to make a treaty with the Assyrians, a military alliance in order to get this invasion off of his back by these other powers. So it’s a very calculated geopolitical thing. And Isaiah confronts Ahaz, and he says, “Look, if you go out and make deals with these pagans, you are not letting Yahweh do what he’s going to do. You think you know better than he does. So don’t do it. Let Yahweh protect you, as he swore he would do to David!”  And that’s when he gives this prophecy.

Now, the word in the Hebrew is not ‘virgin.’ It means ‘a young woman’. It says the young woman. Who’s he talking about? He’s talking about someone Ahaz knows, almost certainly one of his wives. All right. And it says she’s pregnant. And she’s going to give birth to a son. And you’re going to name him Emmanuel, meaning God is on our side.

Now, there’s some very horrifying—dirty laundry—in Ahaz’s past. In the past, he had offered one of his sons in human sacrifice in a misguided hope to get Yahweh on his side. So what Isaiah is saying to him is that you are going to have a son and you’re not going to kill him. That the fact that he is born and survives and thrives will be a sign that Yahweh is with you. And you don’t need to go making these very dangerous deals with these very dangerous Assyrians!

Now that’s in Isaiah’s own very specific to his context. Eight hundred years later, Matthew reads that. Matthew can read Greek and Hebrew. You can tell that from the way he treats these things. So he knows what’s up, right? And he picks… (Again, I just can’t do it well, okay?) Is that Matthew is doing all of his skills as a surgeon of prophecy. To surgically set up a way in which this makes sense for Jesus.

Shirley, I will send you a PDF of my article, which you can send out to people, okay? Because it’s all in there.

Shirley

Yeah, that’s really helpful. So you all need to subscribe to earlychristiantexts.com newsletter and we’ll send it to you.

That’s wonderful, Bob, that you can share this with us. So you were going to stop there. Is that what you’re saying?

Robert

It’s going to confuse people more if I keep on going, I think. So we have time for other questions.

Shirley

All right. So Honor just got put her hand back up.

Honor

You said at one point that the word ‘messiah’ means ‘anointed’. So any king of Israel was anointed and some prophets were anointed. And they were anointed because they were inaugurated into that office. And they also fulfilled things that the people expected. So then if anybody calls Jesus a Messiah, they’re essentially saying that he was anointed to accomplish some expected purpose.

Okay, so my question is this. What he did, as I read it, was just go right to the basic nitty gritty of Judaic teachings and show what they really meant spiritually.

Robert

Yeah, that’s Matthew.

Yeah, but what I want to ask is, “Were there people at that time who desired that, for whom that was an expectation, or was that expectation cultivated by Jesus?” You understand what I’m saying? Did people already want what he did, or did he come and teach and they said, oh yeah, that’s a good idea, now that’s what we want?

Robert

Yeah, and you see especially in Matthew’s gospel this theme of Jesus taking basically—what are the commandments of Moses and finding in them what he believes is the true, eternal way to go about following this. A way of the heart, not a way of externalities. And that’s what Matthew’s gospel says is the true fulfillment of these teachings: is to live them in ways which are coming, like you say, from the heart and the spirit, not just from a way of properly doing the proper things in order to make things happen the proper way.

Now, is that a messianic task? Well, it depends who you ask, right? And I’m sure that…

Honor

That was my question. Were there people… Was there some substantial group of people who wanted that?

Robert

There were people who were hoping for a Messiah who would come and give the final and perfect interpretation of all the Mosaic commandments, because the rabbis had been… The scholars had been arguing about this, because, I mean, they’re very vague sometimes. Like, don’t do work on the Sabbath day. Well, what does ‘work’ mean? And so they get into all… And they have to do that. How do we honor this? And so people could say, well, look, that’s way too complicated for everybody. Just tell us what it means in here. So, yeah, there was some hope that there would be a perfect teacher who would come and make everything clear. That was not a majority. Most people thought about the Messiah as one who’s going to deal with these Romans.

Shirley

Very interesting. Thank you. Great question, Honor.

Shirley

So Peggy, you always have some important thing to tell us. Go ahead. Today is not that important. Today is personal. I want to thank you and tell you what my takeaway is today: it’s that I’m humbled by thinking about these things being pulled out of context. And I don’t know about you all, but I tend to go look up the things that I hear that I don’t agree with—when I hear good Christians do this, good Christians hate this, etc. But then, when I hear things that I already believe, I don’t think I’ve been doing the deep research that I need to do also. I don’t think it’s going to change my ultimate faith and belief because that is something intrinsic to myself and my belief. And there’s a different way I got there. But I think that’s important so that we’re not quoting or misquoting to convince somebody else that this is the way. So, ‘thank you!’ is all I’m saying.

Shirley

Peggy, I think that’s a great final point to be making for us, first to figure out how to deal with our own response to all this. I appreciate that very much.

Bob, do you know what you want to say to everybody? I realize that with Bob’s offer for us, those of you who are Patreon supporters, I’ll be able to get that to you by tomorrow if Bob gets me this PDF, like overnight. I can get that to you in your emails by tomorrow. That’s for the Patreon people who will be meeting with us next week in the Reflections groups. So if you’re not a Patreon person, you can get it in the email, which will come out on the third Wednesday of the month. If you are a Patreon supporter, then you’ll get it tomorrow. How about that?

Bob, do you have any sort of final thought you want to leave with us?

Robert

Apart from some crass, you know, buy my book! No, I mean, I just want to say in front of all of you that Shirley’s doing such a remarkable thing here, that she has built this out of her own determination and love and care and her expertise. A lot of people have determination, but they don’t have expertise. A lot of experts don’t care enough to actually do what she does. So you are really blessed in having this person who month after month after month after month comes up with truly substantive programs for you. So thank you, Shirley.

Shirley

Gosh, thank you, Bob. I haven’t heard that before, but thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And thanks, everybody, for your participation. This was the September 2025 Bible and Beyond discussion titled, “Did Jesus Fulfill Prophecy?” Now you can think about that question with our guest scholar, Dr. Robert Miller. Thank you for spending the time with us for our monthly Bible and Beyond Discussion. We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern Time. So our next meeting will be on Monday, October 27th.

These Bible and Beyond Discussions are led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of some early Christian text. And then for the last half hour, as you know, participants have a chance to ask their own questions. And before we finish up, don’t forget to go to patreon.com/bibleand beyond/ to sign up.

Now, who’s coming next month? Dr. Lillian Larsen is going to talk to us about the ancient world from her work on the Christianity II Seminar when she found out that Eusebius was telling us things that we don’t really want to take too seriously either. So we’ll talk to Lillian about Eusebius next month.

So anyway, please join me in a special thanks to Bob for coming to be with us tonight and helping us dig beneath the surface of these ancient prophecies. Thank you so much. Thank you, Bob.

Robert

You’re welcome.