Welcome to MrKlingon.org - the home of the Universal Translator Assistant Project!
all the scriptures the things concerning himself. Luke 24:27
... he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary... he was crucified
...he suffered death and was buried.... he rose again ...
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE SCRIPTURES
(Nicene Creed)
In the New Testament we find Jesus himself, as well as his apostles, making clear that the whole arc of Jesus's life was promised beforehand in the days of the prophets. When I first caught on, it was breathtaking - "You mean, it was all there, centuries before the first Christmas? Why didn't anyone tell me?"
Then I came across "Science Speaks" by Peter Stoner. This book put it in mathematical terms. Examining Messianic prophecies, Stoner layed down odds for each one being fulfilled in one man; multiplied together he demonstrated that the odds that ANYONE could fulfill these promises were incredible; the fact that they WERE fulfilled in Jesue pointed to something about this Man. (Note: Stoner's book is no longer in print. However it IS available online at his grandson's website: http://geocities.com//stonerdon/science_speaks.html Josh McDowell's "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" is another excellent source of similar material).
Now that isn't a proof that can *force* anyone to believe: after all, any one day in MY life has a series of random events. Taken together, the sequence of one day in my life can be JUST as mathematically unlikely as Christ's fulfilling the Old Testament promises.
But, what it suggests is that "something is up". History, and in particular, the history of Jesus's life and ministry appears against all odds to have been written in advance. It does not prove God "did it," but it offers a hint, a suggestion that there is an intelligence behind history, that this story is in fact HIS story.
Click to Download
This program
I wanted to look at these odds again; so I created this program. It is pretty simple. You can examine the individual prophecies of Christ's life, and you can set an "odds" number (1 out 2, 1 out of 200). On the field of stars, you'll see a running number that represent the cumulative odds that anyone could fulfill all these things.
You can add more prophecies - click "file" and add (or F2), then put in a title, the OT text and the NT text. Put in an odds number (1 or greater).
You can save the prophecy file ("file" then "save"). This saves any new prophecies, and the current odds numbers.
The starter prophecies have been arbitrarily treated as a set of five cards with odds of one in 52, 51, 50, 49, 48. Try 1) adjusting them as you think makes sense 2) try adding more. A list of over 300 prophecies is found in the file messiah.txt (press F1, then "references").