At the end of the New Testament in the first verse in the Book of Revelation, we find the following words,
1 The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.[1]
At the end of the revelation, John tries to worship the angel who brought him the end-time message. The angel says,
10 See thou do it not: I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. [2]
A testimony is a document that confirms the will of the testifier. Like a person’s will is a document giving evidence or proof or testament to his desires. The spirit of prophecy found in the Bible is the testament or proof or evidence that Jesus is God. The accuracy of God’s prophecies confirms or testifies that Jesus is the Christ. The accuracy of God’s prophecies confirms or testifies to the fact that the Bible is true.
In my condensed Bible concordance I can find some 48 Old Testament Messianic prophecies, or prophecies concerning the coming of the Jewish Messiah, all of which were fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Nowhere in all of ancient Greek and Latin literature can there be found any real specific prophecy of a great historical event to come in the distant future. To the contrary, the Bible is full of countless, detailed, specific prophecies, all of which have been miraculously fulfilled and come true—except the final End-time prophecies which are either to be fulfilled in the near future or are coming to pass right now.[3]
What would be the chance of one person just happening to fulfill all 48 prophecies by chance?
After researching, I have found some interesting information. In 1957 Peter W. Stoner, a university professor at Pasadena City College in California, did a study of the possibility of one person fulfilling 48 of the nearly 300 to 350 Messianic prophecies. His work was published in 1957 by Moody Press in Chicago, Illinois and was titled SCIENCE SPEAKS, An Evaluation of Certain Christian Evidences.[4] The research was done with the help of the students from twelve different classes who were taking a course on Christian Evidence.
First Professor Stoner, with the help of each Evidence class, estimated the odds for just eight of the Messianic prophecies being fulfilled by one man. They made “reasonable and conservative estimates” which the students agreed upon unanimously. For example, they tried to figure out the odds of a child born in Bethlehem at the beginning of the first century becoming the Messiah. What were the odds of three wise men would come from the east and bestow gifts on the child and his family? What were the odds that they same child would escape the slaying of the male children of Bethlehem by Herod the Great? What were the odds of that child traveling specifically to Egypt and then returning later to live in Nazareth so that later he would be called a Nazarene?
Stoner then took the average result for each of the possible eight prophecies calculated by the twelve different classes. By multiplying the probability that was found for one of the prophecies by the other seven prophecies, he came up with the probability of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies.[5]
Making the reasonable and conservative assumption that the other forty prophetic possibilities would have nearly the same rate of probability, he did the math. He found that the odds of one person fulfilling all 48 prophecies would be 1 in 10 to the 157th power or one over 10 followed by 157 zeros, or one chance out of
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
French Mathematician Emil Borel suggested in the late 1950’s that a number with a probability of 10-50, or one in ten to the fiftieth power, represents “a negligible event on the cosmic scale.”[6] Therefore 10 to the negative 157 would be even less negligible. It’s just beyond possibility for one person to accidentally fulfill all 48 prophecies of the some 300-350 total Messianic prophecies found in the Bible. Nevertheless, Jesus did.
Attorney Lee Stroebel, the former agnostic journalist with the Chicago Tribune, who had received Illinois’ highest honor for public service in investigating reporting from United Press International, said in 2007 that statistical information presented in Professor Stoner’s Science Speaks about the Messianic prophecies was one of the factors which gave him confidence to believe in Christ. Lee went on to become a New York Times besting-selling author with his books The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith and The Case for Easter.[7]
Footnotes:
[1] Revelation 1:1
[2] Revelation 19:10b
[3] Treasures, World Services, Zurich, Switzerland, 1987, pg.19.
[4] http://dstoner.net/Science_Speaks/Science_Speaks.html
[5]http://www.bereanpublishers.com/the-odds-of-eight-messianic-prophecies-coming-true/ ; http://jvmi.co.uk/who-is-yeshua/reasons-to-believe/prophecies.html
[6] http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/borelfaq.html
[7] http://www.leestrobel.com/Bio.php
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