Usually a church would be a natural location in which to question
someone about a biblical issue. But there was something different
about sitting down with Pastor Louis Lapides in the sanctuary of his
congregation on the morning after Sunday worship services. This
setting of pews and stained glass was not where you would expect to
find a nice Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey.

Yet that's Lapides' background. For someone with his heritage, the
question of whether Jesus is the long-anticipated Messiah goes beyond
theory. It's intensely personal, and I had sought out Lapides so I could
hear the story of his own investigation of this critical issue.

Lapides earned a bachelor's degree in theology from Dallas Baptist University, as well as a master of divinity and a master of theology degree in Old Testament and Semitics from Talbot Theological Seminary. He served for a decade with Chosen People Ministries, talking about Jesus to Jewish college students. He has taught in the Bible department of Biola University and is the former president of a national network of fifteen messianic congregations.

"If the prophecies were so obvious to you and pointed so
unquestionably toward Jesus," I asked, "then why don't more Jews
accept him as their Messiah?"

"In my case, I took the time to read them," he replied. "Oddly enough,
even though the Jewish people are known for having high intellects, in
this area there's a lot of ignorance. Plus you have countermissionary
organizations that hold seminars in synagogues to try to disprove the
messianic prophecies. Jewish people hear them and use them as an
excuse for not exploring the prophecies personally. They'll say, ?The
rabbi told me there's nothing to this.'

"I'll ask them, ?Do you think the rabbi just brought up an objection
that Christianity has never heard before? I mean, scholars have been
working on this for hundreds of years! There's great literature out
there and powerful Christian answers to those challenges.' If they're
interested, I help them go further."

I wondered about the ostracism a Jewish person faces if he or she
becomes a Christian. "That's definitely a factor," he said. "Some
people won't let the messianic prophecies grab them, because they're
afraid of the repercussions — potential rejection by their family and the
Jewish community. That's not easy to face. Believe me, I know."
Even so, some of the challenges to the prophecies sound pretty
convincing when a person first hears them. So one by one I posed the
most common objections to Lapides to see how he would respond.
The Coincidence Argument

First, I asked Lapides whether it's possible that Jesus merely fulfilled
the prophecies by accident. Maybe he's just one of many throughout
history who have coincidentally fit the prophetic fingerprint.

"Not a chance," came his response. "The odds are so astronomical that
they rule that out. Someone estimated that the probability of just
eight prophecies being fulfilled is one chance in one hundred million
billion. That number is millions of times greater than the total number
of people who've ever walked the planet!

"He calculated that if you took this number of silver dollars they would
cover the state of Texas to a depth of two feet. If you marked one
silver dollar among them and then had a blindfolded person wander
the whole state and bend down to pick up one coin, what would be the
odds he'd choose the one that had been marked?"

With that he answered his own question: "The same odds that
anybody in history could have fulfilled just eight of the prophecies."
I had studied this same statistical analysis by mathematician Peter W.
Stoner when I was investigating the messianic prophecies for myself.
Stoner also estimated that the probability of fulfilling forty-eight
prophecies was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!

Our minds can't comprehend a number that big. This is a staggering
statistic that's equal to the number of minuscule atoms in a trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion, billion universes the size of our universe!

"The odds alone say it would be impossible for anyone to fulfill the Old
Testament prophecies," Lapides concluded. "Yet Jesus — and only Jesus
throughout all of history — managed to do it."

The words of the apostle Peter popped into my head: "But the things
which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets,
that His Christ should suffer, He has thus fulfilled."

The Altered Gospel Argument
I painted another scenario for Lapides, asking, "Isn't it possible that
the gospel writers fabricated details to make it appear that Jesus
fulfilled the prophecies?

"For example," I said, "the prophecies say the Messiah's bones would
remain unbroken, so maybe John invented the story about the Romans
breaking the legs of the two thieves being crucified with Jesus, and not
breaking his legs. And the prophecies talk about betrayal for thirty
pieces of silver, so maybe Matthew played fast and loose with the facts
and said, yeah, Judas sold out Jesus for that same amount."

But that objection didn't fly any further than the previous one. "In
God's wisdom, he created checks and balances both inside and outside
the Christian community," Lapides explained. "When the Gospels were
being circulated, there were people living who had been around when
all these things happened. Someone would have said to Matthew, ?You
know it didn't happen that way. We're trying to communicate a life of
righteousness and truth, so don't taint it with a lie.'

"Besides," he added, "why would Matthew have fabricated fulfilled
prophecies and then be willing to be put to death for following
someone who he secretly knew was really not the Messiah? That
wouldn't make any sense.

"What's more, the Jewish community would have jumped on any
opportunity to discredit the Gospels by pointing out falsehoods. They
would have said, ?I was there, and Jesus' bones were broken by the
Romans during the crucifixion,'" Lapides said. "But even though the
Jewish Talmud refers to Jesus in derogatory ways, it never once makes
the claim that the fulfillment of prophecies was falsified. Not one time."

The Intentional Fulfillment Argument
Some skeptics have asserted that Jesus merely maneuvered his life in
a way to fulfill the prophecies. "Couldn't he have read in Zechariah
that the Messiah would ride a donkey into Jerusalem, and then arrange
to do exactly that?" I asked.

"For a few of the prophecies, yes, that's certainly conceivable," he
said. "But there are many others for which this just wouldn't have
been possible.

"For instance, how would he control the fact that the Sanhedrin offered
Judas thirty pieces of silver to betray him? How could he arrange for
his ancestry, or the place of his birth, or his method of execution, or
that soldiers gambled for his clothing, or that his legs remained
unbroken on the cross? How would he arrange to perform miracles in
front of skeptics? How would he arrange for his resurrection? And how
would he arrange to be born when he was?"

That last comment piqued my curiosity. "What do you mean by when
he was born?" I asked.

"When you interpret Daniel 9:24?26, it foretells that the Messiah
would appear a certain length of time after King Artaxerxes I issued a
decree for the Jewish people to go from Persia to rebuild the walls in
Jerusalem," Lapides replied.

He leaned forward to deliver the clincher: "That puts the anticipated
appearance of the Messiah at the exact moment in history when Jesus
showed up," he said. "Certainly that's nothing he could have prearranged."

The Context Argument
One other objection needed to be addressed: Were the passages that
Christians identify as messianic prophecies really intended to point to the coming of the Anointed One, or do Christians rip them out of context and misinterpret them?

Lapides sighed. "You know, I go through the books that people write to try to tear down what we believe. That's not fun to do, but I spend the time to look at each objection individually and then to research the context and the wording in the original language," he said. "And every single time, the prophecies have stood up and shown themselves to be true.

Prophecy of the Virgin Birth Hundreds of years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Isaiah 7:14 foretold: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." Critics, however, have said this is a
mistranslation. They claim the Hebrew word used in this prophecy, almah, merely means "young woman," and that bethulah would have been used if the idea of virginity were intended. But researcher Glenn Miller told me that the latest and most detailed linguistic studies show bethulah could refer to a widow or divorced woman who was not a virgin. Almah is never used of a non-virgin. Says Miller: "If any notion of virginity were intended — even as only an ?implication' — almah was the best/only word to do that job."

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