False Prophecy and Religion

The War of the Messiah

Well I certainly did not finish these scrolls in 10 days!  And I was certainly not prepared to write posts for the last month – even if I had brought my copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls to North Carolina.  The only writing I accomplished was a rough draft and hopefully the final copy of my proposal to study in Korea this summer.  But let me get back to the DSC.

To refresh your memory and mine, I will repeat my opening statements about this particular scroll.  This Scroll is two pages long and when discovered created quite a controversy.  As more research was placed on the meaning of this document, the Yahad were determined to believe that the Messiah would be victorious and make Israel a leading nation in the world. 

The source material for John of Patmos’ Book of Revelations is sitting open in front of me at this very moment.  In the War of the Messiah, written between 200 and 100 BCE, the Israelite hopes of an earthly Messiah are recorded without apology.  Two Old Testament “prophecies” are recorded in this Scroll verbatim.  Both references are written with an introduction recorded as:

4Q285 Frag. 4 just as it is written in the book of Ezekiel the prophet:

Ezek 39:3-4 Then I will strike your bow from your hand and make your arrows drop from your right hand.  On the mountain of Israel you will fall, you and all your troops and the nations with you.

4Q285 Frag. 7 + 11Q14 Frag. 1 Col. 1 – just as it is written in the book of Isaiah the prophet:

Isaiah 10:34-11:1 He will cut down the forest thickets with an axe; Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One.  A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

To this very day many Christians claim that Matt 2:23 is in reference to Isaiah 11:1.  So there is little doubt that this concept – of linking Jesus with Isaiah 11 – was well known in the century when Christianity began.  Ezekiel 39 has the same connotation, since it has not come to pass yet: Lebanon is still a country in the Middle East, and is still bordering Israel.  For the Yahad the hope was that these verses would be fulfilled with the first coming of the Messiah, for Christian this exact same hope is now placed in the second coming of the Messiah.  But in the end for over 2100 years these verses have been used by Jews and Christians alike to claim prophecy in the Bible has accurate prophecies.

Isn’t wonderful that religion can depend on eternity to fulfill prophecy!  If it doesn’t work this time maybe in the following year or the year after that or maybe in the next century, or how about 2100 years from now this prophecy will come true!  They may be waiting for another 2000 years before these prophecies are realized…

It truly amazes me that random acts of current events can be used to claim that a “prophecy” has been fulfilled.  Yet the same people cannot understand that evolution can, but almost always does not, occur the exact same way!  The act of restoring the nation of Israel by the UN in 1948 has even been claimed to fulfill prophecy by those who believe that the rapture will occur before the seven years of tribulations.

To a gay Atheist these promises of unfilled prophecy are just fantasy of the desperate.  These are just people clinging to an old religion that has had fragmentation from the beginning of the religion.  As I read more of the Dead Sea Scrolls it becomes obvious that the people who started the Christian religion were just using specific hopes and desires of the community of that time to draw crowds to their fledging religion.  It is obvious that the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was responsible for a large number of people to lose faith in Judaism.  Those same people were looking for something new, they found it in Christianity. 

This entry was posted on December 2, 2009, 9:24 am at 09:24 and is filed under War of the Messiah, Dead Sea Scroll, Readings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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