Lydia McGrew’s Math Proves the Bible True?  Did you know we can mathematically prove that the Bible is true? If you don't believe me, give me a chance to show you. >> All right, let's see it. So, first, not only did 40 authors over 1500 years produce one consistent story and message with tens of thousands of cross references. So, I've addressed this chart and this claim many times in the past. These cross references are relationships and connections that we perceive in the text, not necessarily things that were intended by the authors or editors. And the more we impose unifying frameworks upon the text, the more we create opportunity to perceive new connections. And one of the strongest indicators that these cross references were not intended by the authors is that a lot of the cross references in this chart are actually contradictions. So for instance, if you go look at the website of Chris Harrison, the person who created that chart. He talks about what a cross reference is and gives this photo as an example of a cross reference. And on the left you can see 118. That is Acts chapter 1 verse 18. And this is talking about the death of Judas. And the cross reference is to Matthew's contradictory account of the death of Judas. So it's it's not even one consistent story in the one example that the creator of that chart provides of a cross reference. It's a direct contradiction. And I've provided discussions regarding why the attempts to overcome the contradiction between the accounts of Judas just fall flats. And once again, that is the one example of a cross reference that was provided by the person who created that chart. That is a laughable piece of evidence for the supernatural composition and harmonization of the Bible. But even more amazingly, there are hundreds of fulfilled prophecies. >> There isn't a single thing in the Bible that is a historically plausible fulfilled prophecy. Not a single one. There are lots of prophecies that are uttered in one part of the Bible and described as fulfilled in another part of the Bible. And they are not historically plausible. So the assertion that there are hundreds of fulfilled prophecies can only be made on top of a foundation of presuppositions about inherency and infallibility and historicity and univocality and all the rest. If you engage this question at all critically, it just falls to pieces. And I'll just give you a very small sample of those prophecies pulling from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, which perfectly predict the historical facts surrounding Jesus's crucifixion. Neither of which of course constitutes an actual prophecy. Psalm 22 is a lament psalm. It is where the psalmist is lamenting something that happened to them. But Psalm 22 ends with praise because there's a turning point at which God intervenes and saves the psalmist. So these things are later reinterpreted and recast as prophecies because they become interpretive lenses for understanding other people's similar experiences. But that does not make them a prophecy. And Isaiah 53 is talking about the servant who is explicitly and repeatedly identified in Isaiah as the nation of Israel and more specifically a kind of personified representative of Israel. Not necessarily corporate Israel isomemmetrically, but kind of a a uh projection of a personified Israel. And it's also not a prophecy. It's just talking about things that have already happened. And once again, later down the road, people reinterpret it because it becomes an interpretive lens for bringing meaning and significance to experiences that they feel are related. And so you overlay the earlier text to try to bring out more insight and more meaning and more significance. That does not make it a prophecy. Philosopher and historian Lydia Mcgru ran the probabilities using the standard historical data. Uh >> in point of fact, Mcgru actually does not use standard historical data. Mcgru asserts a bunch of presuppositions not only about how the text is constituted but also how it is translated and then interpreted. And Mcgru acknowledges that there are objections that could be raised to these presuppositions and Mcgru does not engage them. Instead, Mcgru punts to a Messianic Jewish apologist and specifically to this book, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volume 3, Messianic Prophecy Objections. So, for instance, if I were to point out that Psalm 22:16 does not actually say, "They pierced my hands and my feet." What is Mcgru's response? Well, in a footnote to point to Brown's book, as you see here in note four, after the biblioraphic data, see Brown for a detailed discussion of the controversy over the text translated they have pierced and whether it should be translated as like a lion. Both a variant of the Maseretic text and the Septuagent support the translation as they have pierced. But this doesn't actually engage the concern because the concern is not should we reconstruct the verbal root kah for the word in Psalm 22:16 in the Maseretic text that looks like like a lion. The concern is what does ka mean? Because Brown doesn't address that. Brown just says, "Oh, we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls it's probably ka and the Septuagent translates oro." And Brown says, "Well, they both mean pierced." And that's simply false. They don't mean pierced. They mean to dig out. And when you look at the way those words are used, both the Hebrew root and the Greek root, there is no plausible case to make that this has anything whatsoever to do with nails piercing hands and feet during a crucifixion. And you can look at my own video number mlen 3050 for a thorough argument for why you just cannot translate the Hebrew root kaga even if that is what's supposed to be in Psalm 22:16 or the Greek root oro as pierced. It just doesn't mean that. So Mcgru doesn't even address that and Brown doesn't even address that. But it gets even worse because Mcgru also addresses the fact that well these aren't actually prophecies. So here in this paragraph, one challenge at this point would be the claim that these passages are not messianic at all. On that point, space does not permit any detailed discussion here. Michael Brown has summarized and discussed the arguments pro and con on this subject and has shown the presence in Jewish tradition of both the futuristic interpretation of Psalm 22. That is that it was not usually taken in Jewish tradition to be a reference to the psalmist's own life and its messianic interpretation. Now, Brown does do that, but there's a problem here. Brown is answering Jewish objections, and Brown is answering Jewish objections by pointing to Jewish tradition and what is usually considered authoritative among Jewish people. And so, Brown is not saying, look, the data actually demonstrate this was a prophecy. Brown is saying, well, Rashi interpreted it as a prophecy. There's Jewish tradition that interprets it as a prophecy. So how can you say it's not a prophecy? But if rashi or Jewish tradition are not authoritative for you, there's absolutely no sense whatsoever in which Brown has demonstrated that this should be understood as a prophecy. Brown is trying to leverage orthodoxy to pressure someone into accepting that interpretation. Brown is not actually using any historical data to demonstrate it's a plausible interpretation of those texts. Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 are not prophecies. And no, Rashi saying well they're futuristic doesn't change anything about that. So Mcgru doesn't address these things. Mcgru doesn't use standard historical data. She punts to a Messianic Jewish apologist whose argument only works if you consider Jewish tradition and authorities to be authoritative over how you interpret a text that was written a thousand years before those Jewish authorities. This is laughable apologetics. >> 22 and Isaiah 53 predict things like that the Messiah would be crucified. >> They predict absolutely no such thing whatsoever. that he would be silent, nonviolent, and innocent, that Roman soldiers would gamble for his clothes, that he would be buried in a rich man's tomb, that no bones would be broken, and so on. And if you are writing your narrative about Jesus precisely so as to evoke those ideas from the Hebrew Bible, you write your story in a way that evokes those ideas from the Hebrew Bible. Each detail alone is maybe a coincidence, but all of those together, Lydia Mcgru calculates the probability to be 25 million to one as Jesus actually being the Messiah. And once again, this does not deal with standard historical data and presupposes a bunch of things about the authorship of the gospels, about the eyewitness status of the authors, about the historicity of what is written in the gospels. And obviously that paper by Mcgru is not the place to relitigate all of that. But it has been litigated academically and the consensus view is that these things are not historical and that they were precisely written with fulfillment of those stories from the Hebrew Bible in mind. >> On top of all of that, Jesus fitting those prophecies makes his resurrection not surprising but expected. >> Wow. Imagine that. The external evidence shows that he actually had a resurrection as well. >> It absolutely does no such thing whatsoever. >> It's like, how could this guy not be the Messiah? >> Well, if you do not dogmatically presuppose it, then it's very clearly not the case. >> Quickly refute the most popular objection. >> Oh, I bet you will, which is, what if the authors purposely made up those details to fulfill the prophecies? First of all, there's no independent historical reason to believe that beside your psychological bias. >> Well, that's a laugh riot. Uh but there are lots of good reasons to draw that conclusion. Uh it is the academic consensus that the authors of the gospels crafted their narratives in ways that would have Jesus more directly fulfill prophecy and more fully resonate with characters and stories from the Hebrew Bible. In fact, you can look at places where one gospel author is adopting a story from a previous gospel but is then changing it so that they can go on to say see this fulfills prophecy even though it is precisely the change that results in the prophecy fulfillment. And this is particularly clear in Matthew, which by the way is the only gospel where some of these details are even found, such as the notion that Jesus was buried in a rich man's tomb. Matthew's the only one who calls that out. And that's an alteration from the story from Mark. And you've got a bunch of other examples in Matthew of that going on. So this argument only works if you know nothing about the scholarship and if you refuse to accept historical critical methodologies and literary methodologies and text critical methodologies. This only works if you have no awareness of much less training in actual critical academic approaches which this content creator doesn't have and which their audience is even less likely to have. So, this is an argument that's going to work for this content creator's audience because that audience has less of an idea what they're talking about than this content creator, who by the way doesn't even begin to have the first clue what they're talking about. >> Secondly, I take it well established that the gospels are historically reliable. So, to take these details with less credence is arbitrary. >> But the gospels are not historically reliable. And so the argument here is, well, as long as you presuppose the Gospels are historically reliable, then you ought to accept that the Gospels are historically reliable. But they're not. This is just a dogma this time quite explicitly stacked on top of another dogma. >> Thirdly, the apostles themselves were partially convinced that Jesus was the Messiah because of these fulfilled prophecies. that is granted you accept the historical reliability of the gospels as well as traditions about the apostles that come from centuries later. Many of the prophecies actually very clumsily fit the Old Testament which we would not expect at all if they were just making up the details to fit. It's actually precisely what we would expect because to try to match the events of Jesus's life precisely to these prophecies would contradict because for instance Psalm 22 has this lament but then ends with praising God for saving the individual. So, when they're considering how to tell a story about Jesus and have him fulfill a prophecy and they identify Psalm 22 as the prophecy they like, they can't very well say, "Well, it turns out he survived the whole time, they have to clumsily read Jesus into Psalm 22." It's precisely what you would expect from a secondary attempt to overlay things onto these texts so that they could be appropriated as prophecies about something they were never about. >> Lastly, why would the authors make that up and follow a fake Messiah and blaspheme their God? Same reason people make up garbage about Bible codes and about the gospel message hidden in the meanings of the names in Genesis 5 and countless other things that people still do down to this day. Not because the data support them, but because it makes the texts and the traditions and the figures more meaningful and more useful and it makes them feel better. That's why. >> And even more so risk their lives for what they believed in. >> For someone who presumes to judge other people's psychological biases, this is one of the least psychologically curious questions I think I've ever heard. Every day all around the world, billions of people make stuff up to rationalize and to justify their beliefs and their actions and their worldviews. And there are circumstances where that means taking on significant risk to one's mental health, to one's well-being, to one's livelihood, even to one's life. That kind of thing happens because identity politics are a hell of a drug. There is a perfectly rational explanation for how this can all happen. You just have to be willing to listen to it and to think critically, which this content creator very clearly is not. >> That objection is an utter failure. Stop coping. [laughter] It is statistically insane to believe that Jesus is not the Messiah. The laughable argumentation and the sophomoric hyperbolic rhetoric in place of an actual argument is just so delicious. Uh, but what a ridiculous argument. And the fit for this video is Bizaro., Lydia McGrew’s Math Proves the Bible True?, YouTube, 01kgfvrw529t3v8y41hmcyg5kw.