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Prophecy is appealed to in support of his divinity. It is claimed that the writers of the Old Testament predicted his coming. Do such predictions exist?
In his work on “The Bible,” as well as in a previous chapter of this work, the writer has shown that there is not a single passage in the Old Testament that, in the original text, refers in the remotest degree to Jesus Christ.
Greg shows that much of Old Testament history, like Deuteronomy, is presented in the form of anticipatory narrative. To the Christian argument that the Messianic predictions, at least, were written long anterior to the time of Christ, he replies: “This is true, and the argument would have all the force which is attributed to it, were the objectors able to lay their fingers on a single Old Testament prediction clearly referring to Jesus Christ, intended by the utterers of it to relate to him, prefiguring his character and career, and manifestly fulfilled in his appearance on earth. This they cannot do. Most of the passages usually adduced as complying with these conditions, referred, and were clearly intended to refer, to eminent individuals in Israelitish history; many are not prophecies at all; the Messiah, the anointed deliverer, expected by the Jews, hoped for and called for by their poets and prophets, was of a character so different, and a career so opposite, to those of the meek, lowly, long-suffering Jesus, that the passages describing the one never could have been applied to the other, without a perversion of ingenuity, and a disloyal treatment of their obvious signification, which, if employed in any other field than that of theology, would have met with the prompt discredit and derision they deserve” (Creed of Christendom, pp. 135, 136).