Biblical Prophecy (2)—Christian

The Church broke away from its Jewish origins in the latter part of the first century a.d., when it was virtually defunct in Jerusalem and survived elsewhere mainly as a network of Gentile groups created by the missions of Paul and others. It was still far from having an agreed documentation. Christians, however, inherited the Jewish Bible—to be known presently as the Old Testament—and while some extremists wanted to drop it, the consensus was in favor of keeping it as sacred Scripture. After all, Christ had endorsed it and quoted from it. Christians believed, however, that he had indicated a new way of understanding it, and especially of understanding its prophecies.
Many of these, they held, should be read as foreshadowing him. With that clue in mind, they began finding fresh significance in various prophetic texts. This process can be seen in the First Gospel, which bears the name of Matthew. In support of the belief that Jesus’ mother was a virgin and he had no human father, the author says the miracle is foretold in Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” Isaiah was probably referring to the birth of a royal heir in his own time, not to anything miraculous; the Hebrew word translated “virgin” does not necessarily mean that. Yet in a context of divine inspiration, it is fair to detect a secondary sense beyond the obvious one, and the name Emmanuel (meaning “God with us”) may be thought to hint at such a sense.
Matthew, or whoever the author was, asserts an Old Testament confirmation of Jesus’ status in Micah 5:2, where a messianic figure is to be born in Bethlehem. He also asserts an Old Testament forecast of his entry into Jerusalem in Zechariah 9:9, about Zion’s king coming to her mounted on an ass. He finds foreshadowings in texts that were not originally prophetic at all, such as Zechariah 11:13, which refers to thirty pieces of silver, the sum paid to Judas. The Fourth Gospel finds similar anticipations of the crucifixion, as in Psalm 22:18: “They divided my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots.” This discovery of symbols or “types” in Jewish Scripture went much further, as in the Letter to the Hebrews, where many episodes in the history of Israel are given fresh meanings and made to point in a new direction.
According to Saint Augustine in the fifth century, such anticipations of Christ, extracted from Jewish Scripture, were effective in making converts. When the essential Christian message is once accepted, these texts may indeed be seen as corroborative, yet scarcely as predictive. No one would have taken them thus at the time of writing.
Granted, they are not prophecy invented after the event, but they are prophecy recognized after the event, when they were fulfilled; not before. The most impressive case is the citation in the New Testament (two or three times, though with surprisingly little emphasis) of the “Servant Song” in Isaiah 52:13–53:12. In this, the prophet known as Second Isaiah tells a story that is genuinely hard to account for except in terms of Christian beliefs about Jesus, and he tells it over 500 years before Jesus lived and before those beliefs took shape.
Prophecies by the Christians themselves were concerned with the Second Coming of Christ, the overthrow of the powers of evil, and the End of the World. They were based on reputed sayings of Jesus. In the Gospels, he speaks of the Kingdom—the community of believers, in which God will reign—and its imminent manifestation and ultimate glory. He makes no commitment as to duration: he hints at an undefined future, perhaps a long one, and warns that the day and hour of the End are known only to his heavenly Father. However, some of his sayings, as presented in the Gospels, are given a context suggesting that the End is close and is, in fact, to be within the lifetime of “this generation.”
Wishful thinking or textual confusion may have affected the record. It certainly appears that many Christians did expect an early return of Christ in visible majesty. The second letter of Paul to his Thessalonian converts (its authenticity has been questioned, but the point is irrelevant) reveals that some of them not only thought that the Lord would return soon but that he might even have returned already and were giving up work and the ordinary business of life in that belief: were dropping out, in fact. Paul condemns this behavior, and, in doing so, makes an important contribution to Christian prophecy. He says a diabolic archenemy must appear first, who will afflict and divide the Church until Christ actually does return and destroy him. This is the beginning of the concept of Antichrist, who acquires a settled place in the Christian scheme of things.
The New Testament has one complete and famous prophetic book, the Apocalypse or Revelation by a Jewish Christian named John, traditionally the apostle. It was written, at least in its present form, during the closing decade of the first century. John still seems to be hoping for an early End, but he has touches that imply otherwise. One is a description of the Church in the future as “a great multitude… from every nation,” presupposing many years of worldwide evangelism and growth yet to come.
Revelation belongs to an established genre of Jewish apocalyptic prophecy, but it has a complexity of structure and a richness of imagery that surpass the surviving Jewish examples. At the start, Christ comes to the author in a vision and tells him that he will see “what is and what is to take place hereafter.” This promise has led many commentators to interpret the entire book as a preview of history (or at least the history of those parts of the world that the commentators think important) for many years ahead, sometimes as far as the twentieth century. Such speculation has been encouraged by what look like cryptographic clues in the text. In general, it is misguided. For instance, while chapters 8 and 9, depicting plagues and other disasters, foreshadow divine judgments on the pagan world, they are mythic rather than literal. They cannot be credibly related to anything that actually happened.
In chapters 13 and 17, however, John does symbolize recognizable realities—the anti-Christian Roman Empire, in the guise of a satanically sponsored Beast, and its world-exploiting capital, in the guise of the “harlot” Babylon. He alludes to emperors living in his own time, Nero certainly, Domitian probably. Given these factual references, it is not too fanciful to probe further, and these chapters do have a predictive element and even arguable fulfillments. John foretells a persecution

of Christians immensely more ruthless and widespread than any inflicted hitherto, with a religious aspect of its own; and such a persecution happened in the early fourth century a.d. and not before. He also foretells the ruin of “Babylon,” the city of Rome, by forces generated within the empire itself; and this happened when Rome was sacked by barbarians whom the empire had tried to absorb, in the fifth century and not before.
Revelation looks beyond to the Second Coming, a final conflict, and a thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth. Some Christians took this literally, saying that the Second Coming would bring a kind of Utopia, even a Utopia of material well-being. This “millenarian” opinion failed to meet with ecclesiastical approval, and the thousand-year reign was given a symbolic meaning, but the more down-to-earth reading of John’s prophecy never quite expired.