The Old Testament described Jesus before he was born. No one but God could
have foretold in such detail so many different kinds of things about Jesus.
The Jews themselves had identified many of these Scriptures as foretelling
Messiah. They were not brought to light until after Jesus came. They were
plain for all to see. Some of them are so astonishing that we may feel
they can only have been written after the events they speak about. Yet
the evidence that they were written centuries before is altogether
beyond doubt. Let us say it clearly: the birth, life, mission, death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth were detailed in the old
Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, and read in Jewish synagogues
at home and abroad, and faithfully preserved right down to our own
times.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, some of them pre-dating the
birth of Jesus by over 200 years, contain, for example, copies of the
prophet Isaiah with exactly the same prophecies as are known to us
from our English Bible. The same is true of the Greek translations
of the Old Testament: they too were made two or three centuries before
Christ and are known to us by various manuscripts now in museums in
different parts of the world. Thus the prophecies were known in Hebrew
and Greek long before Jesus came. Therefore, it would simply be flying
in the face of incontestable facts to say that these prophecies were
'inserted' after Jesus was born.
In any case, we must remember that the Jewish nation is not Christian and
they would never have allowed their Bible, the Old Testament, to be
tampered with by Christian hands. To try to plead, as some have done,
that the prophecies were added at a later date is only to admit how
good they are! The only Bible available to Jesus was the one we know
as the Old Testament. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first
century AD, lists the books in the Jewish Bible in his day and they
are exactly the ones we have in our Old Testament. The Old Testament
without doubt predates the time of Jesus.
