I had a bit of an ah-hah moment last night when I read that Romans were very much into prophecy. I had read that before and it had been described as a point of attraction for Romans of Christianity. I had also read that the early Christian writers scoured the Old Testament (OT), their only scripture at the time, prophecy-mining as it were. They found scads of OT prophecies and re-framed them as prophecies of the coming of Jesus.
All of a suddenly it clicked. Why did those New Testament (NT) writers scour “scripture” for references predicting the coming of Jesus on Earth? It was because they were focused on converting pagans to the “new” religion and since they were in the Roman Empire, that meant they were trying to attract Romans. Romans being impressed by prophecies, caused the NT authors to find as many as they could, even to the point of making them up or reframing them in ways they clearly were not intended for.
And modern Christians often point to the prophecies in the NT as “proof” of the existence of Jesus and his god, as the Romans themselves did.
So, you now understand that the NT authors included prophecies (which were both out of time and place) into their writings, claiming them to be linked to Jesus, in order to attract Romans, and then millennia later Christians use those prophesies as “proof” of the existence of their god-man.
I wonder if the original prophets knew that their work would come around like that: turned into fiction (different fictions?) and then used as concrete proof of the existence of the fictional Jesus.
Uncommon Sense 