In my last blog, I wrote about the trip Jesus took down Hosanna Road and his prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem. The fulfillment of various Biblical prophecies, some spoken and recorded hundreds of years earlier, remains one of the strongest evidences of the trustworthiness of the Bible. Events in the life of Jesus himself fulfilled hundreds of Old Testament prophecies. Here’s an excerpt from the Got Questions website explaining how scholars count this subset of Biblical passages:

“The story of Jesus saturates the metanarrative of the Bible, and prophecies of His first advent are found throughout the Old Testament. Allusions to Him also come up in micro ways, as many people and events hint at the work He would accomplish. One scholar, J. Barton Payne, has found as many as 574 verses in the Old Testament that somehow point to or describe or reference the coming Messiah. Alfred Edersheim found 456 Old Testament verses referring to the Messiah or His times. Conservatively, Jesus fulfilled at least 300 prophecies in His earthly ministry.”

Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which marks the place where some believe Jesus was crucified and resurrected.

Mathematically minded scholars have attempted to compute the likelihood of one man, whose life divided history between B.C. and A.D., actually fulfilling so many ancient prophecies. It’s almost impossible. So some of them narrow to just a few prophecies (such as the one that Messiah would ride on a donkey colt) and do the calculations. Here’s analysis from the Bible.org website:

“In his book, Science Speaks, Peter Stoner applies the modern science of probability to just eight prophecies regarding Christ. He says, “The chance that any man might have ...fulfilled all eight prophecies is one in 10 to the 17th. That would be 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.” (one hundred quadrillion).

Stoner suggests that “we take 10 to the 17th silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state 2 feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly... Blindfold a man and tell him he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up [that one marked silver dollar.] What chance would he have of getting the right one?”

Stoner concludes, “Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing those eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man,...providing they wrote them in their own wisdom.”

Apologists have compelling evidence for the existence of God and for the reliability of the Bible. Many scholars have set out to disprove the deity of Christ and truth of the Biblical accounts and ended up coming to faith, by the grace of God, as they studied these matters.