In this festive finale of The Bible for Normal People Season 8, Pete and Jared unwrap a big question: does the Old Testament really predict Jesus’s birth? They dive into Matthew’s creative storytelling, explore what prophecy and fulfillment actually mean, and break down some common assumptions about the Christmas story. Join them as they explore the following questions:
- What does prophecy mean in the context of the Hebrew Bible?
- How does the New Testament use the Old Testament to talk about Jesus?
- What does “fulfillment” mean in Matthew’s Gospel?
- How did prophets in the Old Testament function, and what were their roles?
- What was the immediate historical context of Isaiah 7:14, and how does it relate to Jesus?
- Why does Matthew use a Greek translation of Isaiah to refer to a virgin birth?
- What is the significance of the phrase “Out of Egypt I called my son” from Hosea 11:1 in Matthew’s narrative?
- How do Jewish interpretations like Midrash influence Matthew’s Gospel?
- Why does Matthew tie Jesus to texts like Micah 5:2, Jeremiah 31:15, and Exodus 4:19?
- How does Jesus “fulfill” the story of Israel without being explicitly predicted?
- What does this approach to prophecy mean for modern interpretations of the Bible?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
- “Prophecy in the Old Testament is not so much prediction—at least not prediction of something way off in the future. It’s really a proclamation. The prophet’s job was to interpret the times, what’s happening. Interpreting the invasion of the Assyrians, for example, from a divine point of view.” — Pete Enns
- “Fulfilled doesn’t mean predicted. You can fulfill something without being predicted. Jesus fulfills kingship, the kingship of the Old Testament doesn’t predict Jesus. Jesus is, for Matthew especially, a new Moses—but the story of Moses doesn’t predict Jesus.” — Pete Enns
- “Jesus fills these roles or these archetypes that have been set up in our tradition. That’s fulfilling it. That doesn’t mean that [the author of] particular passages was zapped by God and had a vision of a future person named Jesus, and then gave us this vague encoding of it.” — Jared Byas
- “When we think of fulfilling, we should think of how later authors are tying traditions and their story into their religious tradition. Prediction is the past predicting the future, where fulfillment is future authors, if you will, or present authors trying to tie themselves back in meaningful ways to the tradition.” — Jared Byas
- “Matthew is participating in that prophetic tradition. I think it oversteps when we say there are particular passages that predict Jesus’s birth.” — Jared Byas
- “The New Testament authors are taking the Old Testament passage out of context, but that’s what people in their context did. That’s the conundrum. And this is why I think one of the most powerful things to engage is how the New Testament actually uses the Hebrew Bible. It’s not friendly to certain views of inerrancy or certain ways of thinking of biblical authority.” — Pete Enns
- “You could say Jesus embodies Israel’s story, even from the earliest part of Israel’s story from the Exodus.” — Pete Enns
- “If we want to get to that ancient context and how the ancients would have read texts or heard texts, they aren’t interested in the question ‘Is it true?’ We are obsessed with that question. How does this impact how we live as faithful members of the community? How do we connect our stories to our ancestors? Those are real concrete questions that [they were] asking and wrestling with. And I think it would just do us well to maybe be less afraid of that question for our time.” — Jared Byas
- “Matthew is exploiting the grammatical ambiguities of the text and lifting it up out of its original context and placing it in a totally different one. That is very offensive, I think, largely for modern readers. We just don’t read like that. If you want to understand the Bible in context, which we all want to do, understanding how they interpret a text is important.” — Jared Byas
- “Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. It’s not like a “Where’s Waldo?” in the Old Testament. ‘There he is, and there he is, and there—do you think Jesus is over here?’ I don’t think that’s a satisfactory way of looking at how the New Testament ties Jesus to Israel’s story. And that’s why just simple prediction doesn’t really explain that. It doesn’t really cut it.” — Pete Enns
Mentioned in This Episode
- Class: December class “A Manger Misunderstanding” taught by Pete Enns
- Join: The Society of Normal People community
- Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
