Harry Marks wrote:We all know that the subconscious can "see" a pattern, such as a developing traffic accident, and respond to it without any conscious involvement. I have experienced that myself. My idea is that it is possible for a person to develop sufficient trust in evaluations that have no conscious input that the person begins to interpret these as having a divine origin. So they may "feel" that, say, Egypt is not the enemy but Assyria is, or Judah has no inner strength because the rich have been oppressing the poor villagers, without having any careful argumentation to support these intuitions. When enough of these seem to have proven out, the prophet is given "true" status.
It would seem to be rare enough going by the number of traffic accidents,Harry.
I don't see how something like this could account for Isaiah naming Cyrus the Persian king 150 years in advance describing his conquest of Babylon,the return of the Jews from Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple. And this before the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the first place.
The higher critics put forth theories to postdate it saying there was a second writer who added the later chapters after the event and stuck it on to the earlier Isaiah writings.
So all the Jews who knew of the earlier Isaiah writings just blindly swallowed this story knowing it was not part of the original?
The whole point of the passage about Cyrus is that the God of Israel distinguishes himself from the impotent pagan idols by prophesying the course of future history.
No evidence is ever offered for this theory of a second later writer and it's based on arguments about form and style but there are perfectly good indicators of uniformity in theme and style.
http://www.bibleresearch.org/articles/a2pws.htm
Harry Marks wrote:A very small proportion of the prophetic literature rose to transcendent heights and became the basis for several renewal movements in first century Judaism, including Christianity. "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," or "I despise the noise of your solemn assemblies" or "by his stripes we are healed" or "the dry bones shall arise and walk" or "they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks". These are recognized as capturing something deeper and more abiding than the laws of the temple or the prophetic predictions about Edom and Moab.
I believe Jesus saw deeply into them and, inspired, created both a new relationship with God and a new understanding of Messiah, and then, by living out those insights, overturned the order of the world.
I'm not sure what you base your beliefs about Jesus on, Harry. The gospels or gnostic writings or something else?
In John's gospel he challenged the religious Jews by saying to them. "You search the scriptures daily,and these are they which testify of me, but you will not come to me that you may have life."
The postdating argument can't be used for Isaiah ch 53 and other passages.
You seem to be saying something a bit different which is that there is a subconscious intuition that can work in a prophetic way.
The prophets though often prefaced their words with; "Thus says the Lord." So they are saying it's not their word or unconscious intuitions that they are relaying.
Sometimes I seem to be giving the Germans a hard time whether it's their higher critics of old or their Nazi past. It has to be said that their response to the Syrian refugee crisis is remarkable and exemplary from a humanitarian perspective.