300, 3 and 1

I have only one ask today: that you read this.

I’d like to make an editor’s comment here. When I write about spiritual matters, I see a definite hit to the reader count for those posts. At the risk—probably a certainty—of turning some of you off, I want to tell you that the spiritual matters are more important to me than the political, so I will continue to write about them. While I do care if you read our content here, I care more for souls and the Kingdom of God, the King of which is Yeshua HaMoshiach, known in the Greek as Jesus the Christ, or just Jesus. I have only one ask today: that you read this.

The Shroud of Turin, public domain

The Old Testament consists of 39 books, according to current canon. That is approximately 306,757 words* in Hebrew and Aramaic. The ancient scriptures are nearly exact in accuracy as scribes copied them through the ages; such was the discipline of those dedicated to the preservation of their only source of wisdom. We know this from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were produced in the 400 year span, beginning shortly after the ministry of final prophet, Malachi, and ending within 100 years after Christ.

The Torah, specifically, adds Masoretic text to sections that are the equivalent to what today we would call a hash, or a checksum. These ensure that the text represented in the section is exactly what was copied from its source. If a scribe made so much as a single error in a letter, the entire section would be discarded. In Matthew 5:18, Jesus himself said to a large crowd in the Sermon on the Mount, “For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle shall in any wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.”

The books of the Old Testament are as reliable, or more so, as any ancient historical document, in that Torah scrolls are still produced in the same way by scribes in Israel.

In the Old Testament, there are some 300 or more specific prophecies regarding the lineage, birth, ministry, sovereignty, ministry, and position of Jesus Christ. His name in Greek literally translates to Yeshua the Anointed One, or the Messiah, the son of the living God. These prophecies also include his resurrection. Taken together, somewhere around 324 prophecies, all fulfilled by Yeshua, and documented in the synoptic gospels, are supported by physical, archeological, and non-scripture-based historical evidence. There is no clear evidence that Jesus didn’t live or that he was made up. There is no convincing physical evidence that the events in the gospels did not happen.

Most scholars agree on the smaller number of 48 explicitly Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. The mathematical probability of one person fulfilling just these 48 is 1:10¹⁵⁷. To put that huge number into perspective, the probability of two people having the same fingerprints is approximately 1:64 billion. The prophetic fulfillment of Messianic prophecies by Yeshua is about 146 orders of magnitude greater than you not being the only person ever to have lived with your own fingerprints. In all of Earth’s history, approximately 117-121 billion people have ever lived, according to most scientists. That means there’s a non-zero chance you don’t have unique fingerprints. But there is really no chance another person could fit the Biblical framework of the Jewish Messiah. Statistically, it could never happen twice in the history of the universe.

Why would Jews spend so much time and effort maintaining perfect copies of the Law, the Prophets and the Hagiographa (collectively, the Tanakh)? Jewish scholars in the days of the Roman Empire knew why: the time of the Messiah must come. They foretold signs of the coming King to the tetrarch Herod the Great, whose authority stemmed from Rome. Herod considered anyone who could rival his authority as a threat, so he went to great lengths to root out this baby King. He even had all the children born in Bethlehem slaughtered after he was visited by three men of means from the east who said they came to worship the child.

The Old Testament is divided into three sections: the Torah, which is the Law; the Prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the way through to Malachi; and the Hagiographa, which is the collection of history, songs and wisdom in the books of Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. Collectively, it is called by an acronym: Tanakh.

The concept of God is also divided into three unique but coherent persons who form a unity—the One True God (Elohim, a plural word) of the Hebrews. The Father, Aveenu Malchanu—our Father, our King—or abba, God, Yahweh, is the Master. The Spirit of God, which “brooded” over the void in Genesis 1:2, is the motive force that moves the universe into being, the energy or power, the Ruach HaKodesh, or Holy Spirit of God. The Torah itself is considered part of God, as his Word. Old Torah scrolls are not thrown away, they are buried with a funeral, given the same honor as a person, for the Word of God is divine.

Three sections of the Tanakh, and three persons of God, but only one was given as a Son to make the Word into flesh and blood. The Father conceived the Son by the Holy Spirit, who passed over Miriam—Mary, the mother of Jesus—and Yeshua was born. When Yeshua’s ministry, announced by his cousin John the Baptist, was anointed from heaven, the Holy Spirit descended on the Messiah “as a dove” during the baptism. It all happened in one small slice of land known then as Judea, and today as Israel.

These places still exist. You can walk on the ground and tread water in the Jordan River. You can stand on the hillside where Yeshua preached his “Sermon on the Mount” by the Sea of Galilee (the Kinneret, a fresh water lake in Israel). You can walk through Jerusalem in the steps that Yeshua took on his last day living as a mortal human.

On a Friday, Yom Shishi, the day when the Sabbath—Shabbat—begins at sundown (Jewish days begin and end at sundown), Yeshua carried the means of his execution, a wooden cross onto which he’d be nailed, in one of the most gruesome, painful deaths imaginable. It’s where we get the term “excruciating.” As his weight crushed the tendons in his nailed feet, the nails in his hands (or likely, wrists), would not allow his upper body to hold himself up, and his chest muscles would burn as he struggled to breathe. Yeshua was slowly asphyxiated as his lungs filled with fluid.

Finally, he uttered his last words, “it is finished!” and died, about three o’clock in the afternoon, according to the New Testament writers. When he died, at the moment the priests slaughtered the Paschal Lamb at the temple, which was part of the observance of Passover, the scriptures record in Matthew 27:

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split ⁵² and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. ⁵³ They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

The Jewish authorities were very eager to get the body of Yeshua and the others who were executed that day off their crosses, so that the sanctity of the Sabbath would not be violated by dealing with dead bodies, which were considered unclean. So they asked the Roman guards to break the legs of the condemned, to hasten their death. But Yeshua was already dead, so they only pierced his side with a spear to prove that he was dead. Blood and fluid issued forth from his body.

They took the body down and a man named Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, approached the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to ask for the body. Pilate granted the body, and it was taken to Joseph’s tomb, where it was prepared with burial spices and a wrapped in burial cloths, including a face covering. The body was placed in Joseph’s tomb, and a large stone was rolled over the opening in the cave to seal it up. The chief priest, Caiaphas, knowing that Yeshua had claimed to his disciples that he was the Messiah, and knowing that he had claimed he would rise from the dead in three days, asked the Romans to post a guard at the tomb, so that Yeshua’s followers could not rob the grave and claim their rabbi had risen from the dead.

Matthew 28 recounts the third day, Yom Rishon, Sunday.

28 After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

² There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. ⁴ The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

⁵ The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

⁸ So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

The Guards’ Report

¹¹ While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. ¹² When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money,¹³ telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him awaywhile we were asleep.’ ¹⁴ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” ¹⁵ So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

The Great Commission

¹⁶ Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. ¹⁷ When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. ¹⁸ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Jesus no longer wore the grave clothes or the mask of death. But today, you can go to Turin, Italy, where there is purported to be a relic of that day. Skeptics say that the weave of the cloth and radiocarbon dating show it to be of medieval origin, not the first century. However, 3D mapping by NASA’s VP-8 image analyzer showed that depth information was encoded in the image seen on the shroud, which would have been near impossible to create using medieval techniques.

To date, nobody has been able to replicate the Shoud of Turin or create a like image. Some say that the image had to be created in an instant, and it is like the radiation bursts projected onto buildings and the earth after an atomic blast released its radiation, like what was found in Hiroshima. The 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project could not reach a conclusion as to the source of the image, using chemical, physical, and imaging techniques. They found no evidence of forgery.

Yet the image of a man, in negative, is embedded in that cloth. That man bears a likeness to a first century rabbi, wounded in the head by a crown of thorns. Think what you will, but that artifact cannot be disproven as the death mask of Yeshua, the King of the Jews, Savior of the World, Son of the living God. It cannot be proven by any scientific means to be that which many people of faith believe it to be.

But that’s the purpose of faith. Jesus said his disciples were blessed, because they got to see him. Even Thomas got to place his finger in the nail holes and the wound in Jesus’ side. The Lord told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

We have not seen the Lord, alive and walking among us. But we have the same evidence available to us that those who lived before us had. We have the 300 prophecies fulfilled by the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Yeshua (yes, I use Yeshua and Jesus interchangeably). We have the three sections of the Hebrew scriptures. We have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which bear witness to each other and to the Son’s purpose on the earth.

And we have the Son of God, the man who lived two thousand years ago, healed many, drove demons out, raised Lazarus from the dead, died an excruciating death on the cross, and walked out of a tomb three days later.

We have him, if we will have Him. He is risen. He is risen, indeed.

Will you have Him?

**Depending how you count. There is an exact count but more than one source of manuscript for certain books. Not the Torah, which is exact.