Ann Gauger has already drawn our attention to the new paper, published just last week, in the journal BIO-Complexity. Authored by Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson, the paper is concerned with the question of the origin of the genetic code, and seeks to evaluate the efficacy of the so-called Direct RNA Templating (DRT) hypothesis as an explanation for its origin.
George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” When you tell the truth about homosexuality today, you can be sure that the central tools of deceit—name-calling and bullying—will be unleashed.
I recently was having a respectful conversation with a homosexual activist, but after I made a point he couldn’t answer he called me a “bigot.”
I asked, “What’s your definition of bigotry?”
He said, “Fear and intolerance.”
I said, “The definition of bigotry is not ‘fear and intolerance.’ It’s making a judgment without knowing the facts. I have written a book about the problems with same-sex marriage and the destructive medical consequences of homosexual behavior. So my convictions on those issues are based in fact not ‘bigotry.’ With all due respect, if anyone is engaged in bigotry it is you for judging my position as wrong without even knowing why I hold it.”
He was also falsely equating my opposition to a behavior as prejudice toward people who engage in that behavior. That’s the central fallacy in virtually every argument for homosexuality—if you don’t agree with homosexual behavior, you are somehow bigoted against people who want to engage in that behavior. How does that follow? If conservatives and Christians are “bigots” for opposing homosexual behavior, then why aren’t homosexual activists bigots for opposing Christian behavior? And if we are bigots for opposing same-sex marriage, then why aren’t homosexual activists bigots for opposing polygamous or incestuous marriage?
Everyone puts limits on marriage—if marriage had no definition it wouldn’t be anything. Recognizing that marriage is between a man and a woman is not bigotry, but common sense rooted in the biological facts of nature. That’s why the state recognizes marriage to begin with—not because two people love one another but because only heterosexual unions can procreate and best nurture the next generation.
Everyone also puts limits on behaviors. But opposing behavior is not the same as opposing or “hating” people. In fact, to really love people, we often have to oppose what they do! Parents know this, and all former children know it as well.
Celebrating behavior that leads to disease and an early death is closer to hate than love. According to the latest data from the Center for Disease Control, homosexual men comprise more than 80 percent of sexually transmitted HIV cases despite comprising less than 2 percent of the population. The FDA says that men who have sex with men have an HIV infection rate 60 times higher than the general population. Why should we be encouraging behavior that results in such tragic outcomes? If I have good reason to think you are on the road to destruction—if a truck is about to run over you—the only way to love you is to urge you to get out of the street. If I tell you to keep walking down that road—that I celebrate the road you’re on—how could I hate you more?
But isn’t homosexuality like race? No. Race has nothing to do with behavior, but homosexuality is a behavior! Skin color affects no one, but destructive behavior affects many. Moreover, sexual behavior is always a choice, race never is. You’ll find many former homosexuals, but you’ll never find a former African-American.
So if you don’t approve of a man because of his race, you are a bigot. But if you don’t approve of a man’s destructive behavior, you are wise.
The “born that way” argument doesn’t work either. Not only is the evidence for being “born that way” non-existent, even if it were true, it should have no impact on our marriage laws.
First, after many years of intense research, a genetic component to homosexual desires has not been discovered. Twin studies show that identical twins do not consistently have the same sexual orientation. In fact, genetics probably explains very little about homosexual desires. How would a homosexual “gene” be passed on? Homosexuals don’t pass on anything because homosexual unions don’t reproduce.
Second, while desires are not a choice, sexual behavior always is. So regardless of the source of sexual desires, people are certainly capable of controlling their sexual behavior. If you claim that they are not—that sexual behavior is somehow uncontrollable—then you have made the absurd contention that no one can be morally responsible for any sexual crime, including rape, incest, and pedophilia.
Third, the “born-that-way” claim is an argument from design— “since God designed me with these desires, I ought to act on them.” But the people who say this overlook something far more obvious and important— they were also born with a specific anatomy. We can’t know if our desires are inborn since we can’t remember anything from birth, but we are 100 percent certain that we were born with our anatomy. So why do homosexual activists choose to follow their desires rather than their anatomy? Ignoring your desires may be uncomfortable, but ignoring the natural design of your body is often fatal.
Fourth, being born a certain way is irrelevant to what the law should be. Laws are concerned with behaviors not desires, and we all have desires we ought not act on. In fact, all of us were born with an “orientation” to bad behavior, but those desires don’t justify the behaviors. If you are born with a genetic predisposition to alcohol, does that mean you should be an alcoholic? If you have a genetic attraction to children does that mean you should be a pedophile? What homosexual activist would say that a genetic predisposition to anger justifies gay-bashing? (Don’t blame me—I was born with the anti-gay gene!) Certainly, those that oppose alcoholism, pedophilia and gay bashing are not “bigots”—they are wise.
The bottom line is that the standard arguments for homosexuality and same-sex marriage don’t work. That’s why some homosexual activists will continue to smear conservatives as “bigots” in order to bully them out of the debate and even out of their jobs. In America today, it’s much easier to win with demagoguery than evidence. If you convince the majority that your opponents are “bigots,” then you automatically win even if you’re the bully actually practicing bigotry (read the bigotry and bullying by homosexual activists of conservative but suspended “Teacher of the Year,” Jerry Buell, here, and my own case here).
Will they get away with their bigotry and bullying? Not if Americans start thinking. Thinking people realize that equating homosexuality with race, though presently fashionable, is just as fallacious as calling marriage based in biology a form of bigotry. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
(This column first appeared on Townhall.com)
Are you supposed to have sex at work? I guess it depends on your profession, but for most of us the answer is “no.” Why then is corporate America obsessed with training about sex?
As described in several recent columns by Mike Adams (beginning June 16, 2011), I was fired as a vendor by Cisco for my conservative beliefs about sex and marriage even though my beliefs were never expressed on the job. When a homosexual manager found out on the Internet that I had authored a book giving evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for society, he couldn’t tolerate me and requested I be fired. An HR executive canned me within hours without ever speaking to me. This happened despite the fact that the leadership and teambuilding programs I led always received high marks (even from the homosexual manager!).
How could an experienced HR professional commit such a blatant act of discrimination unless the Cisco culture was decidedly tilted left? Why didn’t Cisco’s relentless emphasis and training on “inclusion and diversity” serve to prevent this? Maybe it’s because “inclusion and diversity” means something different to corporate elites than to normal Americans. That’s why their training didn’t prevent the problem but actually created an environment of intolerance that led to the problem.
Cisco’s chief “Inclusion and Diversity” officer, Ms. Marilyn Nagel, had trouble on the phone defining what “inclusion and diversity” actually means at Cisco, so she sent me several links from the Cisco website. As in our conversation, I found no specific definition on the website but plenty of platitudes, such as Cisco is committed to “valuing and encouraging different perspectives, styles, thoughts, and ideas.”
If that’s the case, then why not value my “perspectives, styles, thoughts and ideas?”
Because only certain perspectives, styles, thoughts and ideas are approved, you see. “Inclusion and diversity” to corporate elites actually means exclusion for those that don’t agree with the approved views. Whoops, there goes “diversity.”
Shouldn’t the real intent of Cisco’s value of “inclusion and diversity” be to ensure that people in that diverse workforce work together cordially and professionally even when they inevitably disagree on certain political, moral or religious questions? It would seem so. In a large multicultural workforce, people need to work together despite political or religious differences. That’s a noble and necessary goal. It’s totalitarian, however, to subject people to “diversity” training and corporate sponsorships that go beyond teaching respect for people to advocacy of what they do in bed.
All employees should treat one another with kindness and respect because they are fellow human beings, not because of their sexual behavior. If people are to be respected simply on the basis of their behavior, then none of us qualify for respect because we have all behaved badly on occasion.
So instead of trying to force all employees to accept any sexual behavior—especially something as controversial as homosexuality—the inclusion and diversity police should be urging us to treat all people with respect simply because we are human beings. That’s all you need to be productive at work anyway.
But as soon as you start telling people from different religious and cultural backgrounds what they must think about homosexuality, you will offend and create conflict andr resentment. As a Christian, I am commanded to respect all people. That’s what I was doing at Cisco. But don’t tell me that I have to respect and celebrate what people do in bed. Don’t tell me that I must violate my conscience or my God in order to make widgets. That’s not only immoral and un-American; it’s manipulative and stupid. How does accepting homosexual behavior have anything to do with job productivity? Are we supposed to have sex at work?
There simply is no business reason to judge my beliefs about sexual behavior or anyone else’s. And even if some corporate nanny could dream up a reason, it would not justify the assault on an employee’s conscience or religion.
Notice that Cisco did not have a problem with my behavior. My job performance was deemed excellent, and I was “inclusive and diverse” by working in a respectful manner with people of all moral, religious and political views.
Cisco had a problem with my thoughts. Although I certainly accepted homosexuals, I committed the thought crime of disagreeing with homosexual behavior and homosexual political goals. So despite all their talk about “inclusion and diversity,” Cisco deemed my thoughts about something irrelevant to the workplace as grounds for immediate exclusion. Do you think they would have excluded me if I had pro-same-sex marriage thoughts? Of course not—that’s an approved view that Cisco actually sponsors (even though they deny it).
But people who don’t accept homosexual behavior don’t have to work at Cisco then!
True, they don’t. But if Cisco or any other company wants to make it a requirement that every employee and vendor personally accept the behavior of homosexuality or homosexual political goals such as same-sex marriage, then tell us directly. Broadcast it to the world. Cisco can’t and won’t because such a requirement would be a clear violation of the religious protections codified in the Civil Rights Act, and it would result in a mass exodus of employees and customers.
Instead, they create an oppressive culture of political correctness under the false banner of “inclusion and diversity” to achieve the same ends. They tell the world that they value and encourage “different perspectives, styles, thoughts, and ideas” while they punish or intimidate into silence people who have “different perspectives, styles, thoughts, and ideas.” While Cisco executives would never admit this, their actions reveal this twisted truth: Cisco values homosexual behavior more than honesty, freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.
Is it the same at your workplace? Are you tired of having to hide your conservative or religious beliefs as if you live in a totalitarian state rather than America? If you continue to cower in silence before an intolerant militant minority, it will only get worse. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” It’s time to do something—speak up.
(This column originally appeared at townhall.com)
In ID circles we often discuss the sheer rarity of biologically relevant polypeptides with respect to combinatorial sequence space (and the related conundrum of macromolecular interdependence). It has often been argued that this represents a potent challenge to chemical origin-of-life models of an order substantially greater than the challenge it presents to biological evolution. There is one related problem in this regard which is often overlooked, and I want to briefly explore it in this blog entry.
When it comes to polymerization of amino acids to form proteins, two things must be borne in mind with regards to the formation of peptide bonds.
- Peptide bond formation is an endothermic reaction. This means that the reaction requires the absorption of energy: It does not take place spontaneously.
- Peptide bond formation is a condensation reaction. It hence involves the net removal of a water molecule. So not only can this reaction not happen spontaneously in an aqueous medium, but, in fact, the presence of waterinhibits the reaction.
There is also the added problem of interfering cross-reactivity (the probability of interfering cross-reactions between the chemical groups on the various amino acid side chains is quite high).
But this is only the peak of the proverbial ice berg. The difficulties associated withsynthesizing peptides (altogether with appropriate homochirality and all) are only half the story. There is also the problem of breaking the peptide bonds in order to generate a range of amino acid sequences in view of finding some with meaningful activity. I mentioned previously that the formation of a peptide bond requires a loss of a water molecule and the input of energy. On the flip side of the coin, then, breaking these bonds requires the addition of a water molecule and involves an energetically favorable reaction. But here’s the thing: Although this entails a net release of energy, the reaction involves high activation energy. But the activation energy for hydrolysis of peptide bonds is such that spontaneous hydrolysis under ambient conditions is not something which occurs readily.
In view of the difficulties associated with the making and breaking of peptide bonds, a very bleak picture is painted for the exploration of amino acid sequences in the pre-biotic context. Given that the conditions required for the making and breaking of peptide bonds are really quite different from one another, if naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios are to have any traction, it would entail that a location be required in which the conditions can vary significantly, alternating between conditions suitable for peptide bond formation and breaking. And this of course is compounded by the fact that the reactions, when they do occur, are likely to be slow and inefficient. Even granting that volcanoes and ocean vents might have provided the necessary changing conditions, it still stands to reason that the production of different polypeptides cannot have exceeded the rate of change of environmental conditions. This would dramatically limit the potential number of polypeptides which could have been produced in the prebiotic world, thus placing considerable restraints on the probabilistic resources at one’s disposal for the formation of multiple biologically relevant (and functionally interdependent) polypeptides.
In view of the reasons articulated above (and many others), the proteins-first model of the origin of life may be taken as essentially dead in the water. Not only are there the substantive challenges of even forming biologically relevant polypeptides. But even supposing that such prebiotic polymers could be produced in this way and useful sequences were happened across, the polymyers have to be able to reproduce with reasonable integrity. But there does not appear to be any way in which a polypeptide can determine a peptide sequence in some fashion analogous to that of base pairing of nucleic acids. How would these proteins be replicated in order to facilitate the workings of natural selection?
In view of the obvious closed-loop “catch-22? paradox of DNA making proteins and proteins making DNA, there is, of course, the fashionable scenario of the RNA world: That is to say, the possible role of RNA as the earliest hereditary macromolecule. This is seen to follow from the realization that RNA not only has information-carrying capacity, but also possesses catalytic capability. Proposed evidence for this notion included the fact that RNA makes up a large proportion of ribosomes (the protein factory of the cell). Furthermore, in eukaryotes (organisms with nucleated cells), components of genes which don’t code for proteins (called “introns”) are spliced out of an RNA transcript before translation. RNA molecules are involved in many of the RNA-splicing processes, and it has been documented that some RNA introns have self-splicing capability: that is to say, they can excise themselves, though at a slower rate than proteins can do it. Further observations which were taken as evidence for the plausibility of the RNA world thesis included the existence of RNA viruses, which use RNA as their genetic material which is translated directly into proteins.
Leaving aside the problems of attaining an RNA-based replicase (for that discussion, see Signature in the Cell), the problem is that the difficulties outlined above with regards the formation of polypeptides are really quite trivial in comparison to the difficulty of obtaining polynucleotides, in part because of the different kinds of bonds which need to be made and broken and the very different reaction conditions which are necessary at each stage. Nucleotides are composed of three chemical subunits – a ribose sugar, a phosphate group, and a nitrogenous base. Not only do these components need to be present and react together in an appropriate fashion in order to produce one nucleotide, but these nucleotides then have to be polymerized, a process which requires a series of endothermic condensation reactions, thereby requiring a high-energy condensing agent in order to perform them. In order to obtain nucleosides (i.e. base and ribose), one would need to begin with a mixture of nitrogenous bases and ribose and an appropriate condensing agents. To obtain nucleotides requires the mixing of nucleosides with phosphate and a different condensing agent.
The scenario for self-replicative capability of polynucleotides is more optimistic than that for polypeptides. But this is by no means trivial. At the heart of Darwinian rationale lies the concept that evolution must strike a balance between reliable reproduction of a species on the one hand, and opportunistic variation on the other. A poor replicator is much more likely to degrade through inaccurate copying than to be enhanced by evolution. There thus exists a threshold before the cumulative improvement of a replicator can occur by selection. A replicatormust already have a reasonably good performance before it can even improve on that performance. At this point, however, we are running perilously close to yet another catch-22 conundrum: If (as I think is a legitimate assumption), this threshold performance level may be only attained with a sequence substantially longer than the minimum required for folding, one is faced with the even greater improbabilities of attaining such a replicator by a blind search.
One of the most amazing examples of cellular nanotechnology is a molecular motor protein known as kinesin. Kinesin is responsible for transporting molecular cargo — including chromosomes (e.g. during cell division), neurotransmitters and other important material — along microtubule tracks from one region of the cell to another. Read More>>>
The Zeitgeist movie has been circulating on the internet since 2007. In the video its director, Peter Joseph, seeks to persuade viewers that the authors of the New Testament essentially plagiarized the concept of the virgin birth, December 25 as Christ’s birth date, the twelve disciples, the miracles, the crucifixion, and the resurrection from astrological sources and pagan mythology.
The focus of this article is to address the allegation that Jesus is a mythological amalgamation of pagan deities invented by various ancient cultures. I will deal primarily with Horus, as he is the first major mythological figure presented as a forerunner of Jesus. I will subsequently deal with the other allegations in brief.
False claims about Horus
The Zeitgeist movie makes the following claims:
Claim: “This is Horus. He is the Sun God of Egypt of around 3000 BC.”
Response: Horus is not just the sun god. He was also the falcon god whose name means ‘the far-off one’. Ra was the sun god who came to be identified with the mid-day sun. In addition, Horus was also the sky god, whose good or sound eye was the sun, and injured eye the moon.
Claim: “He is the sun, anthropomorphized, and his life is a series of allegorical myths involving the sun’s movement in the sky.”
Response: This is inaccurate. Horus was not the sun, but came to be identified with the position of the rising sun. Later, he was associated with the sun-god Ra. Atum was the god of the setting sun.
Claim: “From the ancient hieroglyphics in Egypt, we know much about this solar messiah. For instance, Horus, being the sun, or the light, had an enemy known as Set and Set was the personification of the darkness or night.”
Response: Seth — Horus’ brother — was Horus’ rival (and usurper of the throne of Egypt). There is debate as to whether the struggle between Horus and Seth was primarily geo-political or symbolic in nature. When the full Osiris complex becomes visible, Seth appears as the murderer of Osiris and would-be killer of the child Horus.
Claim: “And, metaphorically speaking, every morning Horus would win the battle against Set — while in the evening, Set would conquer Horus and send him into the underworld. It is important to note that ‘dark vs. light’ or ‘good vs. evil’ is one of the most ubiquitous mythological dualities ever known and is still expressed on many levels to this day.”
Response: The movie’s claim is dead wrong. Horus was never sent to the underworld. It was Osiris who was killed and became Lord of the underworld, while Horus was king of the living.
Claim: “Broadly speaking, the story of Horus is as follows: Horus was born on December 25…”
Response: This simply isn’t the case. At any rate, neither the Bible nor Christianity claim Jesus was born on December 25, so any parallels with ancient legends are completely inconsequential. The December 25 date only came into prominence under Emperor Aurelian in the third century A.D. But when was the date of Horus? It was during the Egyptian month of Khoiak (which corresponds to November on our calendar).
Claim: “…of the virgin Isis-Meri.”
Response: Again, the claim is simply in error. Horus was born of Isis. And there is absolutely no mention in any Egyptian literature of the trailing name ‘Mary’ as the movie would have us believe. Moreover, Isis was certainly not a virgin, but the widow of Osiris, the father of Horus.
Claim: “His birth was accompanied by a star in the east.”
Response: The video continues to make stuff up as it goes along. There is simply no mention of any stars pertaining to the birth of Horus.
Claim: “…which in turn, three kings followed to locate and adorn the new-born Savior.”
Response: First up, there are no ‘three kings’ mentioned in the birth account of Horus, nor is there a mention there ‘three kings’ in the New Testament account. Rather, it is wise-men, with the number not being specified.
Claim: “At the age of 12, he was a prodigal child teacher.”
Response: Wrong again. Horus was never a child prodigal teacher. In fact, he was kept hidden away by his mother in the papyrus marshes, until he was ready to be ruler of Egypt.
Claim: “…and at the age of 30 he was baptized by a figure known as Anup and thus began his ministry.”
Response: Again, there is no evidence of any such baptism concerning Horus, nor are there any facts which suggest any form of ‘ministry’ of Horus.
Claim: “Horus had 12 disciples he travelled around with.”
Response: Horus did not have 12 disciples he travelled around with. It really is as simple as that.
Claim: “…performing miracles such as healing the sick and walking on water.”
Response: While it is true that some healing ‘miracles’ are associated with Horus, this is with Horus the Child as opposed to Horus the elder or his adult forms.
Claim: “Horus was known by many gestural names such as The Truth, The Light, God’s Anointed Son, The Good Shepherd, The Lamb of God, and many others.”
Response: Again, this is simply false. The only forms of the Horus-god are (1) Horus the Child; (2) Horus as son of Isis and Osiris (“pillar of his mother”; “savior of his father”); and (3) Horus as a sun-god (“lord of the sky; “god of the east”; “Horus of the horizon”).
Claim: “After being betrayed by Typhon, Horus was crucified, buried for 3 days, and thus, resurrected.”
Response: Wrong again. There exists no accounts of Horus being betrayed, nor a death by crucifixion. There is an incident described in one account whereby Horus is torn to pieces, with Isis requesting that the crocodile god pull him out of the water — not quite crucifixion. Moreover, seeing how the movie puts the account of Horus at around 3000 B.C., this predates the invention and practice of crucifixion by thousands of years!
Other Claims
The Zeitgeist movie continues in the same vein as above with all the other mythological pagan gods. The Zeitgeist movie makes the claim that Hindu’s Krishna was also crucified and resurrected. However, again, the Zeitgeist is in error. Hinduism very clearly teaches that Krishna was killed by a wound inflicted from an arrow shot from a hunter who mistakenly hit him in his heal. Following his death, he ascended to be with Brahman. This can hardly be compared to the Christian concept of Christ’s resurrection.
The Zeitgeist movie claims, for example, that Mithras was born of a virgin. But this is in error. Rather, he emerged from a rock. It is also claimed that Mithras rose from the dead, but there is no textual evidence of his death, so there could be no resurrection. Mithras was not a teacher, and was not followed by twelve disciples, as Zeitgeist claims.
Neither is there any evidence of a bodily resurrection of Attis, the Phrygian god of vegetation, nor the virgin birth of Dionysus or Krishna (the latter of whom was his mother’s eighth son, so a virgin birth is not likely).
Conclusion
Sadly, the Zeitgeist movie has become widely circulated on the Internet, deceiving many people with misinformation. As Peter writes in his first epistle, “But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them — bringing swift destruction on themselves.”
According to their own testimony, the New Testament writers “did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty,” (2 Peter 1:16). They were testifying not to myths, but to ‘sober truth’ about events that had ‘not been done in a corner’ (Acts 26:25-26).
This article was originally published on AllAboutTruth.org.
Did Nazareth exist during the life of Jesus? How can we know? What does the evidence say? These are questions to which Christians have been asked to give an answer on a more and more frequent basis by those who profess themselves to be “skeptics” in our world today. It is curious that the first-century historicity of Jesus should be the subject of such contention, since this matter was effectively laid to rest long ago.
There are several reasons which are often given for doubting the first-century historicity of Nazareth, which are largely built around arguments from silence. For one thing, Nazareth is never mentioned in the writings of Josephus, nor is it mentioned in any other first-century writings. Critics also contend that the biblical geography is in error, as there is no cliff near the synagogue from which Jesus was allegedly thrown, as recounted in Luke 4:24-30.
Generally speaking, caution should be taken when dealing with arguments from silence. The question must be raised as to just how much one would expect the contemporary writers to mention the town of Nazareth. Nazareth was a small and insignificant village, and Josephus had no real reason to mention it. The town’s insignificance is evident in the first chapter of John’s gospel, when Nathaniel asks, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46).
Leaving aside the problems with the argument from silence, it should also be noted that the claim is not entirely correct. In AD 70, at the end of the Jewish war with the Romans, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and this meant that Jewish priests and their families had to be redeployed. An inscription was discovered in 1962 in Caesarea Maritima, which documented that the priests of the order of Elkalir came to live in Nazareth. This has only been confirmed by later discoveries. For example, in 2009, the first Nazarene home to date from Jesus’ era was excavated by archaeologists. The house was a simple structure, consisting of two small rooms and a courtyard.
The claim about the errant geography carries a bit more weight than the argument from silence. The closest cliff from which Jesus might have been thrown is roughly 2.5 miles away from the synagogue, however, and there is no reason why Jesus could not have been taken this far.
In conclusion, the claim that there is no historical evidence for the existence of the town of Nazareth in the first century stands refuted by the archaeological data, and many of the more informed atheist critics, even among those who deny the historicity of Jesus, have advised caution with this argument.
I have always viewed the exquisitely detailed Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 53 as one of the most powerful and compelling reasons for thinking that Christianity is indeed true. Written some 700 years before Christ’s life on earth, this prophecy details the suffering and redemptive purposes of the Messiah. Moreover, the presence of the entire book of Isaiah in the Qumran scrolls gives us confidence that this prophecy pre-dates the first century by at least a couple hundred years. Its presence among the Jewish Scriptures precludes any possibility of Christian tampering anyway, and such a possibility is uniformly rejected among contemporary scholarship.
So what does this passage say? Can there be any doubt that this passage refers to Jesus? I have entered the full passage below, and followed it with a brief discussion of common attempts to evade this powerful argument. The relevant text begins in Isaiah 52:13, and continues to the end of chaptier 53:
“See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.
Just as there were many who were appalled at him— his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness— so he will sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on himthe iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days,and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
Some might argue that contemporary Jews argue against this passage being messianic. However, having read the conventional views among them, I think such a view is untenable. Firstly, if the passage — as most contemporary Jews maintain — is really a personification of the nation of Israel, then the passage makes no sense when it says “…for the transgressions of my people [i.e. Israel] he was striken…though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” The term “the servant” is also used of the messiah in other parts of the Bible, such as in Zechariah 3:8 (“I am going to bring my servant, the Branch”)
Moreover, most contemporary Jews are simply not familiar with the chapter – it is curiously avoided in the synagogue readings. We can, however, settle the issue of the passage’s historical Judaic interpretation by going to the ancient sources. Jonathan ben Uziel (early 1st century), for example, in his Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible), paraphrasing Isaiah 53, wrote: “My servant, the Messiah, will be great, who was bruised for our sins.” Furthermore, the Talmud (in the Midrash Tanchumi) states with reference to Isaiah 52:13 that “He was more exalted than Abraham, more extolled than Moses; higher than the angels.”
Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees in John 5, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
The apostle Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1:10-12, ”Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.”
Could this passage really refer to anyone besides Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world? Is all this just one big happy coincidence? You decide!