 One of the greatest missionary bluffs is their claim, and it's made quite frequently, that there are over 300 prophecies in the Tanakh, in the Jewish Scriptures, in the Hebrew Bible, that prove Jesus is the Messiah. This is a claim that's made by virtually all missionaries and all missionary organizations on many websites. They will actually give you a list of these 300 plus prophecies. Some go up to 365, where you get one for every day of the year. Some claim there are over 600. So there is this claim, it's very common, that our Bible, the Jewish Bible, contains literally hundreds and hundreds of prophecies, messianic prophecies that prove Jesus is the Messiah. Now I call this a bluff, because a number of years ago, I did a series of programs on the internet with a friend named John O'Vandor, he's in Australia, and we actually went through each one of the prophecies on a very popular missionary website. So it turned out that on this site there were, I believe, 312 or 303, and we actually spent many months each evening going through a handful of these passages, and we discovered that by and large, these passages were like eating cotton candy. You ever had the experience of eating cotton candy? You know that you bite into it, you begin to chew it, and then it's not there. It doesn't have any real substance. And what we discovered was that virtually all of these passages that are cited by Christian missionaries can be literally dismissed in three seconds. There's really nothing to them that they are a bluff. In the programs that we did, we actually cited, we quoted numerous Christian commentaries to the Bible that agreed, they agreed with our assessment that these passages are not speaking about the Messiah. This is something that's not just our opinion, numerous Christian commentaries to the Bible agree that these passages by and large are not speaking about the Messiah and they're not speaking about Jesus. Even most missionaries, if they're pressed, they will admit that there aren't really anywhere nearly 300 prophecies in the Tanakh in the Jewish Bible predicting Jesus as the Messiah. They'll usually reduce the number to somewhere between 15 and 50, a far cry from 365. Now why do I call this again a bluff? Because I believe that just citing this number by making the bold claim that the Hebrew Bible contains over 300 prophecies proving that Jesus is the Messiah, I believe that that statement is intended to wow the audience and to really discourage the listener from pursuing any real kind of investigation. After all, most people will probably say, wow, there are over 300 prophecies. That's incredibly powerful. How am I ever going to possibly investigate each and every one of them? And if I do investigate them and I can puncture several of those passages, well, they'll still have over 300 left. So I believe that's the bluff element that it's designed to basically intimidate the listener, overwhelm them and just make the case without having the person investigate it because it seems like it'll be an impossible thing to ever go through. The truth is that real messianic prophecies in the Bible, real messianic prophecies in the Bible are very clear. They're very clear. And we have a way of determining whether something is clear. There's a very simple test for clarity. The test for clarity is, does everyone agree on its interpretation? If you have a passage in the Bible where all Jewish readers and all Christian readers agree this passage is speaking about the Messiah, then I believe you can feel confident that you are reading a messianic prophecy. One example, which I would ask you to read when you go home, is the 11th chapter in the book of Isaiah. The 11th chapter of the book of Isaiah speaks about a descendant of King David who will be wise and he'll be righteous and when he is ruling as the king of the Jewish people, the entire world will be living in peace and the entire world will come to believe in God. But there you have a very clear articulation of the Messiah. It speaks about a person who will be a king. The word Messiah simply means anointed, kings were anointed. We know that King David was given the promise that all future kings will descend from him. So when the Bible speaks about a passage where the passage actually mentions a descendant of David who will be the king in the future and when he is reigning, the whole world's going to be transformed, that is clearly a prophecy about the future messianic age. And what gives it even more certainty is that it is consistent with other passages that are clearly about the Messiah. The prophecies that are cited in these long lists are very far from clear. When you go through these lists of 300 plus prophecies, they are far from clear. As I mentioned, even Christian commentaries dispute whether they're actually prophecies about the Messiah. They will usually be classified by Christians themselves as types or shadows. They themselves downgrade these passages and they're usually not going to say these are absolutely clear and unambiguous. They say, well, they're types and they're shadows. They're hints. Once you get into the realm of types and shadows and hints, you're very far from clarity. These are very subjective readings of the Bible with an agenda. These are readings of the Bible that approach the Bible with an agenda, like the parable of the archer who first shoots his arrow and then draws the target around the arrow so these people begin their reading of the Bible. They approach the Bible with a foregone conclusion. They assume from the outset that Jesus is the Messiah and then they mine the Bible for any passages that sound like they may be alluding somehow to Jesus. There's something about the passage that sounds like it resembles it's got some kind of a correspondence to Jesus. For example, King David in the book of Psalms often speaks about being hated and rejected. We know that King David was someone that had many enemies and he was pursued and people were trying to kill him. And in many of the Psalms he writes about his difficult life of being pursued by those who hate him and his enemies. These passages get wrenched out of context and transformed into messianic prophecies about Jesus who was rejected by his own people. The Jewish people didn't accept Jesus as the Messiah. So when you have David saying that I was despised and I was rejected, so those words are lifted out of the Psalm, it's ignored that it's really speaking about King David and the missionary says, you see here the Bible speaks about the Messiah, about himself being rejected and having enemies. You can actually play this game. It's an amazing thing to try. You can play this game with any text, any text. Go through a novel by Charles Dickens or go through the Huffington Post or any large document, a novel, a newspaper, a magazine and find phrases that may be sound like or can be applied to Jesus. You can, by the way, do this with your own self. We all know that horoscopes are written in a way that is so vague that any person, anyone could pick up any horoscope forecasting any month and you could probably find things in that horoscope forecast that you say, oh, I can see how that applies to me. So when your criteria for reading the Bible is so vague and so subjective, it's possible to find in our Bible or in any text in war and peace, you'll be able to rip out little sound bites that could apply to you, could apply to your grandfather, could apply to Jesus, could apply to anyone. I'm sure that Republicans could find hundreds and hundreds of illusions to Donald Trump in war and peace. Wouldn't be too difficult. So we know that these are prophecies, these lists of 300 prophecies are built on circular reasoning in the sense that they're built with an agenda. It's not built by people that are reading the Bible to try to see what is the Bible actually teaching? No, they're reading the Bible with an agenda. I have my beliefs and now I want to find passages in the Bible that support my beliefs and because they have this agenda that's built upon circular reasoning, they often will quote passages out of context, transforming passages that have nothing to do with the Messiah, but they become morphed into messianic prophecies because there's some kind of illusion or connection or it sounds like Jesus. They have some kind of a superficial connection to Jesus and therefore the Christian missionary says, you see, here is a messianic prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. That's why again this approach leads to basically a cotton candy kind of reading of the Bible and ultimately a huge bluff by citing these hundreds of passages.