Was the baby in the manger really the Christ? Did he miraculously fulfill these predictions that were written hundreds of years before he was born? And how do we know he was the only individual born throughout history who fit the prophetic fingerprint?
There are plenty of scholars I could have asked about this topic. However, I wanted to interview someone for whom this was more than just an abstract academic exercise, and that took me to a very unlikely setting in southern California.
INTERVIEW: LOUIS S. LAPIDES, MDIV, THM
Usually a church would be a natural location in which to question someone about a biblical issue. But there was something different about sitting down with Pastor Louis Lapides in the sanctuary of his congregation the morning after Sunday worship services. This setting of pews and stained glass was not where you’d expect to find a nice Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey.
Yet that’s Lapides’ background. For someone with his heritage, the question of whether Jesus is the long-anticipated Messiah goes beyond theory. It’s intensely personal, and I had sought out Lapides so I could hear the story of his own investigation of this critical issue.
Lapides earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from Dallas Baptist University, as well as a master of divinity and a master of theology degree in Old Testament and Semitics from Talbot Theological Seminary. He served for a decade with Chosen People Ministries, talking about Jesus to Jewish college students. He has taught in the Bible department of Biola University and is the former president of a national network of fifteen messianic congregations.
Slender and bespectacled, Lapides is soft-spoken but has a quick smile and a ready laugh. He was upbeat and polite as he ushered me to a chair near the front of Beth Ariel Fellowship in Sherman Oaks, California. I didn’t want to begin by debating biblical nuances; instead I started by inviting Lapides to tell me the story of his spiritual journey.
Lapides came from a Jewish family, attending a conservative Jewish synagogue in preparation for bar mitzvah, but his family did not strictly observe the Jewish traditions. He had never been taught about the Messiah; in fact, Lapides said it was never even discussed. “My impressions of Jesus came from seeing Catholic churches…I never thought Jesus had any connection to the Jewish people. I just thought he was a god of the Gentiles. …When the New Testament was first presented to me, I sincerely thought it was going to basically be a handbook on anti-Semitism: how to hate Jews, how to kill Jews, how to massacre them. I thought the American Nazi Party would have been very comfortable using it as a guidebook.” I shook my head, saddened at the thought of how many other Jewish children have grown up thinking of Christians as their enemies.
Lapides said several incidents dimmed his allegiance to Judaism as he was growing up. His parents’ divorce when he was seventeen made him wonder where God came in, why they didn’t go to a rabbi for counseling, and what good is religion if it can’t help people in a practical way. “On top of that, in Judaism, I didn’t feel as if I had a personal relationship with God. I had a lot of beautiful ceremonies and traditions, but he was the distant and detached God of Mount Sinai who said, ‘Here are the rules—you live by them, you’ll be okay; I’ll see you later.’ And there I was, an adolescent with raging hormones, wondering, Does God relate to my struggles? Does he care about me as an individual?”
The divorce prompted an era of rebellion, and in 1967 Lapides found himself in Vietnam. Lapides read books on eastern philosophies and visited Buddhist temples while in Japan, trying to “figure out how faith can deal with” the evil he had seen. He survived Vietnam, returning home with a newfound taste for marijuana. He tried to live an ascetic lifestyle of self-denial in an effort to work off the bad karma for the misdeeds of his past, but soon he realized he’d never be able to make up for all his wrongs.
In 1969, Lapides’ curiosity prompted him to visit Sunset Strip to gawk at an evangelist who had chained himself to an eight-foot cross to protest his eviction from his storefront ministry. There on the sidewalk Lapides encountered some Christians who engaged him in an impromptu spiritual debate. When one of the Christians brought up the name of Jesus, Lapides tried to fend him off with his stock answer. “I’m Jewish,” he said. “I can’t believe in Jesus.”
A pastor spoke up. “Do you know of the prophecies about the Messiah?” he asked.
Lapides was taken off guard. “Prophecies?” he said. “I’ve never heard of them.”
When the pastor offered him a Bible, Lapides refused to read the New Testament. “Fine,” said the pastor. “Just read the Old Testament and ask the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of Israel—to show you if Jesus is the Messiah. He came to the Jewish people initially, and then he was also the Savior of the world.”
To Lapides, this was new—and astonishing—information. He said, “Pretty soon I was reading the Old Testament every day and seeing one prophecy after another.” As Lapides progressed through the Scriptures, he was stopped cold by Isaiah 53. With clarity and specificity, in a haunting prediction wrapped in exquisite poetry, here was the picture of a Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of Israel and the world—all written more than seven hundred years before Jesus walked the earth. He finally began to understand the paintings he had seen in Catholic churches he had passed as a child: the suffering Jesus, the crucified Jesus, the Jesus who he now realized had been “pierced for our transgressions” as he “bore the sins of many.”
Over and over, Lapides came upon the Old Testament prophecies. Each one chipped away at Lapides’ skepticism until he was finally willing to take a drastic step. “I decided to open the New Testament and just read the first page,” he said. “I couldn’t put it down. I read through the rest of the Gospels, and I realized this wasn’t a handbook for the American Nazi Party; it was an interaction between Jesus and the Jewish community.”
Soon thereafter, Lapides accepted Jesus Christ into his life and later met his wife, who happened to attend the same church pastored by the minister who many months earlier on Sunset Strip had challenged Lapides to read the Old Testament. “I’ll tell you what—his jaw dropped open when he saw me walk into the church!” Lapides laughed.
Lapides’ story was moving to me, but still, it raised some questions. “If the prophecies were so obvious to you and pointed so unquestionably toward Jesus,” I asked, “then why don’t more Jews accept him as their Messiah?”
“In my case, I took the time to read them,” he replied. “Oddly enough, even though the Jewish people are known for having high intellects, in this area there’s a lot of ignorance. Plus you have countermissionary organizations that hold seminars in synagogues trying to disprove the messianic prophecies. Jewish people hear them and use them as an excuse for not exploring the prophecies personally. They’ll say, ‘The rabbi told me there’s nothing to this.’ And I’ll ask them, ‘Do you think the rabbi just brought up an objection that Christianity has never heard before? I mean, scholars have been working on this for hundreds of years! There’s great literature out there and powerful Christian answers to those challenges.’”
Some of the challenges to the prophecies sound pretty convincing when a person first hears them. So one by one I posed the most common objections to Lapides to see how he would respond.
1. THE COINCIDENCE ARGUMENT
First I asked Lapides whether it’s possible that Jesus merely fulfilled the prophecies by accident. Maybe he’s just one of many throughout history who have coincidentally fit the prophetic fingerprint.
“Not a chance,” came his response. “The odds are so astronomical that they rule that out.” I had studied this same statistical analysis by mathematician Peter W. Stoner, who estimated that the probability of fulfilling just 48 prophecies was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion! Our minds can’t comprehend a number that big. This is a staggering statistic equal to the number of atoms in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, billion universes the size of our universe! “The odds alone say it would be impossible for anyone to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies, yet Jesus—and only Jesus throughout all of history—managed to do it.”
The words of the apostle Peter popped into my head: “But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ should suffer, He has thus fulfilled” (Acts 3:18 NASB).
2. THE ALTERED GOSPEL ARGUMENT
I painted another scenario for Lapides, asking, “Isn’t it possible that the gospel writers fabricated details to make it appear that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies? For example, the prophecies say the Messiah’s bones would remain unbroken, so maybe John invented the story about the Romans breaking the legs of the two thieves being crucified with Jesus, and not breaking his legs. And the prophecies talk about betrayal for thirty pieces of silver, so maybe Matthew played fast and loose with the facts and said, yeah, Judas sold out Jesus for that same amount.”
But that objection didn’t fly any further than the previous one. “In God’s wisdom, he created checks and balances both inside and outside the Christian community,” Lapides explained. “When the Gospels were being circulated, there were people living who had been around when all these things happened. Someone would have said to Matthew, ‘You know it didn’t happen that way. We’re trying to communicate a life of righteousness and truth, so don’t taint it with a lie.’
“Besides,” he added, “why would Matthew have fabricated fulfilled prophecies and then be willing to be put to death for following someone who he secretly knew was really not the Messiah? That wouldn’t make any sense.
“What’s more, the Jewish community would have jumped on any opportunity to discredit the Gospels by pointing out falsehoods. They would have said, ‘I was there, and Jesus’ bones were broken by the Romans during the crucifixion,’” Lapides said. “But even though the Jewish Talmud refers to Jesus in derogatory ways, it never once makes the claim that the fulfillment of the prophecies was falsified. Not one time.”
3. THE INTENTIONAL FULFILLMENT ARGUMENT
Some skeptics have asserted that Jesus merely maneuvered his life in a way to fulfill the prophecies. “Couldn’t he have read in Zechariah that the Messiah would ride a donkey into Jerusalem, and then arrange to do exactly that?” I asked.
“For a few of the prophecies, yes, that’s certainly conceivable,” he said. “But there are many others for which this just wouldn’t have been possible. For instance, how would he control the fact that the Sanhedrin offered Judas thirty pieces of silver to betray him? How could he arrange for his ancestry, or the place of his birth, or his method of execution, or that soldiers gambled for his clothing, or that his legs remained unbroken on the cross? How would he arrange to perform miracles in front of skeptics? How would he arrange for his resurrection? And how would he arrange to be born when he was?”
That last comment piqued my curiosity. “What do you mean by when he was born?” I asked.
“When you interpret Daniel 9:24-26, it foretells that the Messiah would appear a certain length of time after King Artaxerxes I issued a decree for the Jewish people to go from Persia to rebuild the walls in Jerusalem,” Lapides replied. He leaned forward to deliver the clincher: “That puts the anticipated appearance of the Messiah at the exact moment in history when Jesus showed up,” he said. “Certainly that’s nothing he could have prearranged.”
4. THE CONTEXT ARGUMENT
One other objection needed to be addressed: Were the passages that Christians identify as messianic prophecies really intended to point to the coming of the Anointed One, or do Christians rip them out of context and misinterpret them?
Lapides sighed. “You know, I go through the books that people write to try to tear down what we believe. That’s not fun to do, but I spent the time to look at each objection individually and then to research the context and the wording in the original language,” he said. “And every single time, the prophecies have stood up and shown themselves to be true.
“For example, hundreds of years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Isaiah 7:14 foretold: ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.’ Critics, however, have said this is a mistranslation. They claim the Hebrew word used in this prophecy, almah, merely means “young woman,” and that bethulah would have been used if the idea of virginity were intended.
“But researcher Glenn Miller told me that the latest and most detailed linguistic studies show bethulah could refer to a widow or divorced woman who was not a virgin. Almah is never used of a non-virgin. Says Miller: ‘If any notion of virginity were intended—even as only an “implication”—almah was the best/only word to do that job.’
“So here’s my challenge to skeptics: Don’t accept my word for it, but don’t accept your rabbi’s either. Spend the time to research it yourself. Today nobody can say, ‘There’s no information.’ There are plenty of books out there to help you.
“And one more thing: sincerely ask God to show you whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. That’s what I did—and without any coaching it became clear to me who fit the fingerprint of the Messiah.”
“EVERYTHING MUST BE FULFILLED…”
I appreciated the way Lapides had responded to the objections, but ultimately it was the story of his spiritual journey that kept replaying in my mind as I flew back to Chicago that night. I reflected on how many times I had encountered similar stories, especially among successful and thoughtful Jewish people who had specifically set out to refute Jesus’ messianic claims.
I thought about Stan Telchin, the East Coast businessman who had embarked on a quest to expose the “cult” of Christianity after his daughter went away to college and received Y’shua (Jesus) as her Messiah. He was astonished to find that his investigation led him—and his wife and second daughter—to the same Messiah. He later became a Christian minister, and his book that recounts his story, Betrayed, has been translated into more than twenty languages.
He found, as have Lapides and others, that Jesus’ words in the gospel of Luke have proved true:
“Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” It was fulfilled, and only in Jesus—the sole individual in history who has matched the prophetic fingerprint of God’s Anointed One.
This book is excerpted from The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, copyright (C) 1998 by Lee Strobel. Used by permission of Zondervan.
Lee Strobelis described by the Washington Post as "one of the evangelical community's most popular apologists." Former award-winning legal editor for The Chicago Tribune, Lee is a New York Times best-selling author of nearly twenty books including The Case for Christmas. He has been interviewed on numerous national television programs, including ABC's 20/20, Fox News, and CNN. Lee shared the prestigious Charles "Kip" Jordon Christian Book of the Year award in 2005 for a curriculum he co-authored about the movie The Passion of the Christ. He also has won awards for his books The Case for Christ,The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator, and Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary. Learn more about Lee by visiting LeeStrobel.com.
Sermon Central
