Yesterday we began considering the work of professor Stoner and his mathematics students who worked on the 300 prophecies, given over 1500 years, that we find in the ancient Hebrew writings. From the 300 they first selected 8. 1) that he would be Born in Bethlehem, (Micah 5:2 fulfilled Matthew 2:1) 2) That He would be Born of a Virgin (Isaiah 7:14, fulfilled Matt 1:18-23) 3) That He had to be born of King David’s lineage (Jeremiah 23:5, fulfilled Rev 22:16) 4) That He would be betrayed by a friend (Psalm 41:9, fulfilled John 13:18-26) 5) That He would be sold for 30 silver coins (Zechariah 11:12, Fulfilled Matt 26:14-16) 6) That He would be crucified (Psalm 22:6-18 fulfilled Luke 23:33) 7) The Year, month, Day, and Hour of death of His death (Dan 9:26, Ex 12:6, fulfilled Matt 27:45-50) 8) That he would be buried in a rich man’s tomb (Isaiah 53:9, fulfilled Matt 27:57-60)
This is how they assigned probabilities to prophecies like Micah 5:2, written hundreds of years before the event, that said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. The asked questions like how many men were born in Bethlehem? Stoner applied the probability of 1 in 280,000. As you can see their figures are highly conservative. From Isaiah 53:4-6 Stoner and his students again asked the question – how many people in the world have been wrongly accused and yet remained silent in their defense. They assigned a probability (again absurd) of 1 in 1000.

After Dr Peter Stoner and 600 of his students took just eight of the prophecies about the Messiah and applied the ‘Principle of Probability.’ They concluded that the chances of all eight being fulfilled in one man in a lifetime was: 1 in 10 to the power of 17. That’s 10 with 17 zeros after it. Because this is such a large number that would not mean much to many, they designed an illustration to demonstrate its size. The illustration was this: Mark a silver dollar and Cover the state of Texas (Queensland) 2mtrs deep and give a blind man one chance of picking the one coin that’s 1:10^17.
Dr Peter Stoner and 600 of his students then took Forty-eight of the prophecies about the Messiah and applied the ‘Principle of Probability’ the same way they had done to the 8. They eventually concluded that the chances of forty-eight messianic prophecies being fulfilled by one man in a lifetime was: 1 in 10^157. Scientists tell us the number of atoms in the universe is 𝟏𝟎^𝟖𝟎. Therefore, there is not enough atoms in the universe to hold the number of 10^157. I was in a youth meeting once where we demonstrated the size of this number by writing 3 zeros on each segment of a paper towel. We then rolled the paper towel out around the room, asking young people to support it as we did so. If we applied the same blind man illustration by marking one atom and giving him one chance to pick up that atom, we would get a glimpse of the sheer impossibility of Jesus being able to fulfill all 300 Old Testament prophecies purely by chance.
So, is Jesus who He claimed to be? We are not done yet. TBC