In Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21, Jesus describes the events that will precede the end of the world and his return. He speaks of wars, conflicts and political unrest as signs of the coming end, but emphasizes that "the end is not yet come" (Matthew 24:6-7). Earthquakes, famines and plagues are mentioned as signs, but they are only the beginning of the birth pains (Matthew 24:7-8).

There is neither a time limit nor a specific place for an event. There is no mention of which enemies are to come. No specific place where the enemies will attack and war will break out. No mention of when a famine or what disease will come. There is no clear timetable for the events – will they take place in the following decades, centuries or millennia?

It does not take divine inspiration to prophesy that there will be war, famine and disease at some point in the future. It is guaranteed that these events will happen at some point. Earth will be a great place to live if there is a time when you can not prophesy these things and expect them to come true in the near future. One can make these prophecies based on guesswork or logical deductions.

2) Prophecies are far too unspecific to be taken seriously. The ambiguous nature of prophecies: You can not tell what the prophecies are about. Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21) Jesus speaks about the signs of the end times, including wars, famines, earthquakes that were already mentioned. He also mentions false prophets: He warns that many will come in his name, claiming to be the Messiah and leading people astray (Matthew 24:5, 24:11). Who are these people who have led people astray? Who were the shepherds? There are tens of thousands of denominations within Christianity. Jesus mentions the "abomination of desolation" and cosmic turmoil, but this language is highly symbolic. No one can know what this refers to.

In Daniel 7, the prophet Daniel has a vision of four beasts rising from the sea, symbolizing four kingdoms, and a final judgment in which the kingdom of God will be established. It is often assumed that the four beasts represent different kingdoms, but it is disputed which kingdoms they refer to. Some interpret them as ancient empires (Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome), while others see them as future powers.

The prophecy of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39) speaks of a great battle in which Gog from the land of Magog will lead a coalition of nations against Israel. God intervenes and the army of Gog is destroyed. The identity of Gog and Magog and the peoples involved is unclear. Some interpret this as a prophecy about ancient enemies of Israel, while others see it as a prediction of a future conflict that may even involve modern nations.

The prophecy The Woman and the Dragon (Revelation 12) in Revelation describes the vision of a woman clothed with the sun, a dragon and the birth of a male child destined to rule the nations. The images are very symbolic and are interpreted in different ways. The woman has been interpreted as Mary, the Church or Israel, the dragon as Satan or political powers. It is up to the reader to interpret these prophecies. What are they really talking about?

 In Isaiah 45:1, Cyrus is mentioned as the Lord’s anointed. The problem is that the earliest known copies of the Book of Daniel and Isaiah are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are some text fragments from earlier times, such as the Silver Ketef Hinnom scrolls, which were written around 600 BCE. However, they do not contain any prophetic material. So, how do you know that this sentence, in which Cyrus is mentioned, existed somewhere several centuries earlier? That's like saying that someone in 1960 prophesied that Donald Trump would become president in 2016. But the earliest evidence for this prophecy is from 2018. Who is going to believe that except the most ardent trumpist?

The same goes for Daniel’s prophecies about future kingdoms; these kingdoms had already come when the text was written. It is hard to believe that a book predicted the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires, which came into existence much earlier than the earliest written versions of the book of Daniel.

Believers often claim that Jesus foretold the future in his prophecy about the destruction of the temple. The problem is that virtually all New Testament scholars date the Gospels to the 70s or later. The earliest written text of Mark was composed around 250 AD. Sure, earlier versions of the text existed. But the apologist has to prove that a version of Mark existed not just 180 years earlier (70’s), but a full 200 years earlier. So, how can one prove that these words were really spoken by Jesus in the 30s and not invented by someone ellse in the decades following his ministry? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If one claims that a man knew a specific future event, then one should have clear knowledge that the words were actually spoken before the event they supposedly prophesy.

Furthermore, apologists have claimed that the Gospel of Mark existed in, say, the 40s or 50s. Then one could ask: What prevented later Christians from inserting this prophecy about the destruction of the temple after the fact? Changes could have been made to the gospels. Scholars have determined that a longer ending was likely added to Mark's Gospel based on textual evidence and comparisons with other ancient manuscripts.

The problem is that many biblical prophecies cannot clear the first hurdle of a PROphecy. To believe that a verse predicts a future event, we must clearly know that the verse was written before the event it prophesies.

4) Relying on faith. This refers to the criteria already mentioned: the ambiguity of prophecies and the high probability that they are ”retrophecies”. This applies in particular to the Gospels, in which Jesus supposedly fulfilled dozens of prophecies of the Old Testament. Jesus is called out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1 → Matthew 2:14-15), born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2 → Matthew 2:1-6, Luke 2:4-7), Jesus’ anguish on the cross is described in Psalm 22 and so on and so forth. A number often quoted by apologists is 300 – they claim that Jesus fulfilled 300 prophecies during his lifetime. If you believe the Gospels, it's as if every move he made was a fulfillment of a prophecy. The question is, how does a skeptical reader know that the Old Testament verses that are called prophetic are really prophecies? Should they simply rely on the word of the evangelists? The writers of the Gospels could have had the Old Testament (or the Septuagint) before them when they wrote their books. If you look at the context of the verses in the Old Testament, you cannot conclude that they are prophecies to which they refer. They are just individual verses picked out here and there. Nothing in the context of these verses indicates that they are prophecies. The author of the Gospel could have as well understood the preceding and following verses as prophecies. It is all completely arbitrary. These verses are prophetic because the text says so. So why should the Gospel writers be trusted if they correctly identify prophetic material in the Old Testament?

The other question is: How can the authors of the Gospels be trusted to accurately record events from the life of Jesus? Should I simply take them at their word that these events took place exactly as they say? How do I know that the events took place as reported by the Gospel writers? What prevents them from inventing these stories to make it appear that Jesus fulfilled prophecies? There is every reason to doubt that the Gospels are accurate history. They are full of supernatural elements and motifs and are probably based on an early missionary proclamation. Jesus is born of a virgin and announced by an angel. Angels attend to his needs and show him the way. Wise men from distant lands follow the heavenly signs to greet him at his birth. An evil ruler recognizes him as a threat and tries to assassinate him, but he is spirited away with heavenly guidance and miraculously saved. As a youth, he is already wiser than the wise men of his people. God recognizes him from heaven. The devil himself tries to dissuade him from his divine mission - but he fails. He controls the elements, both man-made and natural, and even has control over life itself. When he dies, all of creation is thrown into turmoil - the dead rise, the sky darkens, the earth shakes and the curtain of the temple is torn in two. But in the end, he even conquers death. There is practically no historical confirmation for any of this, even in cases where there clearly should be.

The prophetic argument that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament boils down to: "One ancient book quotes another ancient book. Therefore God exists".One should take it on faith that these ancient texts are telling the truth and nothing but the truth. .

It is often claimed that the founding of the Jewish state in 1948 was a fulfillment of a prophecy. The Bible could mention the number of years after important events in Jewish history. For instance, the destruction of the first temple in 586 A.D. . It could add this to the year of the creation of the Jewish state, 1948 = 2534. It could prophesy: "After 2534 years of Babylonian exile, the Jewish state will rise again". Or "the Jewish state will be founded 1878 years after the destruction of the Second Temple". That would be good evidence – discounting the fact that it would give the Jews the opportunity to try to bring this about artificially (a self-fulfilling prophecy).

One could also, ask was it really Jesus’ own message that was proclaimed to the world? In any case, this verse is at least close to a fulfilled prophecy. It is true that Christianity was proclaimed on all continents, especially after European expansion and colonialism in the 16th century. But this is an isolated case. Are we really to believe that an omnipotent being has managed to give us this single fulfilled prophecy as proof of himself?

Ultimately, the fulfilment of prophecy is a numbers game. Any text that contains enough prophecies is likely to get some of them right. If I make 100 prophecies for the next century, I might get some of them right. Of course, if I phrase them very generally, I might get most of them right – ”there will be wars/plagues/hunger”. But even if I make them specific, I might hit a few of them. I could predict things like:

-Russia will go to war with NATO in the 2030s

-China will devour Taiwan in the 2040s

-The population will grow to 11 billion in the 2060s

-There will be a major pandemic originating in Africa in the 2070s

If someone points out in 2124 that I am right on some of these points, would that make me a God-inspired prophet? No, of course not. I was just lucky or good at drawing conclusions from known reality. These are based on the current development of humanity. What if 50 out of 100 of them came true? Now we are talking. Even then, we could still ask why all 100 have not been fulfilled?

Pointing to a few isolated, cherry-picked verses as ”fulfilled prophecies” means and proves nothing. Any person with any degree of skepticism will think that these are a few prophecies that were fulfilled by sheer luck. Therefore, one would need an analytical approach where this material is analyzed in depth. One should establish criteria to determine which Bible verses are prophecies and calculate what percentage of them have come true. This kind of analytical approach does not exist in religious circles. Everything is based on religious faith.