Conundrum IV

Jesus met all the prophecies predicting the coming Messiah of the Old Testament, and how could He not? He was a rabbi, He knew the signs of the coming messiah, as did a majority of the populace. Everyone was expecting the coming Messiah to do such and such and to have certain attributes. Jesus, knowing the signs as well as anyone else in His world, could easily follow a checklist and make certain he accomplished all the signs He was supposed to display.

This is not to say that He intentionally mislead the people. If He wanted to announce His presence as the Messiah, all He had to do was follow the prophetic script. Everyone would know who He was, except for the Romans, of course.

If someone did not know the signs and somehow accomplish each one, it would have been truly miraculous!

So, does it make Him the Messiah because He already knew what signs He was supposed to display?

Another conundrum!

Conundrum III

Some Seventh Day Adventists researchers proclaim the “number of the beast” points directly to the Pope because of the title “vicarius filii dei” (vicar of the Son of God). [The way this works is that the writer did not know the words he was seeing in the vision but he DID know Roman numerals, hence:

V – I – C – A – R – I – V – S — F – I – L – I – I — D – E – I
5 – 1-100-0 – 0 – 1 – 5 – 0 — 0 – 1 -50- 1 – 1 — 500-0-1 = 666 ]

The Popes would like to backtrack and remove all mention of the title from their records but they cannot… so the Church weakly claims “it has never been an ‘official’ title of the Pope”.

That’s splitting hairs as the Popes for centuries have used the title in an ‘official’ capacity which, legally speaking, DOES make it an official title.

Now the tricky part comes: the title derived from a forged document – probably created at the behest of a Pope (or one of his minions) – in order to acquire temporal power over the rulers of the world; this document was the “Donation of Constantine”, purportedly written by the Emperor Constantine giving supreme power to the Catholic Church in Rome.

So the “number of the beast” is now connected to the Pope but not through any coincidence. How? Because the person who forged the document probably knew it added up to the number of the beast and had it in for the Pope. Who knows?!

It was a definite human agency that saddled the Pope with the number of the beast, but could he have been working through some sort of Divine Agency? Again, who knows?

Anyway, it is more circular logic like conundrum I & II. The Pope is saddled with the number of the beast through some form of human agency, not in answer to a prophecy.