Israel Does NOT Fulfill Bible Prophecy

An Article Contributed by John Bedson

In my opinion Christadelphianism can never be extinguished until the core support for its rationality has been exposed as a mistake. Christadelphian belief is now almost entirely dependent on the theory that the establishment of the State of Israel is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy and that this therefore demonstrates the existence of a supernatural God and the reliability of scripture. This note intends to address this issue and to propose that these things are merely coincidental and do not prove anything at all.

The roots of Zionism go back to 587 BCE, when the Jews were carried off to captivity in Babylon and their prophets optimistically predicted that one day God would allow them to return and that the Messiah would appear at that time to establish his Kingdom based in Israel. Known as the Babylonian exile, it is verified by Babylonian records. In 539 BCE the Persians captured Babylon and permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem. It could be argued that the return was a fulfillment of Bible prophecy, but others would point out that many different peoples were allowed to return to their homeland and to resume the worship of their old religions by the Persians, so the fact that it happened to the Jews was not unusual in any way. Needless to say the Messiah did not return following their return to Israel

After the Jews returned to the Holy Land, they remained Persian subjects until Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE and the Jewish people in Israel came under Greek dominion. The Hellenistic (Greek) culture and civilization was attractive to many of the Jews who progressively reformed and even abandoned their ancient beliefs and a virtual civil war erupted between the modernizing, Hellenistic Jews and the traditional orthodox Jews who struggled for control of the High Priesthood.  The Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes, 175–164/163 BCE, sided with the reformist Jews in this struggle and attempted to enforce Greek religion and culture and abolish the orthodox Jewish religion. It is a great pity that he did not succeed, because world history might have taken a very different course and much bloodshed might have been avoided if the Jews had followed the path of enlightened Greek philosophy instead of narrow minded orthodox religious bigotry that was the source of so much suffering of the Jewish people over the following two thousand years.

The orthodox, traditionalist Jews were suffering severe persecution and it is generally accepted by everyone except Christian fundamentalists that the book of Daniel must have been written during his reign because of the extraordinary correlation between detailed prophecies in that book and the minutia of historical events at that time. In other words, Daniel was cheating by recording history but passing it off as prophecy. The earliest copy of the book of Daniel is dated around 125-100 BCE and its first indisputable reference occurs in the book of 1Maccabees, written about 100 BCE. It was also probably about this time that six chapters from the pre-Babylonian exile book of Jeremiah were transferred by Jewish scribes to the end of the book of Zechariah so that a post Babylonian return prophet like Zechariah could appear to predict the appearance of Messiah to rescue the Jews from their Greek tormentors. This is confirmed in Matthew 27: 3-10 where the writer acknowledges that the closing section of Zechariah was in fact written by Jeremiah. 

The Hellenistic Jews were much less militarized and more poorly organized than the orthodox Jews who revolted under the leadership of the Jewish Maccabeans. For a while, from 164 to 63 BCE, the Jews had a brief period of national independence but again the Messiah failed to appear. Once again the "Time of the End" was NOT the time of the end as predicted by the prophets and life went on. The Hellenistic reform of Jewry was snuffed out and the ultra-orthodox power of the conservative Jews prevailed. It was this same Pharisaic extremism that so rankled Jesus that his teaching was directed against it in a reformist style that in some ways harked back to the attempted Hellenistic reforms of earlier years. Ultimately his work resulted in a Jewish splinter group which became Christianity which later was extended to the Gentiles by teachers like Paul the apostle.

In 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem and the Jews became Roman subjects this time. Friction between the Jews and the Roman continued until 70 CE, when Jerusalem was destroyed and many Jews where forced to disperse. However a not inconsiderable remnant of Jews remained in the land which we now call Israel and over the years this number increased and some also drifted back from their dispersion. It is often overlooked that Christians from the time of Christ also continued to live in the Holy Land right up to our own times. In 638 Muslim armies invaded Palestine and captured Jerusalem where they remained for 1300 years and eventually became what is known as the Turkish Ottoman Empire. 

The Christadelphians claim that the preservation of the Jews down the centuries of time since their exile in Roman times is a miracle. But the Greeks, Persians, Egyptians and a multitude of other peoples have also survived during the past two millennia and some like the Chinese have survived in a Diaspora whilst also keeping their homeland. The unusually exclusive nature of the Jewish religion greatly assisted their preservation in exile and helped to preserve their distinct identity as a separate people. But in many ways this has been a curse to the Jews. Because of their strict religious practices and their condemnation by the Catholics they were forced to endure ghettoization. This assisted the rabbis to maintain a rigid religious control over the minds of the inhabitants and to stultify free thought and reformist ideas amongst the Jewish people.

Following the French revolution the reformist policies of Napoleon removed the discriminatory rules against the Jews throughout Europe and to a large extent broke down the walls of the Jewish ghettos - much to the dismay of the rabbis who saw their powerful religious hold over the Jews weakened. The Jewish people had been imprisoned not only by the Gentile ghettos but also by the spiritual ghettos imposed by their strict Jewish religious leadership. There followed in the nineteenth century an amazing release of Jewish talent richly contributing to medicine, science, politics, law and the arts. It was a Jewish renaissance the like of which had never been seen before.    

It was at this time that Reform Judaism took root which was a sort of Jewish Reformation from strict Jewish orthodoxy, rather similar to the Protestant Reformation against Catholicism three hundred years previous. This enlightened philosophy spread from Germany to America in the mid nineteenth century and paralleled the Reformed Reformationists, American Revisionists and Pre-Millennialist Evangelicals with whom Dr Thomas was mixing and forming his ideas about religion. These Christians developed ideas about the return of the Jews to Palestine partly because they were unhappy with the influx of large numbers of Jews from Europe. They nationalized the idea of Israel and theorized that Britain and America were a form of new Israel and Zion. They then came to believe that the prophecies of return of the Jews to Palestine must be fulfilled as a precondition to the return of Christ and the salvation of the world and this became an important part of their eschatology. Paradoxically the Jewish Reformists resisted the idea of a return to Palestine as their mandate in life, like the Hellenistic Jews two thousand years before, was to reject much of orthodox Jewish practice and custom and to assimilate into society like any other religion. By 1880 more than 90% of American synagogues were Reform.       

In the nineteenth century of Dr Thomas, historic nations long ruled by one or another empire, including Greece, Hungary, and Bulgaria achieved self-government, while others, including the Czechs, Poles, Irish, and Norwegians launched national liberation movements. In this context it appeared natural for the Jews to achieve national independence in Israel. In the time of Dr Thomas approximately eighty thousand Jews already lived in Palestine, although millions more were dispersed among the nations of Europe and North America. 

By expounding Bible prophecy Doctor John Thomas predicted that dozens of historical things would happen, including the return of Christ in 1866. Almost none of those things, including the return of Christ came true. Even the very tiny number of things that did come true all happened approximately one hundred and fifty years ago, causing the majority of Christadelphians today to accept that he was also mistaken about the things that he got right, because quite obviously that was NOT the time of the end and therefore it was mere coincidence that one or two things did work out for him. Few Christadelphians today would dare hold those things up as evidence of the accuracy of Bible prophecy or of Dr Thomas's talent. We accept that those historical events had nothing to do with Bible prophecy and that God did not predict the fortunes of Napoleon or the Sultan of Turkey in great detail in the book of Daniel etc as expounded by John Thomas. 

Dr Thomas made so many errors that in the various republications of his works like Elpis Israel, successive publishers have been obliged to clean them up by removing entire sections so that future readers will be unable form their own judgment about the Doctor's accuracy in expounding scripture. For example in the preface to the 1924 edition brother CC Walker wrote: "From pages 388, 446 and 448, some erroneous anticipations that the efflux of time has manifested concerning the end of the age, have been omitted as a matter of course". Every time the work gets republished more and more material gets thrown out by editors of the Christadelphian magazine. In the forward to the latest (2000) version it is written: "The third part of the book deals with prophecy in relation to world affairs. Here understanding was influenced by an expectation of the Lord’s early advent, which proved premature, and much that has now to be treated with reserve derived from this outlook". In fact the works of Dr John Thomas, the founder of Christadelphianism, are so riddled with mistakes that very few young Christadelphians have ever seen or read them. They have been replaced by more recent works by modern Christadelphian writers. The writings of Dr Thomas are rather like extinct dinosaur bones that have no function but are preserved in museums as objects of curiosity.

Nevertheless, even a rationalist skeptic like me has to give the devil his due and accept that if only for once in his life, Dr Thomas did score the prophetic equivalent of a "hole in one". I have to admit that when it came to his prediction that the Jews would return to Palestine, Dr Thomas pulled the rabbit right out of the hat and held it up to the applause of the audience. Even I loudly cheered his success from age eleven to age thirty four when I finally worked out how the conjurer had performed his trick. I then promptly resigned from the Christadelphians and I never went back.

How the trick was performed

When I was a child one of my favorite comedians was Tommy Cooper. His act was always the same. He pretended to be a buffoon conjurer and all of his tricks went badly wrong. He could not make anything disappear and if he did he was unable to make it reappear again. His props fell over, he dropped his magic wand, he mixed up the playing cards and the rabbit ran away. But just occasionally one of his tricks did work out successfully and he acted surprised that it had actually happened the way that it was intended. This made the act even funnier for the audience who would roar with laughter.

Dr John Thomas operated in much the same way. He blundered around America being baptized and re-baptized changing his religious beliefs with the wind. He lurched from one restorationist group to another altering his mind as he went and castigating people who believed things that he had himself had believed only days before. He left the Church of the Disciples in America and then rejoined them in Britain, only to be thrown out again when they discovered that his beliefs were completely different to their own and that he had been faking his membership of their community. He expounded Bible prophecy with as much skill as Tommy Cooper performing magical tricks, making prophecy apply to minor events in the mid to late Nineteenth Century, telling every one that it was the "Last Days" and that Christ would soon return (1866) to establish the Kingdom and allow the Christadelphians to kill unbelievers and take their possessions. At the time it was all taken very seriously and his followers dutifully trudged to their ecclesias, read their Bibles, read their Dr Thomas magazines, discussed it at the Bible class and prepared to meet the Lord. 

One hundred and sixty years later, rational people look back at his antics and laugh at the comedy of it all. It is now obvious that the man did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about. But Dr Thomas, just like Tommy Cooper, did just once in a while get lucky and one of his predictions would work out. From a rational point of view it only makes the whole show even more hilarious that he occasionally accidentally got the ball in the hole as a result of luck and blind chance. If you play for long enough and throw enough darts at a dart board you will eventually score a bulls-eye. Dr Thomas played for decades making predictions and he finally got one straight down the middle. Here is the famous quote from Elpis Israel. After you have read it I want you all to put your hands together and applaud our founding magician; because usually the poor guy had no more luck than Tommy Cooper and this was the high spot of his career. This was the day that he finally got one of his tricks to work:

"There is, then, a partial and primary restoration of Jews before the manifestation, which is to serve as the nucleus, or basis, of future operations in the restoration of the rest of the tribes after he has appeared in the kingdom. The pre-adventual colonization of Palestine will be on purely political principles; and the Jewish colonists will return in unbelief of the Messiahship of Jesus, and of the truth as it is in him. They will emigrate thither as agriculturists and traders, in the hope of ultimately establishing their commonwealth, but more immediately of getting rich in silver and gold by commerce with India, and in cattle and goods by their industry at home under the efficient protection of the British power."       

In May 1948 the State of Israel was established in Palestine and sixty years later the Christadelphian celebrations have still not ended. Winston Churchill might well have said of the Christadelphians "This was their finest hour". After that it was all downhill. But for a moment let us bask in the glory that our founder eventually got a dart in the middle of the board. Ignore the hundreds of other darts on different parts of the board, all over the wall, through the windows and knee deep on the floor.

As a young child my eyes would glaze over when I heard this expounded off Christadelphian platforms. After my baptism for twenty years I gave hundreds of Christadelphian lectures hammering home my conviction that we had witnessed a miracle and that therefore the Bible was authentic. I could not see or hear God, but I could see Israel and watch Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan on the TV; that was close enough for me. Then in late 1985 I realized that I had been fooled by the slight of hand of a conjurer. It was not a miracle, it was a magic trick. And what is more it was a Tommy Cooper magic trick - it was an accident - it was a coincidence. I resigned from the Christadelphians because Christadelphianism had crumbled to dust in my hands. The final pillar of support had cracked and nothing was holding up the Christadelphian roof. My faith in that nonsensical religion was ended.

Please notice the sentence in the Elpis Israel quote above "They will emigrate thither ....... in the hope of ultimately establishing their commonwealth". Dr Thomas did not predict the establishment of the State of Israel, he merely predicted an influx of Jews into Palestine. That is the first dart to miss the board. Notice also the last phrase of the Elpis Israel quote ".... under the efficient protection of the British power". That is another dart to fall to the floor. At the time Dr Thomas wrote those words in 1848 Britain, not America was the world super-power. Palestine was governed by the Muslim power Turkey who would never tolerate a migration of Jews to Palestine. In the twentieth century, World War I ended control of Palestine by the Turks and the country came under British rule. To secure help from the Zionists, the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which endorsed Palestine as a national home for Jewish people. But the policy backfired and only served to alienate the Arabs. During the period of British mandate (1922-1948), the Jewish population grew from 50,000 to 600,000 people. In 1939 the British terminated their support for Zionism in order to win the support of Arab nations for the war against Germany and the axis powers. The Jews in Palestine immediately started a program of violent terrorism against the British occupying power, which was partly suspended during the Second World War. At the conclusion of the war the Jewish terrorist campaign against both the British and the Palestinians was restarted with a vengeance and large numbers of British troops were killed by the Jews. The British sought to pacify the Arabs by severely restricting Jewish migration and even turned Jewish migration ships away from Palestine and back to Europe, including to Germany where the Nazi holocaust against the Jews had recently been terminated. So Dr Thomas was quite wrong when he predicted that the Jews would return under the efficient protection of the British power. The British did all that they could to prevent the Jews from returning in any number and even executed many of those that did return as punishment for terrorist atrocities. The British created an arms embargo to prevent weapons from being imported by the Jews. The British did all in their power to destroy the Jewish attempt to create a homeland in Israel. In 1945, at British prompting, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Transjordan, and Yemen formed the Arab League to coordinate policy between the Arab states.

On 14 May 1948, to further pacify the Arabs, the British abandoned Palestine at a few days notice and allowed the Arab nations of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq to invade the Jewish controlled areas of Palestine. The British authorities assumed that the Jews would be annihilated within days and their problem solved. However the Arabs have never been keen to support their brethren in need. Even to this day the Palestinians are mostly supported by the European and North American nations whilst the Arabs ignore them. So the Arab attack on the one day old state of Israel was poorly supported and in the event a combined total of only twenty five thousand poorly trained and badly equipped Arab troops (many of them riding on camels) faced a much superior force of more than sixty five thousand (July 1948) well trained Jewish settler troops using the best weaponry that American Jewry could pay for. By spring 1949 the Israelis were fielding over one hundred and fifteen thousand troops against an Arab force of no more than half that number. In the previous year the Israelis had secured a treaty with the strongest Arab army of Transjordan in which they agreed to allow that country to annex the West Bank of the Jordan in exchange for not attacking the Jewish State The Jordanians kept that pledge and only engaged in skirmishes around Jerusalem to defend their areas against the Jews. The result was a relatively easy victory for the Israelis, although Jewish propaganda has portrayed it as the underdog beating overwhelming opponents. The reality was the opposite. The Arabs had actually betrayed the Palestinians and done little or nothing to help them. It was largely an Israeli war of aggression against defending Arab troops rather than the other way around. The Christadelphians proclaimed the whole thing to be a miracle, even though Bible prophecy had been jettisoned because things were not working out the way that Dr Thomas had predicted. 

In fact the closer we look at the matter, the more we come to realize that Dr Thomas and the Christadelphians were in error about the whole thing, which strengthens my contention that the events surrounding the creation of the State of Israel were coincidental to Bible prophecy and in no way a fulfillment. Dr Thomas in Elpis Israel predicted that the Jews would live in "a land of unwalled villages, whose inhabitants are at rest, and dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls" under the protection of "Moab" and "Tarshish" whom he wrongly identified as Britain. Instead, the Jews created their own nation of Israel which has become the sixth strongest nation on Earth defended with amongst other things almost two hundred thermo-nuclear weapons and a fleet of German manufactured submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles almost anywhere on the planet. Israel is the eleventh largest arms exporter in the world and even sells advanced weaponry to Russia.  Dr Thomas wrongly identified Russia as "Gog" whom he said would invade Israel shortly after the return of the Jews to Palestine and trigger the return of Christ to the Earth and the resurrection. But the opposite has happened. The Russians are now dependent on Israel for the supply of unmanned surveillance aircraft and are negotiating the joint production with Israel of an advanced fighter jet to counter Israel's dependence on US co-operation. 

In Elpis Israel Dr Thomas predicted that Britain would also occupy Egypt, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia along with Palestine at the "Time of the End", together with a great deal of other nonsense. None of it has come true and it never will. The passage of time has proved that the book is almost entirely in error. 

Our shame as Christadelphians

It is embarrassing that the founder of our religion should have proved himself to be a completely mistaken with regard to Bible prophecy and that we did not have the integrity and decency to honestly admit that we were led astray by a bombastic, self centered man. It was and still is nothing short of wrong that we hold up the establishment of the State of Israel as a vindication of our understanding of Bible prophecy when the passage of time has proved that we were wholly mistaken. Events over the past century and a half have proved that both Dr John Thomas and the prophets of Israel knew nothing at all about historical events in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries. Thirty years ago I was a Christadelphian zealot proclaiming these things. Now I realize that I was a misguided. The Christadelphians have not been right about Israel fulfilling Bible prophecy. I was wrong and they were wrong. Dr Thomas's trick in predicting the return of the Jews to Palestine was a fluke coincidence reminiscent of a Tommy Cooper conjuring trick working out while everything else fell apart in chaos and confusion and the audience laughed.

I want you to imagine that you go to your financial adviser at the age of twenty to ask for his advice about how to invest the money that you are saving for your retirement. He advises that you split your money and future savings into ten different amounts and invest them equally into ten different funds that he recommends to you. Forty five years later you reach retirement age and you find that nine of the ten funds have gone bust and you face a retirement of poverty instead of the comfort that you had hoped for. The doorbell rings and when you open the door your adviser is standing on the step. "A miracle has happened" he cries - "one of your funds came good"! Would you rejoice and congratulate him on his talent for only losing a 90% of your money?

Or imagine that you play a round of golf with a new friend. At every hole but one he takes a hundred hits at the ball and still fails to get anywhere near the green. Each hole is abandoned with lost balls, smashed windows and broken clubs until you reach the eighteenth hole. Your new friend tees up his ball, pulls out the correct club, steps up to the mark and hits the ball straight and true down the middle of the green. The ball bounces once on the grass, then onto the green and rolls right up to the flag and into the hole! Would you declare him to be the winner of the game? Would you ask him to give you coaching so that your own game can be improved?

That is how we should consider the predictions of Dr Thomas. Nostradamus also
got one or two things right amongst his thousands of mistakes, but that proves
nothing. John Thomas was no different. He once got lucky; but it is time that we realized that the Christadelphians have nothing to prove that their religion has any rational basis. The events surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel are coincidental to Bible prophecy, which is in itself highly confused and self contradictory in its predictions. That is why Christadelphians to this day argue endlessly about these prophecies – because they don’t actually make any sense. John Thomas was wrong, I was wrong and I have to say to you all – in my opinion, we were all wrong.

John Bedson
Melbourne Australia
bedson@pacific.net.au