Truth Unites - Can This Prove Christianity? (Fulfilled Prophecy)

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Gavin Ortlund explores whether biblical prophecies offer real evidence for the truth of Christianity, examining examples from Nahum, Isaiah 53, Daniel 9, and more.Check out my other video on fulfilled prophecy: https://youtu.be/NKzUtFiIQwA?si=GLbx_lWe_fhFUpk5Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth.Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

In this video, I'm going to argue for three things. Number one, the Bible has many prophecies about future events, especially the coming of a Messiah. Number two, the most plausible explanation of at least some of these prophecies, and all of them cumulatively, is a supernatural one. And number three, this provides some evidential weight for the truth of Christianity. Now, there's lots of different kinds of prophecies like this in the Bible. We're going to focus on messianic prophecies, which I think are the most compelling. Before we review those, let's just give an example of a few other kinds. Here we'll start with judgment against other nations, prophecies about this. These are fascinating, they're intriguing. They'll get us into it, even though I think I freely grant these are trickier to use as direct evidence for Christianity. We're going to state this whole appeal in this whole video very modestly and allow for people to, you know, no one's going to feel like a deer in the headlights in the way we unfold this, Lord willing. A favorite of mine comes from the book of Nahum. This is an example of a predictive prophecy, of judgment against another nation. This whole book is a diatribe against the city of Nineveh. And we have extra-biblical historical accounts of the Battle of Nineveh, which took place around 612 BC and resulted in the overturning of the Assyrians as the dominant power in the ancient

near east. Now there are some textual points of resonance between the extra-biblical historical record and what that reports, and then the prophecy of Nahum. It's fascinating. For example, Nehom appears to envision the destruction of the city by fire. We also have a vision in Nahum of the city being plundered. We also have some kind of perception in the book of Nahum of the city being flooded or overrun with water in some way. And we can compare this with the historical accounts we have from Herodotus and Deodorus and the Babylonian Chronicles. And we have some intriguing points of resonance. It's really interesting. So these report that the city was indeed plundered, and burned. And Deodorus recounts that the Euphrates River flooded the city, breaking down the wall,

though his report is questioned, to be fair. Now, most scholars do date the book of Nahum earlier than this event, though there's discussion about how much earlier, and that's not universal. The historian Josephus, ancient historian, placed Nahum way in advance during the reign of Jotham in the 8th century. So some people have gone that route. More commonly among scholars today, you'd place Nahum in the 7th century, sometime between the fall of the Egyptian city of Thebes in 6.63 BC, because that's referenced in the text. But prior to the fall of Nineveh around 612, some place it immediately prior, which means its prediction can be interpreted as more of a natural prediction. It's less obviously a supernatural prediction if it's, you know, three years in advance versus 40. However, this kind of prophecy, though interesting, and I'm putting it out on the table,

starting with it, at the risk of losing everybody out of the gate here, is very difficult to turn into a kind of coercive argument where someone who's not already sympathetic is going to be dragged over to your side, because you have to do so much work. You have to do work on issues of dating and textual transmission. So you have to prove when it's written, and you have to argue against textual interpolations. That's really difficult to do for a lot of these Old Testament prophecies, including Nahum. Furthermore, the specificity of the prophecy is not so exact as to cast off any suspicions of a non-supernatural explanation. So I think Christians are justified in seeing a valid predictive prophecy here on the basis

of the fact that they already believe the Bible is divine revelation on other grounds. So I think this can be evidentially interesting and helpful for the believer, but it's very difficult to maneuver someone else into that position unless they're already moving that way from other factors. There are other prophecies like this I would put in the same category as Nahum. People try to build arguments from the prophecies against the seaport of Tyre in Ezekiel chapter 26 and Zechariah 9, which predict the destruction of this city by Alexander the Great in 32 BC, plausibly predicted. That's the argument.

And then there's other predictions about not just foreign nations, but Israel. So the Babylonian exile and then the return to the land, particularly the rise of the Great Persian. ruler, Cyrus the Great, okay, all of that, but again, very difficult because you have to argue for the earlier date for that portion of Isaiah, very difficult to do. And especially for those of us who are lay people in the field of biblical scholarship, my scholarly work is in other disciplines, not biblical scholarship. The strongest case for fulfilled prophecy and the one that's at the heart of Christianity and I think is more useful in the kind of apologetics mode, as opposed to just building up and edifying those who already believe the Bible is in messianic prophecy, though even here

will state our argument abductively and modestly, as I think the evidence warrants. Now, before diving in, let me state the overall appeal here more colloquially. Put it like this. The Bible reads like an intriguingly coherent story, kind of like a Charles Dickens novel, where all the various subplots ultimately come together and merge into harmony and resolution at the end. I remember reading, what was it, a tale of two cities back in 2010, and that's how it is. You're like, all these different things come together. It's very organized. The Bible itself feels like that.

So we know the Bible comes in two basic parts. There's the longer Hebrew section that is more concrete, more narrativeal, what we typically call today, at least Christians call the Old Testament. Then there's this more compact Greek counterpart, what we call the New Testament, a little bit more systematic, full of letters, etc. This twofold structure of the Christian view of scripture entails a kind of chronology that distinguishes Christianity from other religions. So other religious texts like the Quran don't have this sort of unfolding over time, and there's some advantage to this. From a Christian perspective, there is coherence to this chronological unfolding of

divine revelation. Specifically, the movement from Old Testament to New Testament is something like the movement from promise to fulfillment, and we hold that Jesus of Nazareth is the one that is predicted in at least some of these texts. Now immediately, understandable suspicions will arise from those who are not already persuaded. How detailed are these prophecies? Could the apparent similarities to Jesus be a coincidence? How do we know the texts haven't been altered or massaged in different ways to increase that sense of similarity? What about an intentional fulfillment, either by Jesus or by his followers or by both. Those are just some of the alternative options we're going to need to consider.

Let me also make a clarification. Interpreting prophecies is not like doing math. This is not airtight. Connecting the dots between the promise and the fulfillment is not like the activity sheet that the waiter brings out for your kids at a restaurant where there's a really easy maze or a connect the dots picture and it's super easy to do. That is not like prophecy. According to 2nd Peter, or excuse me, 1st Peter 11,

the prophets themselves had to inquire into the details of what they were seeing to figure out, okay, when is this going to happen, what exactly is it going to look like, what are the details? There's a cryptic element to these prophecies, which makes them sort of interesting and kind of fun in a way. That's largely the result of their literary genre, but it does result in ambiguity. So this is not crystal clear, but I think it has some evidential value. Let's start by just giving a snapshot of Old Testament messianic expectation in this video, because in a previous video, which I will link in the video description, I've given a more comprehensive narrative overview of messianic expectation as it's building throughout the Old Testament.

Here we'll unpack it in five quick lightning shot little steps. Boy, so much more you can explore this. Number one, the story of the Old Testament is one of unfortunate. fulfilled expectation. If you want to summarize the message of what Christians called the Old Testament, what we would order most of us Genesis to Malachi, there's this sense of forward-looking expectation. The basic plot of this set of documents is that the Creator God is choosing one nation, Israel, to bless all the other nations of the world. And that starts right out of the gate with Genesis 12 and the calling of Abram. The first 11 chapters are setting the stage, and then the

narrative really picks up with Abraham Genesis 12. That's what the story's basically about. But the strange thing is, it doesn't really happen. Except to a very small degree, the promises don't really come true. So there's this sense of forward-looking expectation. You know, from start to finish, from the proto-evangelium of Genesis 315, where a descendant of Eve will crush the head of the serpent, all the way to the coming of Elijah and the last two verses in Malachi at the end of the Old Testament, the palpable flavor of the Old Testament is forward-looking and expected. Second, the nature of that forward-looking quality gradually hones in on one particular person who appears to be a royal figure or a king that emerges pretty quickly right there in Genesis

49-10. Jacob is blessing his children. Numbers 24 with the prophecy of Balam, there's this guy who's going to come, he's got a scepter, he looks royal. But more specifically, as you build up steam, this figure is revealed to be a Davidic king, a descendant of David. There are too many passages to cite about that, so I've just put up one example from Jeremiah 23. Third, hope arises also in the Old Testament for a coming prophet who will be like Moses. You see that in Deuteronomy 18, as well as for a coming priest, who will have a kind of perpetual role in God's house, priestly role.

And eventually those hopes, especially the priestly one, seem to somewhat converge with the Davidic hope. You see that in a few passages they'll put on screen. Jeremiah 33 is my favorite Old Testament passage in all these respects. So many different strands coalesce there, like the Dickens novel, the subplots coalescing. But in some texts, it sure looks like the priest and the king are in fact the same guy. That's perhaps clear us in Psalm 110, where David speaks of his Lord. who is nonetheless also a priest, but a different kind of priest. And he refers to a different priestly order, the order of Melchizek, to distinguish this priest, and you're familiar with that

if you've read the book of Hebrews. Now, sometimes this fuller hope is then spoken of as a messianic hope, because Messiah means anointed one, and the priests and the kings, as well as often prophets, were the anointed offices of the Old Testament. Fourth, as that hope develops in its own turn, the messianic hope of the Old Testament becomes interwoven with the entire range of Old Testament expectation. Every hope touches the messianic hope. So it's through the Messiah that God will bring about the blessing of the nations. Psalm 7217. The reunification and peace of God's people, Isaiah 11, Micah 5. Atonement for sin and the cessation of sacrifice. Daniel 9. We'll come back to that text. Deliverance from

foreign powers, Isaiah 11, Jeremiah 30, the multiplication of offspring, Jeremiah 33, Ezekiel 37, the return to the land, Amos 9, Ezekiel 37. Essentially, all of Israel's hopes crystallize and converge into this one figure, like dozens of parallel streams eventually converging to form one mighty river. It's fascinating to see how it all, like a Dickens novel, it all coalesces. Fifth and finally, the biblical story seems to go out of its way to highlight the endurance of this hope, the perpetual nature of the Davidic line, even during major disruptions like the Babylonian exile in the 6th century. That explains the seemingly random genealogical ending to the book of Ruth, who is the great grandmother of David, the otherwise anticlimactic survival of Jeholychin at the end of King,

and Jeremiah, he's the Davidic ruler during the exile, and the emphasis in the post-exilic literature on the establishment of Zerubbable, who's the great-grandson of Jehoagin. You could say that the Old Testament almost reads like a story of expectation, a long tale sustaining a hope that has not yet quite arrived, but you can almost taste it, and it keeps bubbling up. The key to this argument is the cumulative weight of these Old Testament prophecies. It's the sheer number of them, the texture of them, the way they unfold gradually and yet seemingly coherently, like a Lego set. You're building slowly piece by piece, but the end is in mind and it's rational and it's coherent. One of the fascinating ways you see this, of course, is typology, all these systems

or figures that God sets up in the Old Testament in the Nation of Israel that then point ahead to Jesus, and there's so much beauty in how that unfolds. This is a point that Blaise Pascal made, that this messianic expectation does not arise from one person. It comes in the midst of a huge unfolding tradition. And he references a whole people who announce it who have existed for 4,000 years to give corporate testimony to it. So all that is just background. So just setting this, okay, you know, I'm not giving an argument yet. I'm just sort of setting the stage of the nature of the Old Testament from a Christian perspective. Okay, let's now dive into one example, or a couple examples of texts. The first thing we can observe is that we today who are Christians are not the

first people to have a sense of messian expectation. Within first century Palestinian Judaism and elsewhere in Judaism as well, there is lively discussion about messianic hope, but it took many different forms. Among the Jews, some expected two messias, one kingly Messiah and one priestly Messiah. So in the Qumran community, we find texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls that are ticked the coming of both the priestly and the lay Messiah. We also have, of course, find this expectation for a Messiah who will overthrow Roman oppression. That leaves its mark all over the New Testament. And it even gets appropriated by others like the Romans. So so strong is this Jewish hope for a Messiah that you can find Roman historians like Soutonius and Tacitus reworking

and recasting this hope to make it about Roman emperors. like Titus and Vespasian and so forth. So you can see this in this passage from Soutonius as an example. He talks about, you know, there's this hope firmly established that there's going to be rulers from Judea and they're going to rule the whole world and so on and so forth, and they connect that with Roman emperors. The Jewish historian Josephus applies this expectation specifically to Vespasian. And that is not at all shocking because that was his patron.

So everyone's looking at the Old Testament and saying there seems to be an expectation a prediction of someone or some ones who are going to come. There's this forward-looking quality to it, but what exactly it's predicting in the details is widely disputed. One of the things that you notice is some texts seem to portray a triumphant Messiah, whereas others, so this is the Messiah, he's going to come and dash all of his enemies to pieces and so forth. Others seem to envision a suffering, lowly Messiah. Perhaps the more dominant picture of the Messiah is triumphant.

in general, it looks like the Messiah is going to do pretty well. He rules over the entire world. He reigns forever. He subdues God's enemies. He delivers and protects God's people. He spreads righteousness and peace and the saving knowledge of God to all nations of the earth. And I've given texts if you're listening by podcast on the screen to all of those things. But that's not the whole story. You also have passages like Psalm 22 and Zechariah 1210, where this figure comes and is pierced. You also have Zechariah, that word pierced often means a piercing unto death. You also have Zechariah 9-9, where he's writing on a donkey. Most provocatively of all, of course, you have Isaiah 53, where there's a righteous servant of God who suffers vicariously for the sins of others. Now, these texts also

have rabbinic precedent for being taken as messianic, along with the more triumphant messianic texts. This was not the only possible pre-Christian take on passages like Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Zechariah 12, but it was one very prominent one. More recently, it's often claimed that the servant of Isaiah 53 is the corporate nation of Israel, but Isaiah 53 is only one of four servant songs in the book of Isaiah, and they all describe the same figure. And elsewhere, that servant is said to save Israel. Furthermore, if the servant is Israel, then that would require that the speakers in Isaiah 53 are the Gentile nations, which is very odd. There's other details that don't quite fit with Israel being the servant either. So,

while it's true that Israel can be spoken of as God's servant, that cannot exhaust the meaning of this passage in Isaiah 53. Rather, Isaiah 53 is best taken as a messianic prophecy. describing a future individual from among God's people who can then also act on their behalf. I will put up the whole passage on screen in what will probably be tiny font just to torment your eyes, but if you want to read it through, you can. Here, I'm not going to read through the entire passage. By the way, it's actually the end of chapter 52 through the end of chapter 53. So, but we'll just call it Isaiah 53 for short.

Here, let's just read verses 5 and 6, which I remember one of my seminary professors saying, these verses contain as rich in atonement theology as any New Testament passage, if not more. He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. At the risk of oversimplification and doing too much of a drive-by of this incredible, incredibly textured and rich passage. Let's just draw out 10 themes about this servant. Number one, he is

wise and lifted up. Number two, he is marred beyond recognition. Number three, he sprinkles many nations. Sprinkles is priestly language often associated with forgiveness or cleansing. Number four, he is despised and rejected by people. Number five, his suffering is vicarious on behalf of the sins of others. Number six, he is silent before accusation. Number seven, he is suddenly killed for the transgression of God's people. Number eight, he receives a wealthy burial. Number nine, after his guilt offering, he receives new life and descendants. And number 10, he makes many righteous by bearing their sin. Okay, does this sound a little familiar? You know, you can't begrudge us for kind of looking at this and say, wow, this sounds a little bit, I mean, even down to the tiny little details, like number six or number eight in that list I just gave,

if you've seen my work on the burial of Joseph of Arimathea. But here's what's interesting, though. We have these two different strands of prophecy in the old, this is one way to isolate different trajectories. You've got the lowly Messiah and the triumphant Messiah, these two different strands of expectation. It's not easy to see how they're both going to be fulfilled, and so this is why you've got all these different interpretations floating around.

One Jewish rabbi, for example, quoted Daniel 7, which references the son of man or one like a son of man riding in the clouds. And then he quotes Zechariah 9, which references the king riding on a donkey, both of which you can see on screen here. And then his basic conclusion is to cast these two as alternative possibilities contingent on the obedience of the Jewish people. If the Jewish people merit redemption, the Messiah will come in a miraculous manner with the clouds of heaven.

If they do not merit redemption, the Messiah will come lowly in riding on a donkey. So it's fascinating. That's one way to try to put these two different strands together. Here's what's so fascinating. The earliest Christians said both of these are fulfilled in Christ. They're saying the guy who rides on the clouds and the guy who rides on the donkey are the same guy. Jesus isn't merely the realization of Isaiah 53. He's the realization of Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 11. Not only has the piercing of Psalm 22 happened in this one man, so has the triumphant reign of Psalm 5. 72 and Psalm 89 and so forth. This was the early Christian message. Jesus' death fulfilled the expectation for messianic suffering and sin-bearing, and his resurrection fulfilled the expectation

for messianic triumph and kingly rule. Now here's the point I would make. This is unlikely to be the message they would have unless Jesus was risen from the dead. This is not the kind of messianic sham likely to be concocted. A spiritual messianic reign was a very difficult message for the first century Jews languishing under Roman oppression. Even the disciples themselves after the resurrection are still expecting something more political, Acts chapter 1 verse 6. And the birth narratives of Christ make these predictions that sound very political. Luke chapter 1 will look at an example in a second. The point is that makes it very unlikely that they're tampering with the biblical text to try to make it look like Jesus is the Messiah.

Here's how Lydia McGrew puts it. If the evangelists were inclined to alter the story to create an argument from Jesus's fulfillment of prophecy, all of these passages seem unlikely inclusions. It would have been much easier to leave them out or to alter them. She's talking about passages like the words of the angel Gabriel to Mary at Jesus's birth. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High and the Lord God will give him the throne. of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. If you were trying to fabricate a story that your leader was the Messiah, why include prophecies like that that would seem patently falsified by his crucifixion?

Why not just stick with Isaiah 53 and the lowly texts and then say, whoa, those other texts are going to be fulfilled later? Unless, of course, the disciples genuinely believed Jesus had been risen from the dead, and his kingdom really was established in this spiritual manner. There are two other reasons why the idea of an intentionally manufactured fulfillment of messianic prophecy is unlikely. First, it would be a Herculean task to organize such a fulfillment, since it would depend upon so many factors that are either impossible or difficult to control. Here's how Peter Craft puts it. Even if Jesus deliberately tried to fulfill the prophecies, no mere man could have the power to arrange the time,

place events and circumstances of his birth or events after his death. Something similar could be said for the disciples to a slightly less degree, I think. Second, what would be the motive? Why would anyone want to stage an artificial messianic arrival that would likely lead only to scorn and maybe crucifixion? That would hold true for both Jesus and the disciples poignantly. Jesus himself seems to have predicted his own crucifixion and resurrection on several occasions like Matthew 1621, why would they all keep going knowing what's at stake? So the idea of a contrived messianic fulfillment doesn't seem very plausible. What about the other possibilities? Well, the answer cannot be textual corruptions and or interpolations because there's simply too many prophecies in play.

The evidence strongly supports that they predate Christ and generally have been copied very accurately. For example, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls contains copies of Isaiah 53, and that dates well before Christ and are very similar to the text of Isaiah that we had before they were discovered, even if they are not word for word. If you've been watching the internet, you know what I'm talking about there. The third and best alternative explanation is simple coincidence or something in this ballpark. Some of these prophecies are, in fact, cryptic and inexact. To be sure, this is not a slam dunk. Sometimes you could say, well, maybe, maybe, okay, they sort of conjure up an impression that corresponds to Jesus vaguely, but only really

with a combination of cherry-picking, motivated reasoning, and blind luck. If I was arguing the other side, that's the way I would go. For you, viewer, I would encourage you to work through every single text in careful detail. We can't possibly survey everything here. But I would say that the range and specificity of these Old Testament prophecies is pretty remarkable, and coincidence seems like a long shot. Let me give just one other example of a text to say why I've come to that conclusion and encourage you to think this through for yourself. Consider Daniel 9, for example, where the angel Gabriel announces to Daniel the destruction of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, that's the word sanctuary there, and the coming of a Messiah, that's the anointed one, who will atone for sin,

who will establish righteousness, and who will put an end to sacrifice an offering, you can see those words emboldened toward the end. Now, this is hugely contested. I mean, oh, boy, so much. I mean, first of all, just the date of the book of Daniel. However, all sides agree that it predates Christ. There's big differences within that. But the specific time frame that is given here is debated.

Here we have a reference to 70-7s, or sometimes translated 70 weeks. The debate is on how to understand this language. It gets very complicated. You get into stuff like inclusive counting and different kinds of years, Sabbath years versus prophetical years and so on and so forth. You have to remember there's no year zero, so you go straight from negative one to one. It gets really complicated. But here's one reasonable option is to take 70 times of seven years as 490 years. Okay? That's very common as a way to take it. Now, if you measure from the decree of Artaxerxes, which is referenced in

Ezra 7 to Restore Jerusalem, which is dated to around 458 BC, that lands you right around 33 AD, around the time Jesus was crucified. There's a little wiggle room because of, again, some of these factors I mentioned about inclusive, counting, and so on and so forth. And this is a few decades, of course, before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple in 70 AD. Now, it is very difficult to be dogmatic about the exact chronology. I'm not trying to oversimplify this. There are different proposals that have been given. And to give a thorough answer, you've got to do a lot more work.

I'm acknowledging the complexity of this. But here's what I would say, even apart from the issue of the time. timing. This is a remarkable prophecy. Daniel foresees the coming of a Messiah, his being cut off, the ending of sacrifice, the destruction of the temple, and the forgiveness of sins, God's people. In the first century, the Jewish sacrificial system was ended, and the temple was destroyed, and a man believed to be the Messiah was indeed cut off. It's legitimate to wonder how and why such an expectation of these events would arise in advance. Could it be be a coincidence? In isolation, that seems more plausible, but when you combine, that's why I said at the

beginning, the cumulative weight, if you combine, if you get into the story, you're reading the expectation, you know, you combine Daniel 9 with Isaiah 53, with the entire labyrinth of Old Testament expectation. This is powerful. The idea that the early Christians simply retrojected Old Testament texts onto Jesus struggles to account for the sheer breadth and specificity and sometimes awkward or politically risky features of the prophecies that they appeal to. It's genuinely hard to account for such a lengthy, coherent story of hope. Now, if there is any truth to this story, it means something striking. Think about this. Think about this. Oh, my joy in making this video and studying for it to hope it helps somebody out there. What it means is the most important and

influential person who ever lived was expected. You know, I often make arguments about Jesus from his resurrection, Lord liar, lunatic, legend, those kinds of arguments. But a piece of that is also this precursor to Jesus in the nation of Israel, where he doesn't just fall like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere. He seems to be the fulfillment of a story, a coherent story. Now, if that is right, think about the emotional implications. We're familiar with this idea of a Messiah from outside the Bible. We know what it's like to long for a deliverer. You know, we understand how Morpheus feels toward Neo in the Matrix. We understand why people get such high expectations and hopes for an incoming political leader? What if Jesus is that for human

history? If that is true, it means something incredibly exciting which can be summarized with the simple word, hope. Hope, not just for the Jewish people, though for them as well, but for everybody, because of the increase of his government and his peace, there will be no end and anybody can get in on it. To capture the emotional resonance of this, think of the final scene in Rogue One, A Star Wars. War's story. Where right after Darth Vader just massacres all those rebel troopers, the tiny ship escapes and it has the Death Star plans and Princess Leia receives them and she's asked what they are and you know what she says? Remember this? And just a simple word, she says, hope. Think of the emotions of that scene where, you know, think it's like you're languishing in the darkness,

terrible oppression, things look very grim, but how a glimmer of hope is kindled. A light has been lit in the dark. The rebellion has a chance. There's a reason to keep fighting. That's the emotions that this appeal should put upon the heart. If Jesus is the expected Jewish Messiah, this is what we should feel. The long saga of human history is brutal, but something is being done about it. There's a plan quietly unfolding. Like a Dickens novel, every little strand will gather together in the end. If Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, we're allowed to hope in that.