Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/275

228 of an impossible city, is a standing monument of the prophetic character, and of the lasting folly of interpreters. It were easy to collect other instances of palpable mistake.

The Messianic prophecies are the most famous of all. It is commonly pretended that there are in the Old Testament clear and distinct predictions of Jesus of Nazareth. But I do not hesitate to say, it has never been shown that there is, in the whole of the Old Testament, one single sentence that in the plain and natural sense of the words foretells the birth, life, or death of Jesus of Nazareth. If the Scripture have seventy-two senses, as one of the Rabbins declares, or if it foretell whatever comes to pass, as Augustine has said, and means all it can be made to mean, as many moderns seem to think, why predictions and types of Jesus may be found in the first chapter of Genesis, in Noah and Abraham and Samson, as well as in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, the Odes of Horace, and the story of the Trihemerine Hercules.

The Messianic expectations and prophecies seem to have originated in this way: After the happy and successful period of David and Solomon, the kingdom was divided into Judah and Israel, the two tribes and the ten, the national prosperity declined. Pious men hoped for better times; they naturally connected these hopes with a personal deliverer; a descendant of David, their most popular king. The deliverer would unite the two kingdoms under the old form. A poetic fancy endowed him with wonderful powers; made him a model of goodness. Different poets arrayed their expected hero in imaginary drapery to suit their own conceptions. Malachi gives him a forerunner. The Jews were the devoutest of nations; the popular deliverer must be a religious man. They were full of pious faith; so the darker the present, the brighter shone the Pharos of Hope in the future. Sometimes this de-