Bible Prophecy

View other editions of Bible Prophecy.
View books by Tim Callahan.

Good book for the non-scholarly. - Rated
In response to the "reader" that wants to give the book a raspberry -- you don't need to be a Bible scholar or read hundreds of scholarly studies in order to see the many fallacies in the Bible. They're there, and the only way to get around them is to resort to tortuous semantic and linguistic acrobatics that in the end are all suppositions. This book is very good -- but, like I said, not in-depth enough for the "scholarly."

Scholarly, entertaining critique of failed bible prophesies - Rated
This book makes sense of the previously (to me) impenetrable confusion of biblical prophesies by setting them in their historical, social and religious contexts. Middle Eastern ancient history is complex and fascinating, but essential to any rational evaluation of the bible. At last I can see where the authors of Daniel Ezekiel Isiah and Revelation were coming from! The New testament writers' obsession with making Jesus fulfill the scriptures and their deliberate or accidental obscuration of the facts of his life fall into place. Finally Callahan skewers the modern millenarians of the US fundamentalist fraternity and although he doesn't say it explains why Regan kept referring to the Soviets as."the evil empire". Can't recomend it too highly to recovering exchristians and students of world history in general.

Important addition to secular biblical scholorship - Rated
If Callahan's work needs any vindication outside of itself, the sheer disgust it inspires in blatant fundie apologists provides it. Aside from acting as an efficient debunking machine, the book is strong in basic biblical history. Downside: some of his points are not very clear. Sometimes arguments are lost in trying to import and summarize other complex fields of study. Not for beach reading. Perks: Great reference for biblical debates.

Prophecy 0, History 1 - Rated
Mr. Callahan shows with detailed, step by step dissection of Bible "Prophecy" that it is nothing more than history after the fact or wishfull thinking by the authors. The fact that Paul says in the Bible that all prophecy is true doesn't make it so. This book as part an overall skeptical study of the Bible shows prophecy for the paper tiger it is.

Hugh Raspberry! - Rated
Wouldn't recommend it to a dog! If solid proof was ever needed that amateurs need to mind their own business when it comes to critiquing the Bible, here it is.

Callahan's book is in trouble from the very start - or the very end, as the case may be: The bibliography is uninspiring and notable for its inadequacy; it includes seven encyclopedias (!), several Bibles, two Bible commentary sets (including one from 1929!), and less than 20 total sources in support of the authors' own viewpoint - many of them historical atlases or works decidedly inappropriate for the subject at hand.

On the other side, Callahan has examined less than a dozen conservative works on the subject, including McDowell's ETDAV; the most scholarly such work consulted in Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties! It seems fairly obvious that Callahan did no more than visit his local library and use what resources he found there - and then presumed that there was no more to be found!

Further marks of amateurism emerge as the main text itself is examined. Callahan's treatment of Ezekiel's Tyre prophecy, for example, fails on almost every one of the same points as those critiques we have discussed elsewhere, and his treatment of the Book of Daniel uses the same old arguments that have been refuted and outdated for years. (He refers to there being "a number of Greek and Persian words" in the text of Daniel, in support of a Maccabeean date; the reader is not told that the Greek words are only three in number, and are all musical instruments that could very well have been brought to Babylon by Greek traders; and, that the Persian words are but 15 in number, and are mainly administrative terms - not surprising if Daniel lived for a time under Persian rule and served in their administration!) He asserts that Mark shows "considerable ignorance of the geography of Galilee," using the same old Tyre/Sidon saw we refer to in AJINOD Chapter 4; finally, he has the nerve to compare the arbitrary voting process of the Jesus Seminar to the voting of the canonical councils! This is but the tip of the iceberg in a book riddled with incompetencies; I would have to write a whole new series of essays to go any further!

Callahan, of course, knows no Biblical languages, and is not a specialist in any Biblical field, so the superficial scholarship we find here is not surprising. He does, however, take time in his introductory material to defend his ability to address the topics in question, and has the nerve to suggest that he is able, with his own knowledge, to see the "gaps" in the thinking of conservative scholars. It is rather unfortunate that he fails to "put his money where his mouth is" when it comes to the main text.