On page 2 of this issue, Bruce Wildish made a point in his reply to Everette Hatcher that is so self-evident that anyone should see its logical soundness: "(A)ny text that speaks clearly of events now known to have happened cannot have been written any earlier than the events to which it refers." Despite its basic soundness, however, inerrantists are unwilling to apply this principle to biblical interpretation. The prophet Isaiah lived in the 8th century B. C., yet in the book attributed to him, he mentioned by name Cyrus, a Persian king who didn't live until the 6th century B. C. (44:28; 45:1). Common sense should tell reasonable people that the reference by name to Cyrus is overwhelming evidence that at least this part of Isaiah was not written until or after the time of Cyrus, but inerrantists aren't willing to apply common sense to biblical interpretation. Instead, they speak of "prophetic foreknowledge " as an explanation for how Isaiah could have known the name of a Persian king who would not even be born till well over a century later, but as Wildish also pointed out, "It is unscholarly and unprofessional to allow considerations like 'prophecy' to enter the discussions [about dating authorship]."
Wildish's observations are nothing more than an appeal to a long-standing rule of evidence known as Occam's razor. William of Occam was a 14th-century philosopher, who taught that explanations should not be multiplied unnecessarily to explain problematic events, so the simplest hypotheses will probably be the correct explanations of unexplained phenomena. This is a principle that has since become widely accepted in the investigations of unusual circumstances, but apologists resist applying it to biblical criticism. They rely instead on supernatural explanations.
Many biblical examples could be used to illustrate the superiority of Occam's razor over the God-did-it approach to explaining exceptional events, but the "prophecy" of king Josiah's religious reformation should be sufficient to show how common sense can adequately explain away many so-called biblical prophecies. According to 2 Kings 13, a "man of God" was sent to Bethel to denounce Jeroboam's erection of a pagan altar. In verses 2-3, the "man of God" spoke what many biblical fundamentalists consider an example of amazing prophecy:
O altar, altar, thus says Yahweh: "A son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name; and he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the high places who offer incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you." He gave a sign the same day, saying, "This is the sign that Yahweh has spoken: The altar shall be torn down, and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out."
Needless to say, the book of 2 Kings 22-23 records the reign of king Josiah, who instituted sweeping religious reforms, one of which was burning pagan priests on the altar that Jeroboam had erected at Bethel (23:17). Since Jeroboam had reigned in ca. 922-901 B. C., 280 years before the time of Josiah, biblical inerrantists will cite the "man of God's" prophecy of Josiah's destruction of Jeroboam's altar and ask, "How could this prophet have known almost three hundred years before the event even the name of the king who would burn pagan priests and destroy the altar?"
The answer to the question is so obvious that even biblical inerrantists surely know what it is: this could very easily be a simple case of after-the-fact prophecy. Clearly, the books of Kings were not written until after the time of king Josiah; otherwise, 2 Kings could not have recorded the history of his reign. This fact raises the very distinct possibility that the writer(s) of these books simply put words into the mouth of the "man of God" to make it appear to superstitious readers of the time that a prophet had foreseen specific events almost 300 years before they happened.
Rational people will apply Occam's razor to this situation and
ask themselves which is more likely, that someone put an after-the-fact
prophecy into the mouth of a biblical character or that a deity guided
him to know specific details about what would happen 280 years later.
There really is no contest here. The first alternative is far more
likely.
