Jimmy Akin delves into the complex question of whether Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy of reuniting the 12 tribes of Israel. He examines different perspectives on the matter, including the view that the prophecy may have been fulfilled spiritually through the early Church. Learn about the historical context and theological implications of this intriguing topic.
Transcript:
How did Jesus fulfill the prophecy, the Messianic prophecy about bringing in all 12 lost tribes of Israel back into the land of Israel?
Okay, so the first thing to know is James Tabor is a very eccentric individual. He has a lot of views on various matters that basically there’s no other support for in the scholarly community. He’s an eccentric. That doesn’t mean he’s always wrong, but it does mean whenever you hear him say something, you really want to look at it to say, “How good is the evidence here?”
When we’re talking about the prophecy that the tribes would be reunited, there’s actually a debate in the Jewish community about that prophecy.
And it seems pretty evenly split.
What you find in Talmudic times, the rabbis debating about that, and does this prophecy still apply, or has it been canceled? Because when the 10 lost tribes left, they lost their Jewish identities. When they were taken into captivity, they eventually lost their Jewish faith, they lost their Jewish identities, they got integrated with other peoples, and they disobeyed God. And so for those tribes, are they going to be brought back? Well, there’s a lot of Jewish scholars who would say, “No, they’re not.
They invalidated the promise by abandoning God.” And so that’s one possible solution here.
And I should say James Tabor’s idea about Gad being in Spain, that’s the Gadarenes. That’s all just crazy. The Gadarenes, as the Gospels indicate, were on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, not over in Spain.
And we also know where the 10 lost tribes went, and they didn’t go to Spain.
But one solution is the prophecy became invalid, and so Jesus didn’t need to fulfill it because it became invalid.
Another solution is, well, and this is actually one that there’s support for in some of the Church Fathers, is Jesus did reunite the tribes after his first coming because they blended in with these other people in Mesopotamia, and Mesopotamia became Christian. So they were spiritually reunited with his other people, and thus all the different tribes were reunited because there are Jewish Christians and there are Israeli Christians, even if they lost their identity. Their descendants still became part of Christianity, and so he may have fulfilled the prophecy that way. And then a third possibility is he hadn’t gotten around to it yet, but he’ll do it at the Second Coming, just like there are other prophecies about bringing world peace and stuff that haven’t yet been fulfilled, but will be fulfilled in a greater way at the Second Coming. And obviously, this is just one of those prophecies too.