What all resources/expositions/writings have been published as a comprehensive analysis of prophecy in Scripture? Any resources about prophecy in all of Scripture, its fulfillment, extrabiblical support, etc. would be helpful. I would think that 2000 years of church history would already have a few of these, especially since prophecy and miracles seem to be the favorite apologetic for the truth of Christianity, especially for the early church.
I have heard and seen several claims about the number of prophecies in the Bible, such as "over 1000+ fulfilled prophecies!" or "2000 different prophecies!" or I even read a claim of 3000 prophecies in Scripture. I don't like relying on sources I don't trust and I wanted to do a more thorough analysis, so I got 2 books that were proposed to be a comprehensive exposition on "every prophecy/prophetic passage in the Bible" and a book on every Messianic prophecy.
- The Prophecy Knowledge Handbook: All the Prophecies of Scripture Explained in One Volume by John Walvoord (Amazon)
- Exploring Bible Prophecy from Genesis to Revelation: Clarifying the Meaning of Every Prophetic Passage by (editors) Tim LaHaye and Ed Hindson (Amazon)
- All the Messianic Prophecies of the Bible by Herbert Lockyer (Amazon)
A basic meta-analysis of the two comprehensive resources shows a noticeable discrepancy in what is accepted as prophecy. I found that they disagreed on the number of prophecies at the book-level (meaning # prophecies in each book of the Bible) by 269 prophecies in just the Old Testament. The LaHaye book only includes 374 total prophecies in the Old Testament, so this difference represents a significant percentage of total prophecy. The LaHaye says that it "focuses on the unfulfilled prophecies" though it still claims to be comprehensive, discussing "every prophetic passage in the Bible." I would be even more interested in the fulfilled prophecies than the unfulfilled ones. The Messianic prophecy book doesn't even give a specific number of prophecies besides "over 300"; in fact, the first two books don't either, but I just counted them by hand. For example, I counted 659 sections/subsections of prophecy in LaHaye though it claims there are over 1000 predictive prophecies. I recognize that identifying exact numbers of prophecies can be difficult and blurry, such as when you include typologies or other things like that, but I would think there should be multiple analyses in the past that have been produced on prophecy in Scripture.
I would especially be interested in references that address the questions
- What is the prophecy/prophetic claim?
- Has it been fulfilled?
- Is its fulfillment recorded in Scripture?
- Is there extrabiblical support of this prophecy?
I am not interested in answers giving specific examples of prophecies that have or have not been fulfilled. I am only interested in publications (books, academic journals, church fathers, theologians, etc.) that extensively discuss the prophetic aspect of Scripture in an approximately comprehensive way, since prophecy is important enough to account for about 1/4 of all Scripture. I have actually seen 2 sets of 5 criteria that were created by atheists for analyzing prophecy that I actually find quite useful.