You know, all of this postdiction )like prediction, only it's never realized until after the event itself_ that the Bible seems to be doing reminds me of Nostradamus and the Belgariad books at the same time.
Nostradamus's famous Centuries, that is supposed to predict all the major events through the centuries from his time until sometime after now, have been constantly reread and reprocessed in all kinds of ways. Every time someone breaks the code, figures out how to use it to predict events, and confirms it by carrying out their method and attaching hundreds of stanzas to particular events, they then go on to publish their own works showing how unfulfilled prophecies in the book will carry out. Get to the time of the event . . . and the event doesn't happen. Any of them. Ever. So, more scholars go back to the drawing board and do it over again.
Apparently, Nostradamus was one of the most successful con artists in the history of the world, but then again that's what you had to be if you were a court astrologer. And don't forget, as much of a con artist as he was, he was pretty damn smart to be able to still give good advice, and actually did do a lot to help peasants in plague ridden towns. Towns he was in had hardly any deaths, even if 90+% of people around them died. The real secret he taught, by the way, was wash, in case you didn't know.
In the Belgariad fantasy series, it had been mentioned, and laid out much more in Belgarath the Sorcerer, that the prophecies that had been gathered by the Disciples of Aldur and their allies were in fact completely accurate, but the way they attempted to handle them in the first place, they never realized what the prophecy was saying until after the event. Two of Aldur's Disciples though were twins, very deeply connected telepathically. When one read one of the two main Codices, while the other twin read the other main Codex, they were able to make all kinds of connections much faster than everyone else put together. This, by the way, is where I first read the term postdiction, coined by Beldin . . . who was damn sick of being told what was going to happen after it had already happened.
Too bad this one example of genuine prophecy is honest fantasy, which the books of the Bible probably were at first . . . until jackasses made a real religion out of it.
