St. Thomas, replying to the objection that miracles seem to have ceased, answers that the wonderful conversion of the world to the Christian Faith is itself a most certain proof of past miracles, so that it is not strictly necessary to look for new ones, since the old miracles remain evident in their lasting effect; and God, in any case, has not ceased even in our own time to work miracles through His saints in confirmation of the Faith (Contra Gentiles, I and VI).

Confirmation Through the Fulfilment of Prophecy

Article 1 — The Testimony of Christ Is Confirmed by His Prophecies

I. On prophecy generally. As already explained, a prophecy is the certain prediction of a future contingent event that cannot be foreseen by any natural means. If the predicted event is (1) remote in time, (2) foretold with minute circumstantial detail, (3) complex in character, (4) dependent on free human choice, and especially if (5) the event itself is a miracle, dependent therefore on the free will of God alone, it can be said with certainty that the prophecy lies absolutely beyond the reach of human conjecture. A prophecy of this character, once fulfilled, points directly to the infinite prescience of God, and constitutes a most certain motive of credibility. The prophecies made by Christ Himself come first for consideration here; the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament are considered separately in Article 2. Rationalists assert that when Christ foretold the destruction of Jerusalem, He linked this prophecy with a further prediction of the immediate end of the world, and that since He was mistaken in this second prediction, no confidence can be placed in the fulfilment of His other prophecies either.

II. Christ predicted many future contingent events which were fulfilled to the letter.

1° He knew with certainty the secrets of hearts. “Some of the scribes said within themselves: He blasphemeth … And Jesus seeing their thoughts, said: Why do you think evil in your hearts?” (Matt. 9:3–4; cf. Luke 5:21–22; Matt. 22:18); “he knew what was in man” (John 2:25); “Jesus knew from the beginning, who they were that did not believe, and who he was, that would betray him” (John 6:65; cf. 13:11; 16:19). He was cognizant, too, of events at a distance: “before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee” (John 1:48); He told the Samaritan woman all that she had done (John 4:29); and He told Peter, “go to the sea, and cast in a hook: and that fish which shall first come up, take: and when thou hast opened its mouth, thou shalt find a stater: take that, and give it to them for me and thee” (Matt. 17:26).

2° He foretold His own Passion and Resurrection. “Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon him, went forth” (John 18:4). He foretold His Passion and Resurrection minutely, clearly, and with certainty, on at least three separately recorded occasions, when the events themselves could not possibly have been foreseen by natural means: (1) after Peter’s confession (Matt. 16:20–23; Mark 8:30–33; Luke 9:21–22); (2) after the cure of the lunatic boy (Matt. 17:21–22; Mark 9:29–31; Luke 9:44–45); and (3) after the parable of the labourers sent into the vineyard (Matt. 20:17–19; Mark 10:32–34; Luke 18:31–34). St. Mark records the prediction in full: “the Son of man shall be betrayed to the chief priests, and to the scribes, and ancients, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles. And they shall mock him, and spit on him, and scourge him, and kill him: and the third day he shall rise again” (Mark 10:33–34); St. Matthew adds the specific circumstance of crucifixion (Matt. 20:19). The Pharisees themselves later confirmed the prophecy’s currency, saying to Pilate: “Sir, we have remembered, that that seducer said, while he was yet alive: After three days I will rise again” (Matt. 27:63). All these predictions were duly fulfilled (cf. Matt. 26:57; Mark 14:64; Matt. 27:2, 26, 30).

3° Christ foretold many further circumstances of His own Passion, including the treason of Judas and the manner of his denial (John 13:26, 21; Matt. 26:25, 34), and the persecutions His followers would suffer (John 15:18–20; Matt. 24:9–13). He promised His Apostles the power of converting sinners, the grace of working miracles, the gift of tongues, and the further gifts of the Holy Ghost, and predicted both continuing opposition and their ultimate victory (cf. Matt. 4:18–20; 10:1–19; Mark 16:17; Luke 10:19; 21:14–15; Matt. 19:28; John 15:16). To Peter specifically He predicted his apostolate, his primacy, his threefold denial, and his eventual martyrdom (Luke 5:10; Matt. 16:17–19; John 1:42; Matt. 26:34; Mark 14:30, 71; John 13:36). He predicted, to His disciples, such small circumstantial details as the finding of the ass and the colt (Matt. 21:2), the exact circumstances of the preparation for the Last Supper (Matt. 26:18ff.), and the world-wide renown of Mary Magdalene’s act of charity (Matt. 26:13; Mark 14:9).

4° Predictions regarding the Church. Christ predicted that the Apostles would receive the Holy Ghost (Acts 1:8; 2:4); He foretold the wonderful propagation of the Church and her indefectibility (Matt. 16:18); He foretold, too, the conversion of the Gentile nations: “many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven” (cf. Matt. 8:11; Luke 14:24).

5° Christ foretold many things regarding the destruction of Jerusalem, and, in the same discourse, the punishment of the Jews and the transfer of the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles (Matt. 21:41, 43). To understand the discourse properly, two distinct questions must be distinguished: the disciples’ question about the sign of Christ’s coming and of the consummation of the world, and their separate question about the destruction of Jerusalem itself, together with Christ’s separate answers to each. The prediction runs: “amen I say to you, there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone, that shall not be destroyed” (Matt. 24:2; Mark 13:2; Luke 21:6); the disciples then asked, “tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the consummation of the world?” (Matt. 24:3). St. Thomas notes that in Luke’s Gospel only the first question, concerning Jerusalem, is directly asked, since the disciples still believed, at that stage, that Jerusalem would not be destroyed before the Second Coming — hence their later question in Acts 1:6, “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Christ’s answer to the first question, regarding the destruction of Jerusalem, gives three distinct signs of that coming event. (a) “Many will come in my name, saying, I am Christ … and many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many” (Matt. 24:5, 11; Mark 13:5–6; Luke 21:8) — and indeed, before the destruction of Jerusalem, figures such as Elymas, Simon Magus, and Theudas duly appeared (cf. 2 Pet. 2:1–20; 1 John 2:18; Acts 13:6–11; 8:9–10; 5:36). (b) “You shall hear of wars and rumours of wars … nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places” (Matt. 24:6–8; Mark 13:7–8; Luke 21:9–11) — and Josephus records exactly such civil war and unrest across Judea, Britain, Gaul, Germany, and the Parthian territories in the years leading up to A.D. 70 (Bellum Judaicum, I, 10; XVIII, 1–8); there were earthquakes at Laodicea (A.D. 61) and at Pompeii, and pestilence and famine not only in Judea but across the whole Roman Empire (Acts 11:28; Tacitus, Annals, XVI, 13; Josephus, Bellum Judaicum, V, 12.3; VI, 3); terrible portents, moreover, were reported at Jerusalem itself in A.D. 65 (Josephus, Bellum Judaicum, VI, 5.3; Tacitus, Histories, V, 13). (c) “Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall put you to death: and you shall be hated by all nations for my name’s sake” (Matt. 24:9–14; Mark 13:9–13; Luke 21:12–19) — and between A.D. 30 and 67, Peter, John, and the other Apostles were repeatedly imprisoned, Stephen and James were martyred, Christians were dispersed, and Paul himself was imprisoned, stoned, beaten, and brought successively before Gallio, Felix, Festus, Agrippa, and Nero.

Christ’s answer to the second question, regarding the properly eschatological end of the world, is considered further below, under Section IV of this article. The detailed prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem itself follows immediately (Matt. 24:15–22; Mark 13:14–18; Luke 21:22–24), and Christ Himself gave the cause of this terrible punishment when He wept over the city (Luke 19:41–44). Every one of these prophecies was fulfilled to the letter: the Jews rose in revolt against Rome in A.D. 66–67; Vespasian began the campaign against them and later became Emperor; his son Titus continued the war, besieging Jerusalem itself while the Christians of the city, remembering Christ’s warning, had already fled to Pella. Josephus records that some 1,100,000 Jews perished by the sword or by famine during the siege, and that the survivors were sold into slavery; the city and its Temple were burned and utterly destroyed in A.D. 70 (Bellum Judaicum, VI, 3.6; VI, 6.1; VII). These events took place within the lifetime of many still living at the time Christ spoke, thus fulfilling His own words: “amen I say to you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done” (Matt. 24:34). The Arch of Titus at Rome, and the writings of Tacitus, Josephus, and Suetonius alike, all bear independent witness to this fulfilment.

Two Rationalist objections are commonly raised against the force of this prophecy. (1°) Some critics — Stapfer, O. Holtzmann, Renan, A. Réville, among others — admit that Christ foresaw the coming catastrophe only in a vague, general way, not in genuine detail, and that the surviving text must therefore have been written, or at least heavily edited, only after the event itself. Weiss, however, in his own Leben Jesu, admits that Mark’s Gospel was, in fact, written before the destruction of Jerusalem took place. The objection fails on its own merits: to have foreseen the destruction of Jerusalem at all was, in itself, an instance of extraordinary prevision, since the Jews were at that time living peaceably under Roman rule, as Pliny himself notes (Natural History, V, 15), and Jerusalem was among the best-known and most secure cities of the East; moreover, the prophecy of its destruction was well enough known in advance that the Christians of Jerusalem actually acted on it, fleeing the city for Pella some three years before its fall (cf. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, 5; St. Epiphanius, Haereses, XXIX, 7). Had the prophecy, finally, been composed only after the event, its author would hardly have carefully distinguished the catastrophic end of the world from the destruction of Jerusalem — he would far more naturally have simply conflated the two, describing the end of the world as having already occurred alongside the burning of the Temple.

(2°) Other Rationalists argue that Christ erred outright in prophesying an immediate end of the world, given His words, “this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled” (Matt. 24:34; Mark 13:30; cf. Matt. 10:5–6, 23; 16:28; 26:64). These texts are admittedly difficult, precisely because Christ speaks, within a single discourse, of both the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world together, the first serving as a figure of the second, so that it is not always easy to determine exactly which words apply to which. If, as Rationalists contend, Christ had actually announced an immediate end of the world, He would have flatly contradicted Himself, since in many other places He speaks in a directly opposite sense: He foretold the spread of the Gospel to every nation before that consummation could arrive at all — “this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come” (Matt. 24:14; Mark 13:10) — and He compared the Kingdom to a grain of mustard seed that grows only gradually over time; the spread of the Gospel, in other words, could not possibly take place before the destruction of Jerusalem, as Luke’s Gospel confirms directly: “Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the nations be fulfilled” (Luke 21:24). The true object of Christ’s teaching on this point was not to fix a precise date for the end of the world, but rather to impress upon His hearers the constant need of watchfulness — “watch ye therefore, because ye know not what hour your Lord will come” (Matt. 24:42) — a reading followed by Chrysostom, Theophylact, and Euthymius among the Fathers.

The word “generation” itself, moreover, admits of several legitimate senses. St. Jerome interprets the expression, in this text, to mean the human race as such, whether in the sense of the whole human family or of the whole Jewish race specifically. Others judge that the words refer not to the end of the world at all, but exclusively to the destruction of Jerusalem, in keeping with the general Old Testament usage of “generation” for a specific nation or people (cf. Num. 32:13; Ps. 94:10). Still others hold that the phrase carries a genuinely twofold meaning: with reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, “this generation” means the generation of Jews then actually living, while with reference to the end of the world it signifies, more broadly, the Jewish people as a race persisting across history (cf. Fillion on Matt. 24:34; Cardinal Billot, La Parousie, Jésus-Christ et Fils de Dieu, pp. 401–403). The words of Matt. 16:28 — “some that stand here, shall not taste death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” — most naturally refer, in the same way, to the destruction of the Temple and the visible expansion of the Church that followed it, not to the final Parousia itself. Some critics infer from 1 Thess. 4:15 that St. Paul himself regarded the end of the world as strictly imminent, but a careful comparison with 2 Thess. 2:2 — where Paul explicitly warns the Thessalonians not to be alarmed “as if the day of the Lord were at hand” — corrects any such impression decisively.

IV. The prophecies of Christ are most certain. Christ’s prophecies lie utterly beyond the reach of natural human foresight. The prophecies concerning His own Resurrection and the unshaken stability of His Church, moreover, are not merely future contingent events but genuine miracles, dependent entirely on the free will of God; in other cases, the sheer minuteness of the circumstantial detail foretold precludes any possibility of merely fortuitous coincidence. Our Lord Himself said: “at present I tell you, before it comes to pass: that when it shall come to pass, you may believe” (John 13:19; 14:29) — were Christ not divine, God Himself would in effect have borne witness to a falsehood, which is impossible. The gift of prophecy, finally, has not ceased with the Apostolic age: many later saints possessed this same endowment, as may be read at length in the volumes of the Bollandists and elsewhere.