About The Fulfillment Project

How This Project Began

For more than fifty years, I have studied the Bible with a fundamental conviction: Scripture must be allowed to speak for itself, and claims about what it teaches should be capable of careful examination.

About sixteen years ago, I was introduced to Preterism. As with other theological positions I had encountered, my first response was not simply to accept or reject it. I wanted to verify it. Did its claims hold up to the biblical text? And, because Preterism makes specific claims about events that supposedly occurred in history, did those claims hold up to the historical record?

That investigation led almost immediately to a more basic question.

What does it actually mean to say that a prophecy has been fulfilled?

Before I could determine whether a prophecy had been fulfilled in A.D. 70—or at any other point in history—I needed a reasonable standard for deciding what fulfillment itself required.

At first, this seemed as though it should be easy. Fulfillment is not an obscure concept. We use language every day to make promises, describe expectations, establish conditions, and communicate what we intend.

Nor does taking language seriously require what is sometimes disparaged as “wooden literalism.” As a native English speaker, I recognize figures of speech just as other competent speakers do. We understand metaphor, hyperbole, symbolism, analogy, idiom, and imagery because they are ordinary features of communication. Figurative language does not destroy meaning; it communicates meaning.

The question, therefore, was not whether biblical prophecy sometimes employs figurative language. Of course it does.

The question was much simpler:

What did the prophecy communicate, and did the proposed historical fulfillment actually deliver it?

A Standard Began to Emerge

The more I examined the question, the more straightforward the underlying logic became.

If something is promised, fulfillment should correspond to the thing promised according to the terms of the promise itself.

Applied to prophecy, that means we should be able to place the biblical prediction alongside the proposed historical fulfillment and compare them.

Over time, I organized that comparison around three basic criteria:

Order. Content. Magnitude.

Did the events happen in the order predicted?

Did the things predicted actually occur?

Did they occur on the scale the prophecy describes?

These questions became the foundation of what I call substantial fulfillment: the proposition that a claim of fulfillment should demonstrate substantial correspondence between the prophetic statement and the historical event alleged to fulfill it.

The principle is deliberately simple. It does not begin by asking whether Preterism, Futurism, Historicism, or another eschatological system is correct.

It asks:

Did what was promised actually happen as promised?

From Investigation to Research Library

As I investigated individual Preterist claims, I kept working notes. I recorded biblical arguments, historical claims, proposed fulfillments, objections, counterarguments, and my responses to them.

What began as an investigation gradually became a substantial research library.

I also wanted these conclusions tested outside the confines of my own study. I therefore spent years participating in Facebook groups and discussions in which Preterists constituted the majority. This exposed my arguments to sustained disagreement and gave me the opportunity to encounter many different formulations of Preterist arguments rather than evaluating the position only through a handful of books or individual proponents.

Those discussions generated more questions, more objections, more research, and more refinement.

The objective was never simply to accumulate arguments against Preterism. It was to determine whether the method itself could withstand repeated challenge.

Could the biblical text be compared with history consistently?

Could the same definition of fulfillment be maintained when it produced an inconvenient conclusion?

Could an interpretation explain apparent discrepancies without changing the meaning of the prophecy simply to preserve the fulfillment claim?

Most importantly, could claims of fulfillment actually be verified?

From Research Library to The Fulfillment Project

A few years ago, I began the process of organizing and refining this accumulated research into a form that would be easier for others to read, examine, and use.

That work eventually became The Fulfillment Project.

This website is the product of that continuing investigation.

Its purpose is not merely to state that a particular interpretation is wrong. It is to examine specific claims carefully enough that readers can evaluate the evidence for themselves.

The procedure throughout the project is intentionally straightforward:

Establish what the text predicts. Examine what history records. Compare the two. Then determine whether fulfillment occurred.

Where history corresponds to prophecy, that correspondence should be acknowledged.

Where it does not, the discrepancy should not be concealed by changing the standard.

And where the evidence is insufficient, the appropriate conclusion is simply that fulfillment has not been demonstrated.

After years of research, that original question still governs the entire project:

When we say that God fulfilled a prophecy, can we demonstrate that He performed what was promised according to the terms of the prophecy itself?

That is the question behind The Fulfillment Project: Verifying Claims of Fulfillment.

It began as a personal effort to verify a theological claim.

It became a library of research.

This website exists to make that research available for examination.