Critics of the Bible will sometimes say that the prophecy that Matthew quotes about a virgin birth wasn't really about a virgin birth at all.
Here's what Matthew says:
Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: After His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. ... So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.”
Matthew 1:18,22-23
If we turn back to Isaiah, we find this prophecy in chapter 7. In context, Syria was threatening to invade Judah. Then the prophet Isaiah gave this reassuring prophecy to the king of Judah:
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel. ... For before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings.
Isaiah 7:14-16
(You can read the full context yourself if you like.)
Jews routinely interpreted this prophecy to mean that a young woman at that time, 730 BC, would become pregnant and have a child, but that before this child was old enough to know right from wrong, Syria would be destroyed.
Some go farther and say that the word translated "virgin" could also mean simply "young woman". So that there is nothing miraculous about the birth of the child per se. I don't think this really matters. Even if Isaiah meant "virgin", he could have meant that she was a virgin now but that she would soon become pregnant in th enormal way, i.e. cease to be a virgin.
Either way, the point is, this prophecy was traditionally understood to have been fulfilled in 730 BC, not hundreds of years later with the birth of Christ.
And so, the argument goes, Matthew was deliberately mis-reading this verse to turn it into a prophecy about Jesus, and then inventing a story about Jesus being born of a virgin to fulfill it. A huge hoax to convince people that there was something miraculous about Jesus.
But this argument doesn't work.
Consider: There are two possible scenarios here:
1. Matthew took a prophecy that was fulfilled 700-plus years before, and deliberately misread it to be about Jesus. Then he invented a fictional story about Jesus to claim he fulfilled this bogus prophecy.
2. Matthew saw that Jesus was born to a virgin. This seemed so amazing and important to him that he felt that God MUST have given forewarning in a prophecy. He found the prophecy of Isaiah and concluded, rightly or wrongly, that this must really be about Jesus, and Jews and been misunderstanding it for centuries.
Scenario 1 is wildly implausible. Jews routinely understood the prophecy to be fulfilled in 730 BC. So by claiming Jesus fulfilled the prophecy, he explained nothing. He just made the prophecy more difficult and confusing. And if he just invented a fiction story about a virfgin birth to fulfill a fake prophecy, who would that convince of anything? They'd doubt his reinterpretation of the prophecy AND they'd doubt his virgin birth story.
But if Jesus really was born to a virgin, then Matthew makes sense. Something incredible and miraculous happened and he's trying to explain it.
© 2025 by Jay Johansen
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