Thayer Thursday – Biblical ‘fulfillment’ and the virgin birth
Last week we talked about how we tend to misunderstand the concepts of prophecy and fulfillment, particularly as displayed in the Gospel of Matthew. We learned that “Matthew’s theme of fulfillment is really best explained as Jesus filling fully Israel’s history and life – becoming the one in and through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed.”
When Matthew uses the words prophet and fulfilled, he means something far greater than a mystical fortune teller from the past giving a future prediction about the person of Jesus. Instead, he’s retelling the entire story, God’s plan for the redemption of all creation, in and through the person of Jesus.
In today’s passage of scripture, we see perhaps one of the most controversial examples of this: the virgin birth. This first of Matthew’s fulfillment statements is found in Matthew 1:22-23:
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:
“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
The prophet referred to is Isaiah, a prophet in Jerusalem who lived and taught 700 years before the birth of Jesus. The verse Matthew quotes is from the seventh chapter of the Old Testament book that bears his name:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
Many assume that this verse (due to Matthew’s subsequent reference to it) was making a future prediction about the birth of Jesus, a birth that would be miraculous in nature because his mother would be a virgin.
However, the surrounding context presents several problems with this interpretation of Isaiah’s (and Matthew’s) words.
The sign Isaiah references is not given to people 700 years in the future about Jesus. It was a sign specifically for the King of Jerusalem at that time: King Ahaz. According to Isaiah, his prophecy would reach its immediate fulfillment with the birth of the “son” in Ahaz’s lifetime and the subsequent destruction of the two nations who were conspiring to overthrow him within 65 years (Isaiah 7:1-9). Needless to say, 700 years later, Ahaz was dead and the conspiring nations had been destroyed! Therefore, Isaiah’s words could not have been directly referring to Jesus.
So why does Matthew seem to imply that they do?
Making it even more confusing is that the Hebrew[1] word Isaiah uses (עלמה – ‘almah) which is rendered “virgin” in most of our English translations (and in the Greek translation[2] Matthew used for his quotation) does not necessarily denote a female who never had sexual intercourse. Instead this word is better translated “young woman.” This young woman could, of course, be a virgin since she was young and may not be married (hence the translation’s which say “virgin”) – but the point is her age, not whether or not she was sexually active.[3] The sign was that she would have a baby – not that the baby would be miraculously conceived outside the bounds of sexual intercourse.
So why does Matthew point to this verse for the actual virgin birth of Jesus?
Was Matthew wrong?
Did he simply misunderstand his Hebrew Bible and make a mistake?
Or worse…was he attempting to trick his readers into believing that Isaiah made a prophecy that he never actually made??
No.
Matthew was Jewish and deeply familiar with the Old Testament. He knew that Isaiah’s prophecy was not directly referring to Jesus but to a child born 700 years earlier during the reign of King Ahaz. The original audience of Matthew’s Gospel knew this as well. They were also Jewish and thoroughly steeped in the Old Testament.
Instead of the difficulty laying with Matthew (his misunderstanding or intentional deceit), the problem lies with our understanding of the theme of fulfillment in Matthew’s Gospel.
If we remember that what Matthew means when he says the words prophet and fulfillment is something quite different than what we think those terms mean, we quickly see that he didn’t get it wrong. Instead he is explaining a deep reality about who Jesus is.
Matthew sees in Jesus the filling fully of Israel’s past. By rooting Jesus in these Old Testament happenings, Matthew shows how Jesus fills fully, or brings to a full completion the story of Israel. He shows his readers that the stories of the Old Testament were echoes or shadows of what was to come.
This is exactly what he is doing with the prophecy Isaiah gave to King Ahaz. Matthew sees that this has reached a greater and fuller meaning, it’s fulfillment, in Jesus.
The mother of the son who would be a sign for King Ahaz was a young woman. Not only was Mary a young woman – but (playing on the words of Isaiah and the Greek translation of עלמה) she was an actual virgin!
The sign God gave to king Ahaz was a child that signified God being with them. Jesus, being divine, was quite literally God with them (the meaning of the Hebrew name “Immanuel”).
So that which had reached it’s original ‘fulfillment’ 700 years earlier in Isaiah’s day was subsequently filled fully with the birth of Jesus.
[1]The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew.
[2] By the time of Matthew, the Hebrew version of the Old Testament had been translated into Greek. This Greek translation is called the Septuagint (or LXX).
[3] https://jmsmith.org/blog/immanuel-son-of-a-virgin-or-son-of-a-young-woman/ . I highly recommend this post for a fuller explanation of the Hebrew word Isaiah uses and the Greek word Matthew quotes.
Categories: Biblical Scholarship, Biblical Theology, Blog, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Thayer Thursday, Theological issues