It would likely shock almost all readers of Isaiah 7:14, the famous verse proclaiming that the "virgin will be with child" and that calls this child Immanuel, to find that the verses around it do not have any hint of a Messianic prophecy in their context. Much later in the Bible, Matthew 1:18-23 says that Jesus was called Immanuel and born to the virgin Mary after a supernatural conception, citing Isaiah 7:14 specifically and stating that Jesus fulfilled this verse's prophecies. Matthew does not quote Isaiah 7:15 and attribute temporary moral ignorance to Jesus, nor does it mention that Isaiah having sex with a prophetess who gave birth to a son in Isaiah 8:3-4 seems to be a fulfillment of the virgin birth prophecy as well. The Bible uses Matthew to reveal that there is supposed to be another layer to the prophecy.
It is also true that in this case, there is absolutely no way to tell ahead of time that Isaiah 7:14 is supposed to be a Messianic prophecy, which is not at all an internal contradiction within Christian tenets. From the start, the Old Testament prophecies that apply or seem to apply to Jesus are often either highly vague, moreso than general language typically is, or do not appear to refer to a Christological figure whatsoever in themselves. Now, it is still logically possible for a text to have been intended to predict one thing but also to have been intended to refer to something else (or to happen to overlap with a second thing without someone initially knowing), so this is not a philosophical impossibility, but it does prove that there is little to no "obviousness" in Christ's fulfillment of prophecy within the Biblical narrative until his fulfillment of it is mentioned.
In fact, certain prophecies about the Second Coming made in the New Testament are far clearer, for even the famous passage about how a "virgin will be with child" says nothing about a supernatural virgin birth without a father and gives no indication that a distant coming of a Messiah is in view. That Isaiah 7:15-16 even says that the boy born to this unspecified virgin woman (men can be virgins too, so it is idiotic to only use the term for one gender or the other as modern culture often has) will learn to know right and wrong, hardly the near-omniscience that Jesus is said to possess in the gospel accounts, and this would mean Jesus was not morally sound/aware until a certain time had passed! Jesus is very plainly presented as not being omniscient before his death, specifically claiming to not know the hour of his return--which is one of the handful of very blatant Biblical clues that Jesus cannot literally be Yahweh, only a separate metaphysical entity--but never is Jesus said in the gospels to not know Yahweh's moral nature.
All of this is only problematic for evangelicalism due to its persistent, holistic deviation from the actual philosophical ideas taught in the Bible. A fitheistic evangelical terrified to abandon theological stances they accepted because of tradition, peer pressure, and mere personal assumptions will find if they are willing to look past assumptions that Isaiah 7 is in no way some clear prophecy of Jesus; it is just that this aspect of what the text says has literally nothing to do with whether Jesus existed, had a divine nature, resurrected, or is accurately described in the four Biblical gospels. Of course, just like scientific experiences and the seeming existence of other minds, historical evidences cannot be proven to be anything more than potential illusions anyway, so I am not saying that anyone can know the gospel accounts are accurate any more than they can know if a tree they are staring at really exists outside of their consciousness. The truth or falsity of the gospels simply is not tied to whether or not there are clear Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament.
In the case of Isaiah's virgin birth prophecy, there is no indication in the text that anything other than the birth and growth of a human male is being predicted, and this is indeed what the beginning of Isaiah 8 suggests was a direct fulfillment of this, with the virgin just being a woman who had previously never had sex. That Matthew 1:18-23 says Isaiah 7:14 also applies to Jesus does not contradict or supplant the context of the prophecy in Isaiah's own life, but it does reveal an additional ramification of the prophecy for which there is no evidence whatsoever in the book of Isaiah itself. Messianic prophecy is often either nuanced or especially ambiguous to a much greater extent than is recognized in the church. This does not change anything about the metaphysical or moral nature of Christ as put forth in Biblical theology, just pertaining to the level of clarity in even the more famous passages of the Old Testament that the New Testament claims Jesus fulfills.
No comments:
Post a Comment