The Witness of St. Matthew (Part 3)
As we saw in the first installment of this web series, many scholars claim that Matthew invented his account of the miraculous conception of Jesus in the virginal womb of Mary just to fulfill the misleading Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah (7:14): “Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.” But this is highly unlikely. The author of St. Matthew’s gospel was probably the apostle himself; in any case he was a highly educated Christian of Jewish background, writing to Greek-speaking Jewish Christians, probably in Palestine or Syria. Both Matthew and his readers would have been well aware that this particular passage from Isaiah was not generally regarded at the time as a Messianic prophecy. Hardly anyone expected the Messiah to be born of a virgin, so Matthew was under no pressure of that kind to fabricate a story of a miraculous conception for him.
It is also not clear that Matthew was misled by the Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14. On the one hand, Geza Vermes and others have argued that the Greek use of the word parthenos (virgin) to translate the Hebrew word almah in 7:14 was inaccurate, for the latter word generally meant simply “young woman” in Hebrew. If Isaiah had meant to specify that this young woman was a virgin, he would have used the Hebrew word betulah instead, Vermes contends. He claims that the sign from God offered by the prophet Isaiah in 7:14 consisted not in a miraculous conception, but merely in the fact that a child born to a young Jewish woman would be given an extraordinary name: “Emmanuel,” meaning “God is with us.” This sign was meant to reassure King Ahaz that God would not abandon him and his people, and would preserve the line of David on the throne of Judah.
This interpretation of Isaiah 7:14, however, is far from convincing. To begin with neither almah nor betulah were precisely defined Hebrew words. After all, most “young women” in ancient Israel were presumed to be virgins, and in some passages in the Old Testament the word almah is used for young maidens who certainly were virgins (e.g. Gen 24:23 and Ex 2:8). With regard to betulah NT scholar Michael Brown said in The Case for the Real Jesus (Zondervan, 2007):
Betulah can refer to a virgin, but more often than not it simply means a young woman or maiden. In fact, more than three out of every five times the word occurs in the Old Testament, the most widely used Jewish translation renders it “maiden.” Joel 1:8 speaks of a betulah mourning for the husband of her youth. An ancient Aramaic inscription speaks of a betulah who struggled in labor to give birth. So neither almah nor betulah, in and of themselves, would clearly and unequivocally mean virgin. They’re consistent with virginity, but there is no single word in biblical Hebrew that always and only means virgin. (p. 219)
Furthermore, King Ahaz needed a sign from God that the Lord was still willing to support the Davidic monarchy, and merely an exceptional name given to a newborn child would hardly provide such incontrovertible assurance. There must have been something supernatural and divine about the promised sign, otherwise it would not be a clear indication of divine favor. Thus, it is no wonder that the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14 opted for parthenos (virgin) as the best translation of almah in this case. Besides, we know from elsewhere in his gospel that Matthew was not a slavish follower of the precise text of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (see Mt 2:3-6 and 2:18) — and we can be reasonably sure he also could speak and read Hebrew. All we know is that for some reason, St. Matthew concurred with the Greek Septuagint translation in this case – for there was nothing about the Hebrew words in the text that alone would have compelled him to do so.
In short, something else was motivating Matthew here — not any common belief of the Jews of his day that Isaiah 7:14 was a Messianic prophecy (for there was no such common belief), nor any strict necessity that the Hebrew text had to be translated as “virgin,” as the Greek Septuagint version did.
Some NT scholars have suggested that Matthew may have been under pressure from another quarter to read Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of a virgin birth. It seems that at some point a rumor began circulating among the Jews that Mary had become pregnant early in her marriage to Joseph because the child had been conceived through her adulterous relationship with a Roman soldier. Indeed, Some biblical scholars point to the retort of the Pharisees to Jesus in John 8:41, “we were not born if fornication” as an implicit statement that rumors circulated, even during the lifetime of Jesus, that he was the product of an illicit sexual relationship. For example, on the basis of John 8:41, NT historian James Charlesworth speculated that Jesus was charged during his lifetime with being a mamzer (that is, someone not conceived by married, Jewish parents). But John 8:41 need not be interpreted as a charge thrown at Jesus of physical illegitimacy. Putting the verse in context, it immediately follows Jesus’ accusation that some of his Jewish listeners were spiritually illegitimate, and in that sense not true sons of Abraham (8:39-40). They protest in response “We were not born of fornication; we have one [spiritual] Father, even God.” Jesus replies that if God were really their spiritual Father they would not be seeking to kill him; thus, their true father spiritually is the Devil. In short, this whole passage is about “spiritual” parentage, and has nothing to do with biological illegitimacy.
The main problem with the theory that Matthew was pressured into fabricating a miraculous origin for Jesus (by a rumor spreading that Jesus was illegitimate) is that we have no record of any such rumor in circulation prior to the second century, at least a generation after Matthew penned his gospel. The pagan apologist Celsus, for example, claimed in ca. 177-180 A.D.:
The Mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by the Roman soldier Panthera. (cited in Origen, Contra Celsus, 1:32,31)
Father Rene Laurentin points out in his book The Truth of Christmas (1986):
The name “Panthera” is an anagram of the Greek word Parthenos, a virgin. The one whom Christians called “born of a virgin” (ek parthenou) Celsus calls “born of Panthera.”
In other words, there is little reason to take seriously a second century rumor that was evidently a fabrication, deliberately designed to mock the Christian accounts of the virginal conception of Christ — and there is no reason to believe that this rumor was circulating in the mid-first century, when Matthew wrote his gospel. So, he could not have been pressured by the circulation of such a rumor into inventing a virginal conception story to counter it.
In fact, the way in which St. Matthew tells of the virginal conception of Jesus in his gospel (1:18-25) — a brief, matter of fact, way, without ever referring to it again in his work — makes it likely that he was simply reminding his Jewish-Christian readers of something they already knew, and pointing to a Messianic prophecy that it fulfilled, rather than informing them of a wondrous miracle that they had never heard of before. If his readers already knew of the story, then it must have been in circulation in the Christian communities of Palestine and Syria well before Matthew wrote his gospel (probably ca. 60 A.D.), and certainly prior to St. Luke, who (as I shall argue later) cannot have written later than about 63 A.D. This puts the virginal conception story in Jewish-Christian communities in the Middle East as early as the mid 50’s A.D. And again, it also means that the story almost certainly did not originate with St. Matthew.
It looks as if what really happened here was this: St. Matthew knew of a story of the virginal conception already in circulation among the early Christians, believed it to be true, and embraced the Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14, because it helped him make sense of this miracle for his readers. The virginal conception was evidently part of God’s plan for saving the world through the divine Messiah, Jesus Christ. Convinced (as all the Jews of his day were) that everything significant about the Messiah would have been prophesied beforehand in God’s holy Word, the Scriptures, Matthew searched the Scriptures to find a prophecy for this extraordinary miracle that had been made known to him, and found one in the Greek translation of Isaiah 7:14. And lest we conclude that Matthew was acting irresponsibly in doing so, it should be noted that the Jewish Targums generally saw Isaiah, chapters 7 thru 11 as a whole as filled with Messianic prophecies — although not every detail of those chapters was held to be so, and generally not Isaiah 7:14. In other words: Matthew was at least looking in the right place in the Scriptures for Messianic prophecies (Isaiah, chapters 7-11), and given that the Greek Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14 is a probable, or at least possible translation of the Hebrew text of that verse, he legitimately found there just what he was looking for.
Next Time: The Witness of St. Luke
Robert Stackpole, STD
© 2020 Mere Christian Fellowship
