God With Us

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL
2015

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, “God is with us.” 

(Matthew 1.23)^[1]

Upon hearing this familiar verse, most Christians immediately recognize who Emmanuel really is. If not for hearing it dozens of times around Christmastime, the conceiving virgin bit is a pretty good clue that we are talking about Jesus Christ. While this seems obvious enough to most Christians, if we stop a moment to reflect upon what we just read, we may realize that there is something kind of odd about it. Sure, according to Matthew and Luke, a virgin named Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit and births a child, but she names her child Jesus, NOT Emmanuel.

Is it really that odd? After all, Jesus is known by many things in the New Testament: Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, etc. Could it be that Emmanuel is just another title Jesus was commonly known as? Probably not. In fact, there is only one mention of Emmanuel in the New Testament, and it is quoted above from Matthew 1.23. No other passage in the New Testament ever calls Jesus "Emmanuel."

To understand why Jesus became equated with Emmanuel, we must explore what the author of Matthew is quoting: Isaiah 7.14. However, when we look at this verse, we see that it reads a little bit differently from Matthew's quote. The part of Isaiah 7.14 that Matthew quotes is italicized below:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. 

This raises even more questions. What kind of sign is Isaiah referring to? Why does Isaiah call Emmanuel's mother a "young woman," while Matthew calls her a "virgin"? Why was this verse included in Matthew to begin with?

This article will explore why Emmanuel became commonly associated with Jesus of Nazareth. First we will look at why Matthew 1.23 reads slightly differently than Isaiah 7.14, and then look at the historical context of both verses to get a better understanding of the relationship between Jesus and Emmanuel.

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Isaiah 7.14 vs. Matthew 1.23

It first should be pointed out that Matthew's "Emmanuel" is spelled "Immanuel" in Isaiah. This has to do with how each verse was translated. Isaiah, like most other books in the Old Testament, was originally written in Hebrew. A direct English translation of the Hebrew text reads "Immanuel" rather than "Emmanuel."

Matthew, on the other hand, was written in Greek rather than Hebrew, and is quoting a Greek Old Testament. In the first century, Greek was the common written language in Palestine, not Hebrew. The Hebrew scriptures (known as the Old Testament by Christians) were translated into Greek for ease of use, and one particular translation called the Septuagint became very popular by the time of Jesus. It was the Septuagint that was utilized and quoted by the authors of the New Testament, not the Hebrew version of the scriptures. Today, however, many Bibles use Hebrew manuscripts for the Old Testament, not Greek, in an attempt to preserve the scriptures in their original language. In Greek, the Hebrew for "Immanuel" gets translated as "Emmanuel." Despite their slight variation, they are referring to the same name. To keep things simple, I will refer to (I/E)mmanuel as merely "Emmanuel" from now on.^[2]

Okay, so Matthew 1.23 is quoting Isaiah 7.14, and while Emmanuel is spelled differently, they are referring to the same person. But why does Isaiah refer to Emmanuel's mother as "the young woman," while Matthew refers to her as "the virgin"? That's an important difference.

Again, this has to do with a translation issue. In the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, the mother of Emmanuel is referred to as an almah, which literally translates as "young woman," not specifically a virgin (which is betulah in Hebrew).^[3] In the Septuagint, however, Emmanuel's mother is referred to as a parthenos, which is ambiguous—it can refer to either a young woman in general OR a virgin. So when the author of Matthew read Isaiah 7.14 in the Septuagint, he interpreted parthenos as referring specifically to a virgin, NOT merely a young woman as the original Hebrew implies. Matthew's interpretation of Isaiah 7.14 is based on a translation error.

Isaiah's Emmanuel

As we saw above, the beginning of Isaiah 7.14 says, "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign." Given the connection between Emmanuel and Jesus, it is easy to read that verse alone and think that this "sign" is referring to the coming of Jesus as the messiah. If we read verses around Isaiah 7.14, however, we see quite a different picture. Before we look at these verses, we first need some historical context.

The book of Isaiah is named after its supposed author, the prophet Isaiah ben Amoz, and much of it (including chapter 7) was probably written by him in the 8th century BCE. At this point in Israelite history, the once-great kingdom ruled by King David had been divided into two competing kingdoms: the northern Kingdom on Israel, and the southern Kingdom of Judah. The Kingdom of Israel faced the growing threat of the Assyrian Empire, and sought an alliance with its surrounding kingdoms for protection. The Kingdom of Judah refused to be a part of this alliance, and as a result Israel and its ally laid siege to Judah's capital, Jerusalem, in hopes to overthrow the king and replace him with another whom they could control. This sets the scene for Isaiah 7, in which God tells Isaiah to meet with the current king of Judah, King Ahaz, to give him instruction on how to deal with the siege of his city.

Isaiah tells King Ahaz that the threat from Israel will not prevail, and that he should merely wait for the siege to end on its own accord. Isaiah then gives King Ahaz a sign from God, which he explains in Isaiah 7.14-16, which also happens to be the passage from which Matthew is quoting:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

The sign, then, is a child, who is to be named Emmanuel. Isaiah points to a pregnant young woman around them, and says she will give birth to boy and name him Emmanuel. By the time he reaches the age of reason, he will eat curds and honey, both of which would be extremely difficult to obtain when the city is under siege. In other words, by this time the armies which have besieged Jerusalem will be gone.

This explains the oddness of Jesus being known as Emmanuel. In Isaiah, Emmanuel was not referring to a prophecy about Jesus or the coming messiah, but rather to a child who served as a sign from God to King Ahaz—a child who lived about 800 years before Jesus was born.

Matthew's Emmanuel

If Isaiah's Emmanuel was not referring to Jesus, then why did the author of Matthew quote this verse about Emmanuel in his gospel? He was trying to show that Jesus' virgin birth was foretold in the Old Testament.

According to Matthew, a virgin named Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit while engaged to a man named Joseph. Having your young fiancée pregnant with another man's child would not have looked good, so Joseph plans on calling off the marriage. An angel visits Joseph in a dream, and explains to him the situation:

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 

(1.20-21)

The angel explains that Mary was not pregnant by another man, but rather by the Holy Spirit. Of course, it looks just as shady back then as it does today if your significant other whom you haven't slept with yet claims to be miraculously pregnant, so the author of Matthew explains why Jesus' birth played out in this way:

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” 

(1.22-23)

In other words, the author of Matthew tells his readers that Jesus needed to be born of a virgin to fulfill this prophecy in the Jewish scriptures. But we have already looked at Isaiah 7.14, and seen that it was not written about Jesus at all. So why did the author of Matthew include this quote from Isaiah?

For modern Christians, the Jewish scriptures contained in the Bible are called the "Old Testament," but to 1st-century Jews and early Christians, it was the only Bible they had. The earliest Christians often quoted passages from the Old Testament as evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah that Jews had been waiting for. This, however, was a hard sell. Most Jews were expecting the messiah to be from Bethlehem, to be of the line of David, and to kick Rome out of Palestine. Jesus, however, was known to be from Nazareth,^[4] was believed by many of his followers to be born of a virgin, and was executed by Rome. It was up to Jesus' early followers to convince others that Jesus really was the messiah he claimed to be despite these apparent problems. An effective way to do this was to show that the Jewish scriptures, especially the prophetic works like Isaiah, were really pointing to Jesus as the messiah.

However, this was often problematic; there is no mention of a virgin birth in the Old Testament. The best the author of Matthew could do to demonstrate Jesus' virgin birth was predicted by the prophets was to quote Isaiah 7.14, which used the ambiguous term parthenos—a term that could refer to either a young woman or a virgin.

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While many assume that Emmanuel is referring to Jesus Christ, the original context of the child named Emmanuel was not referring to Jesus at all. The author of Matthew used Isaiah 7.14 to legitimate his own claims that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin, and that it was predicted long ago by the prophet Isaiah.

While it may be tempting to dismiss Matthew's appropriation of Isaiah 7.14 as a misuse of scripture, if we did so we would be missing the larger point the author is trying to make. It is no insignificant fact that Emmanuel literally means "God with us." In Isaiah, the child is to be named Emmanuel as a symbol of God's love and protection for his people, the Kingdom of Judah. The author of Matthew re-applies this concept to his own culture. For him, Jesus is not literally a child named Emmanuel, but his supposed miraculous birth served as a sign that God is indeed with us by sending humanity his son, Jesus.

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Notes

[1] The emphasis in this quote is my own. This same phrase will be italicized in further quotes as well.

[2] Names are often problematic when translated from one language to another. A good example of this is the name "Jesus." Jesus' original name would have been Yeshua, which gets translated into English today as "Joshua." However, in Greek, which happens to have been the common language around the time of Jesus, "Yeshua" becomes "Iesous," which eventually becomes "Iesus" in Latin, and finally "Jesus" in English as we recognize it today. This is, of course, a simplified summation of a much more complex process, but you get the idea.

[3] An almah could certainly have referred to a young woman who happened to be a virgin (as young, unmarried women ideally were in that society), but there is no other context clues in Isaiah to imply that Emmanuel's mother conceived as a virgin. It is also worth noting that many Bibles translate almah as "virgin" in Isaiah 7.14, such as the NIV. However, this is inspired by the birth account in Matthew, not the Hebrew manuscripts. Indeed, in the 6 other uses of almah in the Old Testament besides Isaiah 7.14, the NIV only translates almah as "virgin" one other time, which again is used ambiguously in the passage (see Song of Solomon 6.8).

[4] For more information on how some early Christians explained Jesus' problematic hometown, see The Birth(s) of a Savior.