Prophecy of Messiah: Isaiah 7

Prophecy is a muddy science, and Bible prophecy more muddy than most. Take those Old Testament prophecies. Evangelists never tire of telling us that hundreds were fulfilled in the life of Jesus, far too many to be called coincidence. But how many of these are real, and how many are prophetia ex eventu--prophecies constructed after the fact, products of careful selection and interpretation?To get an idea, let's look at the most famous, the prophecy of the child Immanuel as presented in the Gospel of Matthew: Most good Christians take this at face value, assured that the prophet Isaiah did indeed describe Jesus' miraculous conception and birth seven hundred years before. But did he? Authorities are nearly unanimous. The answer is no.What did Isaiah really say? Turning to Isaiah 7:14 (Masoretic text), we find his precise words: Matthew's interpretation of this passage has several problems, the largest hanging on the Hebrew word 'almah. Writing in Greek, the gospel author turned almah into parthenos, a word usually (but not always) meaning "virgin." In fact, he had a precedent for this; the Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament used by Greek-speaking Jews of his day, did indeed use parthenos in the Isaiah passage. But the Septuagint was for the most part a notoriously sloppy translation, and its version of Isaiah was generally more error-ridden than the rest. By the Middle Ages, the Jews had abandoned the Septuagint, and later Greek translations, by Aquila, Theodotion, Lucien and others, did not use the word parthenos. (The Septuagint, commonly known as the LXX, is still favored by Eastern Orthodox churches.)Liberal "higher critics" deny the element of prediction or foretelling in prophecy. Their assumption is that a prophet was a man of "his own time" who spoke only to men "of his own time." That tells only half the story. God's prophets spoke to men of their own time about those things which were of concern and significance, but they also spoke of those things which were future and which would be of concern and significance to all, from those then living to those who would see the fulfillment of the prophecy and to those who would live after that fulfillment and read the inspired record of the prophecy and its fulfillment. Contrary to the "critics," Biblical prophecy was not written after the fact, ambiguous, artificially fulfilled, nor just a phenomenon common to all religions and peoples. No well-attested evidence of one miraculous "prophecy" has ever been found outside the Bible!