Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/301

 Bethlehem are sought to be established sufficiently betray their origin to permit us to believe in the honor and honesty of Jesus.

Another Messianic prophecy which he is supposed to have fulfilled is that of birth from a virgin, the necessity of which was deduced from an expression of Isaiah's. That the writer of the fourth Gospel was ignorant of this virgin-birth we have already shown, and that the Jewish people in general took him to be the son of Joseph is obvious enough from their allusions to his father (Mk. vi. 3; Mt. xiii. 55, 56; Lu. iv. 22; Jo. vi. 42). Here again he never contradicted the prevalent assumption. But even had they known of the miraculous conception, the Jews might have denied that the passage from Isaiah bore any such construction as that put upon it by Matthew. He renders it: "Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son" (Mt. i. 23). But a more proper translation would be: "The maiden shall conceive, and bear a son," for the word translated virgin by Matthew does not exclude young women who have lost their virginity. Nay, it curiously enough happens to be used elsewhere of maidens engaged in the very conduct by which they would certainly be deprived of it.

Moreover, the two prophecies quoted by Matthew, which were, no doubt, familiar to the Jews, could by no possibility be applied by them to a person of the character of Jesus. Even the small fragments torn away from their context by the Evangelist convict him of a misapplication. In the first fragment, the Virgin's son is called Immanuel, a name which Jesus never bore (Mt. i. 23). In the second, he is described as "a ruler, who shall govern my people Israel," which Jesus never was (Mt. ii. 6). But the unlikeness of the predicted person to Jesus is still further shown by comparing the circumstances as conceived by the prophet with the actual circumstances of the time. Immanuel's birth is to be followed, while he is still too young to choose between good and evil, by a terrible desolation of the land. Hosts, described as flies and bees, are to come from Egypt and Assyria, and camp in the valleys, the clefts of the rocks, the hedges and meadows. Cultivable land will produce only thorns and thistles. Cultivated hills will be surrendered to cattle from fear of thorns and thistles (Isa. vii. 14-25). Noth