Does Matthew Get Isaiah’s Prophecy of the Virgin Birth Wrong?
Another classic, skeptical challenge to the biblical stories of the birth of Jesus goes something like this. “You cannot trust Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus because he gets the key Old Testament text wrong (Matthew 1:23). He quotes Isaiah 7:14, saying it is a prophecy that one day a virgin will give birth. There are two problems with this. First, in the original language, Isaiah is referring to a “young maiden” not a virgin. Second, the text is really about the birth of King Hezekiah, not Jesus. So Matthew misreads the verse and quotes the verse out of context...