The Septuagint, which was the text from which Matthew and Luke were quoting, says, unambiguously, “virgin”. What the Hebrew Old Testament says is really not relevant. It was the contention of the early Christians that the virgin birth fulfilled the prophecy in the Septuagint, and they were right.
butterfiles I was at one point (before I converted) quite interested in the same question you are interested in: are there unambiguous examples of fulfilled prophecy? Today, from my standpoint as a believer (of sorts) I’d say that there are loads of examples of fulfilled prophecy, but most of them are very far from unambiguous, and may be unlikely to convince you unless you start from a Christian interpretative worldview. One of the big problems is that the dating of biblical narratives is often very problematic (which FriarTed alludes to).
Most theologically liberal*/secular biblical scholars are going to date Luke and Acts, for example, to between 80 and 90 AD (if I remember right, anyone is welcome to correct me). More theologically conservative scholars (and some theological liberals, like the great John A.T. Robinson) are going to date Luke/Acts to sometime around the early 60s, largely on the basis that they don’t mention the deaths of Paul or James. If Luke was written in, e.g., 62 AD, then its predictions of the fall of Jerusalem are just that, genuine prophecy. If it was written 20-30 years later, then they aren’t. Personally I side with the ‘conservatives’ here- it seems preposterous to me that the author of Acts would fail to mention the death of the central figure in his story, if he knew about it, and the descriptions of the fall of Jerusalem are much vaguer than one sees in texts that were definitely written after the fact- but neither of us can prove to the other when Luke was written, and therefore neither of us can prove whether the stuff about the Fall of Jerusalem is, or is not, genuine prophecy.
The same goes for a lot of purported biblical prophecies, in the Old Testament and the New. There are a handful of events where we can definitely prove that the prediction of an event was genuinely written down before the fact, and I suppose those count as unambiguous prophecies.
One is, as FriarTed mentions, the claim in Daniel that the Messiah would be born during the fourth foreign empire to rule over the Jews.
St. John in Revelation 17-18 predicts the fall of the Roman Empire (about three and a half centuries before it happened), that it would fall to ten subsidiary peoples (the ‘ten horns of the beast’) which can be interpreted as the Germanic barbarian tribes, and he hints at a time line (the stuff about 'six kings have fallen, etc.", which you can sort of squeeze into a reasonably accurate time line if you date the beginning of Rome at 753, and its fall in 473 AD.)
Second Esdras is on the borderline- it’s not in most Bibles, although some Orthodox churches use it, and Anglicans include it in the lectionary as semi-canonical. The last parts of the book were written probably sometime in the third century AD, and they include a prophecy that the Persian Empire would fall to the Arabs (which did happen about four hundred years later).
*The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ here don’t really correspond to political categories, but just to how literally one reads the narratives.
He means Christ’s eternal kingdom, and that it would be established (i.e. that Christianity would be founded) under the fourth empire to rule over the Jews, which would succeed Greece.
Are there any Biblical “prophesies” that didn’t need after-the-fact interpretation, where people knew what the prophet was talking about before the event supposedly prophesied?
In other words a translation is more correct than the original. I’ll just note that those who are waiting for the Messiah today, and who can read Hebrew better than the author of Matthew could, are not waiting for the child of a virgin.
I’d think Christ’s return before those listening tasted death should count. Certainly many of the early Christians believed it. The current reinterpretation of the words happened only after the prophecy flopped.
The bit I could never understand about the “and a virgin shall conceive…” prophecy isn’t the virgin part (OK, yeah, Matthew was working off of a faulty translation, that’s understandable), but the “Emmanuel” part: Mary most certainly did not name her son Emmanuel, so why quote a prophecy that says she will and claim it as fulfilled?
Voyager If God could guide the writing of a text, He could guide its translation, and He could even guide the emendation of errors in the original text. It was the contention of a lot of early Christians that the translation of the Septuagint had in fact been miraculously guided.
Disagree; it could as easily (and without recourse to miracles) refer to the problems within the Roman Empire under tyrannical emperors. It could be referring to Nero or Domitian or various others.
Eaarly Christians scoured the Old Testament in search of any references that could be tied to anything Jesus might have done or said and relabeled the most obscure passages as “prophecy”.
If a pious scribe wants something to happen a certain way, he may change, augment or even extract from his vivid imagination things that we now accept as gospel (literally). You will notice that the book of John elaborates and expands upon the earlier NT works.
It’s pretty easy to make a prophecy come true when you write the book yourself and really want it to be true.
But this falls prey to the other major issue of biblical prophecy. If I order a steak, and then predict that I’ll get a steak, and the waiter then brings me a steak, was that divine prophecy? Hardly. Rather, what we had was many, many people working for a very long time towards the existence of a state like Israel, largely because it was prophecized.
Interesting, but I have to ask does that negate it, or it is part of it. Does telling people that it will happen get it into people’s minds that it will be done as a step of getting it done?
And this also falls prey to the question asked, if something is prophecized then it is known ahead of time, which is a requirement.
So the problem with this line of thought is if a prophecy is know ahead of time it is invalid because people work to make it come true, but if it is in secret it is invalid because it was discovered only after the event.
Well, here’s the problem. The idea that prophecy props up the bible is contingent upon the prophecies being supernatural. That is, predictions which are so unlikely to be true that it lends credence to the idea that the person who wrote them down was communicating with something omniscient. That’s why they matter. And if the prophecy is something which could be achieved by man, and clearly had many people working towards it for millenia. It’s hardly a huge shocker when it then happens to come true. That’s the problem here.
Or it was a prophecy for which those who have a stake in it coming true cannot reasonably control the outcome. For example, “Portland will be struck by a massive hurricane on september 3rd, 2017”. That’s a specific, non-trivial prophecy that Christians could not realistically influence. If it came true, then I’d be willing to point to that and say, “Damn, how did they know that?” and perhaps even use it as evidence for the divinity of the bible’s authorship.
The problem Biblical prophecies is also the major problem with the Bible itself: There are almost no stories which relate events as they are occurring by people writing in the first person. The entire narrative is clearly second and third-person accounts many of which (as Thomas Paine correctly points out in his polemic, The Age of Reason) don’t even match the timeline proposed by the Bible itself.
When you can resolve all of the other errors and inaccuracies in the Bible you could then factually debate the accuracy of any prophecies or prophetic statements made within its pages.