Catholic Commentary
Fulfillment of Isaiah's Prophecy: The Virgin and Emmanuel
22Now all this has happened that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying,23“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall give birth to a son. They shall call his name Immanuel,” which is, being interpreted, “God with us.”
Matthew 1:22–23 presents Jesus's birth as the fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14, with Matthew using his characteristic formula to show how God's prophetic promises reach their intended completion in Jesus. The passage emphasizes that Scripture has both divine authorship (through God) and human prophetic instrument (through the prophet), establishing Jesus as Emmanuel—God with us—the convergence point of Israel's entire prophetic heritage.
Matthew chains Jesus to Isaiah's ancient prophecy not as proof, but as the moment God stops visiting history and enters it permanently—Emmanuel, God with us.
Matthew 1:22 — "Now all this has happened that it might be fulfilled…"
Matthew's formula, hina plērōthē ("that it might be fulfilled"), appears here for the first of at least twelve times in his Gospel — a distinctive and deliberate literary signature. This is not a casual aside; it is Matthew's theological method laid bare. He is writing for a Jewish-Christian community steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, and he presents the entire life of Jesus as the convergence point of Israel's prophetic heritage. The phrase "spoken by the Lord through the prophet" is theologically precise: it assigns ultimate authorship to God (hypo Kyriou, "by the Lord") while acknowledging the human prophetic instrument (dia tou prophētou, "through the prophet"). This two-agent language anticipates the later Church's doctrine of biblical inspiration — that Scripture has a divine author and a human author, neither eclipsing the other.
The word plērōthē (fulfilled) carries more weight than simple prediction-and-fulfillment. In the Matthean sense, fulfillment involves the drawing-together of a pattern — the Hebrew mālaʾ, to fill up or complete — in which the events of Jesus' life bring to their intended fullness meanings latent in the Scriptures of Israel. Matthew is not merely proof-texting; he is presenting Jesus as the embodied telos of the entire prophetic tradition.
Matthew 1:23 — "Behold, the virgin shall be with child…"
Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7:14, and the textual choice is deliberate: he follows the Greek Septuagint (LXX), which renders the Hebrew almah (young woman of marriageable age) with the unambiguous Greek parthenos — virgin. This is not a mistranslation Matthew exploits opportunistically; the Septuagint translators, working two to three centuries before Christ, already perceived in the text a meaning pointing beyond the immediate historical horizon of Ahaz's court. Matthew reads the LXX as the Spirit-guided preparation for precisely this moment.
The original Isaianic oracle was delivered to King Ahaz during the Syro-Ephraimite crisis (c. 734 BC), offering a sign of deliverance. A child called Immanuel would be born before the threatening kingdoms fell. Catholic exegesis, following the patristic tradition, has long recognized this as a passage with a sensus plenior — a fuller sense — in which the immediate historical referent (likely a child born in Ahaz's day) was a type foreshadowing the definitive fulfillment in the virginal conception of the eternal Son of God. The sign offered to Ahaz was a temporal deliverance; the sign offered to all humanity in Matthew 1:23 is the eternal salvation of the world.
The name Emmanuel — "God with us" — is not given to Jesus at his circumcision (that name is Yeshua/Jesus, v. 21), but it functions as a theological title for Matthew's Gospel as a whole. Matthew's Gospel is famously bookended by this theme: it opens with Emmanuel (1:23) and closes with the risen Christ's promise, "I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (28:20). The virginal conception is thus not an isolated miracle but the decisive moment when the eternal God permanently enters human history — not as a visitor, but as one of us.
Catholic theology finds in these two verses a convergence of several essential doctrines. First, the virginal conception of Christ is a defined dogma of the faith. The Catechism teaches that "the virginal conception of Jesus is not a mythological invention, but a historical reality… the work of the Holy Spirit" (CCC 497). The Church Fathers were unanimous: St. Ignatius of Antioch (early 2nd century) already listed the virginal birth alongside the Cross and Resurrection as among the mysteries "wrought in the silence of God." St. Jerome, translating the Vulgate, deliberately preserved virgo in Isaiah 7:14 and defended its Messianic reference at length against the pagan critic Porphyry.
Second, these verses illuminate Catholic teaching on biblical inspiration and the senses of Scripture. The Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum (§12) teaches that interpreters must attend to both the human author's intention and the deeper meaning intended by the Holy Spirit. Matthew's use of Isaiah exemplifies the sensus plenior: the Spirit who inspired Isaiah already intended the fuller fulfillment now made explicit in the Incarnation. The Pontifical Biblical Commission's 1993 document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church explicitly affirms typological and fuller-sense readings as legitimate and authentically Catholic.
Third, the name Emmanuel encapsulates the entire theology of the Incarnation. The Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) and the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) — affirming Mary as Theotokos, God-bearer — ground precisely here: if the child born of the virgin is truly "God with us," then she who bore him bore God himself. St. Cyril of Alexandria argued that the title Emmanuel was not metaphorical but strictly ontological: the divine Logos did not merely accompany this child but became this child.
Contemporary Catholics often encounter skepticism about the virginal conception — sometimes from within the Church — framed as a mythological accretion or an obstacle to a "mature" faith. These two verses offer a direct and practical counter-formation. Matthew's careful appeal to fulfilled prophecy invites us to read Scripture as a unified, Spirit-breathed whole, not a collection of disconnected texts. A Catholic who prays the Liturgy of the Hours, for instance, encounters Isaiah and Matthew in constant dialogue; this is not liturgical coincidence but theological formation.
More personally: the name Emmanuel is not merely a Christological title for Christmas cards. It is a claim about every moment of Christian life. If Jesus is truly "God with us," then prayer is not sending messages into the void — it is conversation with the one who entered our flesh and our history. In moments of abandonment, grief, or doubt, returning to the bare claim of Matthew 1:23 — God is with us — is an act of faith with two thousand years of prophetic weight behind it. Make it a practice: when facing desolation, pray the single word Emmanuel, letting its history fill it.
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