The Sign of the Virgin

Let us begin, then, by proving that the birth of Christ was announced by the prophets. Isaiah, for one, foretells it: “Listen, house of David. It is no small contest you have with men, since God is setting a struggle before you. Therefore God himself will give you a sign. Look — the virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel” (which, translated, is “God with us”), “he will eat butter and honey; for before the child learns to call for father or mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians.” [a]

So the Jews say: let us take up that prediction of Isaiah and put it to the test. Let us compare, and see whether the Christ who has already come fits, first, the name Isaiah foretold, and second, the signs belonging to that name which he announced about him.

Well then. Isaiah foretells that he must be called Emmanuel, and that afterward he is to take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians. “Now that Christ of yours, the one who has come,” they say, “was neither called by that name nor went to war.” But we thought they ought rather to be reminded to call the rest of the passage to mind as well. For the interpretation of Emmanuel is added underneath — “God with us” — so that you would attend not only to the sound of the name but to its sense. The Hebrew sound is Emmanuel; the interpretation of it is God with us. Ask, then, whether the saying “God with us,” which is what Emmanuel means, has not been in common use about Christ ever since Christ’s light dawned; and I think you will not deny it. For those who come to believe in Christ out of Judaism, from the time they believed in him, whenever they mean to say Emmanuel, mean that God is with us. And so it is agreed that the one who was always foretold as Emmanuel has already come, because what Emmanuel means has come — that is, “God with us.”

They are led by the sound of the name in exactly the same way when they take “the power of Damascus” and “the spoils of Samaria” and “the kingdom of the Assyrians” as though these announced a Christ who would be a soldier. They do not notice what Scripture puts first: “before the child learns to call for father or mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians.” The first thing to look at is the age the passage indicates, and to ask whether an age like that can possibly show us a Christ who is already a man — let alone a general. So the infant, I suppose, would call men to arms with his baby wailing, and give the signal for war not with a trumpet but with a rattle, and point out the enemy not from horseback or from a rampart but from the back or the neck of the woman nursing him, and subdue Damascus and Samaria instead of the breast. (It is another matter, of course, if among you babies do rush out to battle — oiled first, I imagine, and then dried off in the sun, issued with a knapsack and put on rations of butter — babies who are to know how to run a man through before they know how to claw at the breast.) Certainly, if nature nowhere permits this — soldiering before you have grown into a man, taking “the power of Damascus” before you know your own father — then it follows that the announcement is plainly figurative.

“But again,” they say, “nature does not allow a virgin to be a mother; and yet the prophet has to be believed.” Quite right; and he asked for credit in an incredible matter by saying that it was to be a sign. “Therefore,” he says, “a sign will be given you. Look — a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son.” But a sign from God, unless it consisted in some startling novelty, would not have looked like a sign at all. In short, when you are anxious to pull somebody down from believing this divine prediction, or to turn whoever is simple, and you have the nerve to lie and say that Scripture announced not “a virgin” but “a young woman” who would conceive and give birth, you are refuted by this fact alone: an everyday occurrence — a young woman getting pregnant and giving birth — cannot possibly look like a sign of anything. So a virgin mother set before us is rightly believed to be a sign; a warrior infant is not, in the same way. In that case there would be no question of a sign at all. Rather, the sign of a new kind of birth having been granted, the next thing after the sign is a statement about the ordinary rearing of the child, who is to eat “honey and butter.” That, of course, is no sign; it belongs to infancy. But that he is to take “the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, against the king of the Assyrians” — that is an astonishing sign. Hold to the limit of the child’s age, and ask what the prediction means; or rather, pay truth what you are unwilling to credit her with, and the prophecy becomes intelligible from the way it was fulfilled.

Let those magi from the East be believed, endowing the infancy of Christ as a king with gold and incense; and the infant has taken “the power of Damascus” with no battle and no weapons. Everyone knows that the “power” — that is, the strength — of the East is usually rich in gold and spices; and it is certain that the divine Scriptures treat “gold” as making up the “power” of all other nations as well. As it says through Zechariah: “And Judah will keep guard at Jerusalem, and will gather up all the strength of the surrounding peoples, gold and silver.” And about this gift of “gold” David likewise says, “And to him will be given of the gold of Arabia”; and again, “The kings of the Arabs and of Saba will bring him gifts.” The East, for its part, generally counted the magi as kings; and Damascus, for its part, used to be reckoned to Arabia, before it was transferred into Syrophoenicia when the Syrias were divided. So it was the power of Damascus that Christ then “took,” in taking its emblems — gold, that is, and spices.

And “the spoils of Samaria” he took in taking the magi themselves. When they recognized him, honored him with gifts, and knelt and worshiped him as Lord and King on the evidence of the star that guided them and pointed him out, they became “the spoils of Samaria” — that is, of idolatry — by believing in Christ. For Scripture meant idolatry by the name “Samaria,” Samaria being disgraced on the score of idolatry; she had by then revolted from God under King Jeroboam.

This too is nothing new for the divine Scriptures: to transfer a name figuratively on the basis of a likeness in crimes. Scripture calls your rulers “rulers of Sodom” and your people the “people of Gomorrah,” when those cities had long since been wiped out. And elsewhere it says to the people of Israel through a prophet, “Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite” — though they were not born of that stock, but were called their sons because they matched them in godlessness, these same men whom God had long before called his own sons through the prophet Isaiah: “I have fathered sons and raised them up.” In the same way Egypt is sometimes understood in that prophet to mean the whole world, on the count of superstition and cursing. So too Babylon, in our own John, is a figure of the city of Rome, as being equally great and equally proud of her rule, and triumphant over God’s holy people. On this principle, then, Scripture also gave the magi the title of “Samaritans” — “despoiled” of what they had held in common with the Samaritans, as we have said: idolatry, in opposition to the Lord. And it adds, “against the king of the Assyrians” — against the devil, who thinks to this hour that he is still reigning if he can drag God’s holy people away from the worship of God.

Our interpretation gets further support from the fact that elsewhere too the Scriptures describe Christ as a soldier, as we can tell from the names of certain weapons and from words of that kind. But compare the rest of the sense, and the Jews stand convicted. “Gird the sword on your thigh,” says David. But what do you read just above it about the Christ? “Fairer in beauty than the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips.” It would be very odd if David were complimenting a man on the bloom of his beauty and the grace of his lips while girding him for war with a sword — the man of whom he goes on to say, “Stretch out and prosper, advance and reign!” And he has added, “because of your gentleness and righteousness.” Who will ply a sword without practicing the opposites of gentleness and righteousness — deceit, that is, and harshness and injustice, which of course belong to the business of battle? Let us see, then, whether a thing with a different action is not a different sword: the divine word of God, sharpened on both edges with the two testaments, the ancient law and the new law; sharpened by the fairness of its own wisdom; giving each person back according to what he has done. It was legitimate, then, for the Christ of God to be girded in the Psalms, with no feats of war, with the figurative sword of the word of God; and to that sword the “bloom” fits, and the “grace of the lips” with it. He was “girded on the thigh” with it, in David’s sight, when he was announced as about to come to earth by the decree of God the Father. “The greatness of your right hand,” he says, “will guide you” — the power, that is, of the spiritual grace by which Christ is recognized. “Your arrows are sharp,” he says — God’s commands flying everywhere like arrows, threatening every heart with being shown up, and bringing stabbing remorse to each conscience. “Peoples will fall beneath you” — in worship, of course. That is how mighty in war and how heavily armed Christ is; and that is how he will “take the spoils,” not of “Samaria” only, but of all the nations too. Admit that his “spoils” are figurative, since you have learned that his weapons are figures. And so, so far, the Christ who has come was not a soldier, because Isaiah did not predict him as one.

“But if the Christ who is believed to be coming is not called Jesus,” they say, “why is the one who has come called Jesus Christ?” Well — both names meet in the Christ of God, in whom the name Jesus is found as well. Learn how habitual your mistake is. In the course of appointing a successor to Moses, Hoshea the son of Nun is certainly moved off his original name and begins to be called Jesus. Certainly, you say. Our first claim is that this was a figure of what was to come. For Jesus Christ was going to bring the second people — the one made up of us, the nations, who had been left lying deserted in the world before — into the land of promise “flowing with milk and honey,” that is, into the possession of eternal life, than which nothing is sweeter. And this had to happen not through Moses, that is, not through the discipline of the law, but through Jesus, that is, through the grace of the new law, after our circumcision with “a knife of rock” — that is, with Christ’s commands, since Christ is predicted as a rock in many ways and figures. So the man who was being got ready to act out this sacred sign was installed under the figure of the Lord’s name, and was actually named Jesus.

For the one who always spoke to Moses was the Son of God himself, who was also always the one seen; since no one ever saw God the Father and lived. And so it is agreed that it was the Son of God himself who spoke to Moses and said to the people, “Look, I am sending my angel ahead of your” — that is, the people’s — “face, to guard you on the march and to bring you into the land I have prepared for you. Pay attention to him and do not disobey him, for he will not hide anything from you, since my name is upon him.” For it was Jesus who was to bring the people into the land of promise, not Moses.

Now God called him an “angel” on account of the greatness of the mighty deeds he was to accomplish — the mighty deeds Jesus the son of Nun did, and you read them yourselves — and on account of his office as a prophet announcing the divine will. In just the same way the Spirit, speaking in the person of the Father, calls John, the forerunner of Christ, a future “angel,” through the prophet: “Look, I am sending my angel ahead of your” — that is, Christ’s — “face, who will prepare your way before you.” And it is no new practice for the Holy Spirit to call those “angels” whom God has appointed as servants of his power. For that same John is called not only an “angel” of Christ but a “lamp” shining before Christ. David predicts, “I have prepared a lamp for my Christ”; and Christ himself, coming “to fulfill the prophets,” called him that to the Jews: “He was,” he says, “the burning and shining lamp.” For John not only “prepared his ways in the desert” but also, by pointing out “the Lamb of God,” lit up men’s minds by his heralding, so that they understood him to be that Lamb whom Moses used to announce as destined to suffer. In this way too the son of Nun was called Jesus, on account of the mystery to come in his name. For the one who spoke with Moses confirmed as his own the name he had himself conferred on the man, because he had told him to be called from then on neither “angel” nor “Hoshea,” but “Jesus.” So each name belongs to the Christ of God: he should be called Jesus as well as Christ.

And that the virgin from whom Christ had to be born — as we mentioned above — must trace her descent from the seed of David, the prophet plainly asserts in later passages. “And there will be born,” he says, “a rod from the root of Jesse” — and that rod is Mary — “and a flower will come up from his root; and the Spirit of God will rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of discernment and piety, the spirit of counsel and truth; the spirit of the fear of God will fill him.” For no man was ever fit for the whole gathering of spiritual credentials except Christ. He is set beside a “flower” because of his glory and because of his grace, and he is reckoned “of the root of Jesse” because that is where his descent has to be traced — through Mary, that is. For he came from the native soil of Bethlehem and from the house of David; as, among the Romans, Mary is registered in the census, the Mary from whom Christ is born.

I ask again — granting that the one always foretold by the prophets as coming from Jesse’s line was also to display every kind of humility, patience, and calm — whether he has come. Here as before, the man who is shown to have that character will be the very Christ who has come. For the prophet says of him: “A man under affliction, who knows how to bear weakness,” who “was led like a sheep to be slaughtered, and, like a lamb before the man shearing it, did not open his mouth.” If he “neither fought nor shouted, and his voice was not heard outside,” if he “did not crush the bruised reed” — Israel’s faith — and “did not put out the smoldering wick” — that is, the momentary flicker of the nations — but made it burn brighter by the rising of his own light, then he can be no one but the one who was predicted. So the work of the Christ who has come must be examined by setting it beside the standard of the Scriptures. If I am not mistaken, we find him marked out by a twofold activity: preaching, and power. Let each count be settled briefly. So, following the order we have set out, we teach that Christ was announced as a preacher — through Isaiah, for instance: “Cry out,” he says, “with strength, and do not spare; lift up your voice like a trumpet, and announce to my people their crimes, and to the house of Jacob their sins. Day after day they look for me and long to learn my ways, like a people that has done what is right and has not forsaken the judgment of God” — and so on. And we teach that he was to do deeds of power from the Father: “Look, our God will deal out judgment in return; he himself will come and save us. Then the weak will be healed, and the eyes of the blind will see, and the ears of the deaf will hear, and the tongues of the mute will be loosed, and the lame will leap like a deer” — and so on. And not even you deny that Christ did these works, since you used to say that it was not on account of the works that you stoned him, but because he did them on the Sabbath.