The Sign of the Virgin

So God became man, and the Lord himself saved us, giving us the sign of the virgin. Not in the way some now claim — men who take it on themselves to expound the Scripture — reading it as “Look, a young woman will conceive and bear a son.” That is how Theodotion of Ephesus rendered it, and Aquila of Pontus, both of them converts to Judaism. The Ebionites follow these two and assert that he was fathered by Joseph. In doing so they destroy, so far as it lies with them, so remarkable an arrangement of God, and they set aside the witness of the prophets, which came from God. [a]

For this prophecy was spoken before the people were carried off to Babylon — that is, before the Medes and the Persians came to power. And it was translated into Greek by the Jews themselves long before our Lord’s coming, so that no suspicion could remain that the Jews had perhaps put this rendering on the words to suit us. In fact, if they had known that we would one day exist and would use these proofs out of the Scriptures, they would never have hesitated to burn their own Scriptures — the Scriptures that declare that all the other nations have a share in life, and that show those who boast of being the house of Jacob and the people of Israel to be disinherited from the grace of God.

Before the Romans had secured their rule, while the Macedonians still held Asia, Ptolemy son of Lagus was anxious to furnish the library he had founded at Alexandria with a collection of the writings of all men that were worth having, and he asked the people of Jerusalem to have their Scriptures translated into the Greek language. And they — for at that time they were still subject to the Macedonians — sent Ptolemy seventy of their elders, men thoroughly at home in the Scriptures and in both languages, to carry out what he wanted.

But Ptolemy wanted to test them one by one. He was afraid that by conferring together they might use their translation to conceal what the Scriptures really said. So he separated them from one another and ordered them all to write the same translation; and he did this for every book. Then, when they were brought together in one place before him and each compared his own version with all the others, God was indeed glorified and the Scriptures were acknowledged to be truly divine. For every one of them read out the same translation, in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end, so that even the Gentiles who were present saw that the Scriptures had been translated by the inspiration of God.

And there was nothing astonishing in God’s having done this. During the captivity of the people under Nebuchadnezzar the Scriptures had been corrupted; and when, after seventy years, the Jews had returned to their own land, then, in the times of Artaxerxes king of the Persians, God inspired Ezra the priest, of the tribe of Levi, to set in order again all the words of the earlier prophets and to restore to the people the law given through Moses.

So the Scriptures were translated with such faithfulness, and by the grace of God; and out of them God prepared and formed our faith toward his Son afresh; and he has preserved the Scriptures unadulterated for us in Egypt — Egypt, where the house of Jacob flourished after fleeing the famine in Canaan, and where our Lord too was kept safe when he fled the persecution Herod set on foot. This translation of these Scriptures was made before our Lord came down, and it existed before there were any Christians: our Lord was born about the forty-first year of the reign of Augustus, while Ptolemy, under whom the Scriptures were translated, was much earlier. Since all of this is so, the men who now show a desire to make different translations are proved shameless and presumptuous — men we refute out of these very Scriptures, and shut up to believing in the coming of the Son of God.

But our faith is firm, unpretended, and the only true one. It has clear proof from these Scriptures, translated in the way I have described, and the preaching of the church has had nothing slipped into it. For the apostles are older than all these people, and they agree with the translation I have spoken of; and that translation is in harmony with the tradition of the apostles. Peter and John and Matthew and Paul and the rest in turn, and those who followed them, all set out the words of the prophets just as the elders’ translation has them.

For it is one and the same Spirit of God who announced through the prophets what the coming of the Lord would be and of what kind; who through these elders gave a faithful translation of what had been truly prophesied; and who through the apostles announced that the fullness of the times of adoption had arrived, that the kingdom of heaven had come near, and that he was living within those who believe in the one born Emmanuel of the virgin. To this they bear witness, saying that before Joseph had come together with Mary, while she was therefore still a virgin, “she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit”; and that the angel Gabriel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and so the holy one who is to be born of you will be called the Son of God”; and that the angel said to Joseph in a dream, “Now all this happened so that what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: Look, a virgin will be with child.”

And this is how the elders translated what Isaiah said: “And the Lord went on to say to Ahaz: Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God, out of the depth below or from the height above. And Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test. And he said, It is no small thing for you to weary men; and how does the Lord weary them? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel. He will eat butter and honey; before he knows or chooses out what is evil, he will exchange it for what is good; for before the child knows good or evil, he will not consent to evil, so that he may choose what is good.”

So by these words the Holy Spirit has carefully pointed out his birth from a virgin, and what he is — that he is God, for the name Emmanuel says as much. And he shows that he is a man when he says, “He will eat butter and honey,” and when he calls him a child as well, saying “before he knows good and evil”; for all of these are the marks of a human baby. But that he “will not consent to evil, so that he may choose what is good” — that belongs to God. The point is that we should not take him for nothing but a man because he will eat butter and honey, nor, on the other hand, suspect from the name Emmanuel that he is God without flesh.

And when he says, “Listen, house of David,” he was playing the part of one pointing out that the eternal King whom God promised David he would raise up from the fruit of his belly is the very one who was born of the virgin, herself of David’s line. This is also why he promised that the King would be “of the fruit of his belly” — the fitting expression for a virgin conceiving — and not “of the fruit of his loins,” or “of the fruit of his kidneys,” which is the expression that fits a man begetting and a woman conceiving by a man. In this promise, then, Scripture shut out every male part in the matter. And yet it is certainly not stated of the one who was born that he was not from the will of a man; instead Scripture fixed on “the fruit of the belly” and held to it, so that it might declare the birth of the one who was to come from the virgin.

Elizabeth bore witness to the same thing when she was filled with the Holy Spirit and said to Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your belly” — the Holy Spirit showing anyone willing to hear that God’s promise of raising up a King from the fruit of David’s belly had been fulfilled in the birth from the virgin, that is, from Mary. So let those who alter the passage of Isaiah to read “Look, a young woman will conceive,” and who will have him be Joseph’s son, alter the form of the promise given to David as well — the promise in which God undertook to raise up, from the fruit of his belly, the horn of Christ the King. But they did not understand it; otherwise they would have presumed to alter this passage too.

What Isaiah said — “from the height above, or from the depth beneath” — was meant to show that “the one who came down is the same one who also went up.” And in saying, “The Lord himself will give you a sign,” he announced something unlooked-for about his birth, something that could have been brought about in no other way than by God, the Lord of all, God himself giving a sign in the house of David. For what would have been great about it, or what sign would it have been, if a young woman conceiving by a man gave birth? That happens to every woman who bears children. But since an unlooked-for salvation was to be provided for people by God’s help, so also the unlooked-for birth from a virgin was brought about, God giving this sign, and man not working it out.

This is also why Daniel, foreseeing his coming, said that a stone cut out without hands came into this world. For that is what “without hands” means: that his coming into this world was not the work of human hands — of the men, that is, who are in the habit of cutting stone. Joseph took no part in it; Mary alone worked together with the arrangement God had prepared. For this stone from the earth has its existence from both the power and the wisdom of God. That is why Isaiah says: “This is what the Lord says: Look, I lay in the foundations of Zion a stone, precious, chosen, the chief, the corner one, to be held in honor.” So we understand that his coming as a human being was not by the will of a man but by the will of God.

That is also why Moses, giving a figure of it, threw his staff on the ground, so that by becoming flesh it might expose and swallow up all the resistance of the Egyptians, which was lifting itself up against the arrangement God had prepared — and so that the Egyptians themselves might testify that it is the finger of God that works salvation for the people, and not the son of Joseph. For if he were the son of Joseph, how could he be greater than Solomon, or greater than Jonah, or greater than David, when he was born from the same seed and was descended from these men? And how was it that he also called Peter blessed for acknowledging him to be the Son of the living God?

Besides this, if he had indeed been the son of Joseph, he could not, according to Jeremiah, have been either king or heir. For Joseph is shown to be descended from Jehoiakim and Jechoniah, as Matthew also sets out in his genealogy. But Jechoniah and all his descendants were disinherited from the kingdom. Jeremiah declares it in these words: “As I live, says the Lord, even if Jechoniah son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet ring on my right hand, I would pull him off from there and hand him over to those who seek your life.” And again: “Jechoniah has been dishonored like a useless pot, for he has been thrown out into a land he did not know. Earth, hear the word of the Lord: Write this man down as a disinherited man; for none of his offspring will prosper sitting on the throne of David, or be a ruler in Judah.” And again, God speaks of Jehoiakim his father: “Therefore this is what the Lord says about Jehoiakim his father, king of Judah: There will be no one from him sitting on the throne of David; and his dead body will be thrown out into the heat of the day and the frost of the night. And I will look upon him and upon his sons, and I will bring on them, and on the people of Jerusalem and on the land of Judah, all the evils that I have pronounced against them.”

So those who say that he was fathered by Joseph, and that they have their hope in him, make themselves disinherited from the kingdom, falling under the curse and the rebuke aimed at Jechoniah and his offspring. These things were said about Jechoniah for this very reason: the Spirit foresaw the teachings of the evil teachers, so that they might learn that he was not to be born from Jechoniah’s seed — that is, from Joseph — but that, according to God’s promise, from David’s belly the eternal King is raised up, the King who sums up all things in himself and has gathered into himself the ancient handiwork.

For just as sin entered through one man’s disobedience, and death got its hold through sin, so also, through the obedience of one man, righteousness has been brought in and will make life bear fruit in those who in times past were dead. And just as Adam, the first-formed man himself, had what he was made of from untilled ground that was still virgin — “for God had not yet sent rain, and there was no man to till the ground” — and was formed by the hand of God, that is, by the Word of God, since “all things were made through him,” and the Lord took dust from the earth and formed man: so did he who is the Word, summing up Adam in himself, rightly receive from Mary, who was still a virgin, a birth by which he could gather Adam up into himself.

If, then, the first Adam had a man for his father and was born of human seed, it would be reasonable to say that the second Adam was fathered by Joseph. But if the first was taken from the dust and God was his maker, then the second also, summing all things up in himself, had to be formed as man by God, so that his origin would answer to the first man’s. Why, then, did God not take dust again, but bring it about that what was formed should be formed from Mary? It was so that no other handiwork would be called into being, and no other thing that would need to be saved, but that this very same handiwork should be summed up, with the correspondence kept.