Which Old Testament prophet told of the coming of Jesus?

Answer 1

A:If there were any real prophecies of the coming of Jesus in the Old Testament, millions of Jews could have been expected to convert, decimating the Jewish faith. That there is no genuine Old Testament prophecy about the coming of Jesus is attested by the fact that few Jews ever voluntarily converted to Christianity.

However, Burton L. Mack (Who Wrote the New Testament) says there is a trick that seems to come naturally when studying The Bible. One can ask any question of the Bible and get some kind of answer. If the first answer does not appear to be helpful, one can look for another answer to the same question, until the right answer appears. In this way, since the early apostolic age, writers have managed to find all kinds of prophecies in the Old Testament, including prophecies about the coming of Jesus.

One of the most famous such prophecies is Isaiah 7:14, said to prophesy that a virgin would conceive and bear a child. There are several problems with this as a prophecy. First of all, this occurs only in the Septuagint, an early, flawed Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the original Hebrew, this merely says that "the young woman" would give birth, an event that occurred just a few verses later in Isaiah. Also, there is nothing in the context to suggest that any such prophecy refers to Jesus rather than a "virgin" of Isaiah's time, or of any other time - the text never mentions Jesus nor identifies him in any way. The author of the Gospel of Matthew relied on the Septuagint mistranslation, taken out of context, to show that it was prophesied that Jesus would be born of a virgin.