How many times was the birth of Christ foretold in the Bible?

Answer 1

Answer

No Old Testament book literally refers to Jesus, and there is no actual prophecy of his birth. But Burton L. Mack describes a trick that can be used to make any Old Testament book say what you want it to say. By this means, books such as Genesis and Isaiah have been made to prophesy Jesus. Mack says in Who Wrote the New Testament that at first the study of a text may not seem to support a traditional Christian conviction, or the answer one hopes to find in The Bible. But with a little ingenuity, one can set up the comparison again with other emphases and make the answer come out right. This trick seems to come naturally when studying the Bible, and Mack sees it happen all the time in the classrooms of the School of Theology at Claremont.

It also helps to choose the Bible you wish to use to find prophecies, and even more so, to take material from the Old Testament out of context. The author of Matthew's Gospel. Matthew, a Greek-speaking Jew, was looking for a biblical reference he could use to prove that Jesus was prophesied to be born of a virgin. The Septuagint (an early translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek language) incorrectly translated Isaiah 7:14 to say that a virgin would conceive and bear a child. The correct translation would have been "the young woman", and the young woman in question did have a child a few verses later in Isaiah. The author of the Gospel of Matthew relied on this mistranslation, taken out of context, to show that it was prophesied that Jesus would be born of a virgin. In any case, Isaiah never mentioned the name of Jesus, so if this was a prophecy it could have referred to any other Jew, perhaps one not yet born.

Following these simple rules, you can have as many prophecies of the birth of Jesus as you wish.

Answer 2

No prophet literally predicted the birth of Jesus. There is nothing anywhere in the Old Testament which, if read in context and as written, mentions Jesus at all. However, from earliest times, Christians have sought to use the Old Testament to validate the new faith and defend it from criticisms as being a mere novelty.

Matthew, a Greek-speaking Jew, was looking for a biblical reference he could use to prove that Jesus was prophesied to be born of a virgin. The Septuagint (An early translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Greek language) incorrectly translated Isaiah 7:14 to say that a virgin would conceive and bear a child. The correct translation would have been "the young woman", and the young woman in question did have a child a few verses later in Isaiah. The author of the Gospel of Matthew relied on this mistranslation, taken out of context, to show that it was prophesied that Jesus would be born of a virgin.

Answer 3

Isaiah and Micah prophecied the birth of Christ.