Diogenes the Cynic

No, that is waht YOU are doing and that is what "dual prophecy" does.
You tell us. You're the one who's arguing that Isaiah 7:14 should be read free of its context and are trying to force a Messianic interpretation into a verse which has nothing to do with the Messiah.
It doesn't say virgin and is doesn't say "shall conceive." Please try to inform yourself a little better better before you make such confident pronouncements.
It's fun to make things up but Isaiah says none of those things.
That a perfectly ordinary woman would conceive a perfectly ordinary baby from perefectly ordinary sex? Yeah, that's some sign.
If you read from any version which translates almah as "virgin."yoiu are reading from a Christian Bible which is cheating the translation to serve a theological agenda.
I guess you don't know that Strong's only lists words the way they are translated in the KJV. It's a circular reference.
This is not only contraidicated by the text itself (which clearly defines Emmanuel as a baby who will be born-- NOT OF A "VIRGIN" -- in the immediate context of the story) but it's also ludicrous because it would be totally pointless to offer Ahaz a "sign" that wouldn't occur until 700 years after he was dead
This is factually incorrect. Alamah means "young woman" and there is a completely different word (bethulah) for "virgin."
Bullshit.
How was Ahaz ever supposed to see this sign and why does Isaiah itself define Emmanuel as someone who is born in the lifetime of Ahaz to a NON-virgin? (I notice you're trying very hard to ignore the actual context of the story).
You're trying to cite Matthew in order to prove that Matthew's own cherry-picked, cut-and-paste approach to Messianic exegesis was correct? First, Matthew was reliant on the Septuagint which contained the erroneous translation of almah as parthenos in Isaiah 7:14. Matthew, who was never one to care about context seized upon this as an excuse to contrive his virgin birth fiction. Never mind that the verse had nothing to do with the Messiah.
Secondly, it's irrelevant what Matthew thought about the passage because Matthew didn't write it, apparently didn't understand it and was not really interested in any information which didn't serve his agenda anyway.
Bingo. This kid is the one and only "sign" and Isaiah explicitly he says he shagged the kid's mother.
Only prophecy.
No, you find one prophecy and one prophecy only. There is no Messianic meaning in the verse whatsoever. Fudging translations and making unfounded assertions do nothing to further your case.
Where does Isaiah say that 7:14 was about the Messiah?

pharoah

One thing that's often overlooked in these discussions is that II Chronicles clearly contradicts the notion that God saved Ahaz from Syria and Israel.

This passage contradicts 2 Kings 16, which flatly stated that Syria and Israel couldn't prevail against Judah. It's difficult to know which version is closer to real history, since both the Deuteronomist and the Chronicler have their own agendas.

Dual prophecy is a fanciful notion invented by Christians to explain away the prophetic miscues of Matthew and Paul. If such a thing is real, then the child of Isaiah that was mentioned in chapter 8 should have also been conceived by a virgin.

Jack the Bodiless

Summary so far:

Skeptic's Annotated Bible: 1
Carin Nel: 0

Carin Nel, don't you think it would have been wiser to do some research before posting? After all, the SAB spells out the various problems: there's really no excuse for not knowing that the Hebrew word for "virgin" is betulah, or the fact that the "sign" is intended for King Ahaz.

Nor is there any excuse for inventing a "Law of Double Reference".

Will your future attempts be as poor as this one, I wonder?

sunspark

To be fair, he didn't invent that. That's an idea I've heard many times before, albeit not anymore sensible than it was then.

Sven

See, "playing along" does not mean making unsupported assertions about double fulfillment (etc.). "Playing along" means providing evidence for your position.
And may I remind you that I only invited you here because the thread in Ev/Cr (in which you originally made claims) went off-topic?

No problem, here it is again:

Because Christians have invented the idea that a prophecy can be fulfilled twice out of thin air, so that they have a few verses in the OT more which meaning they can twist long enough to make a prophecy about Jesus out of it. This strategy was necessary because all real prophecies about the Messiah were not fulfilled by Jesus.

So please present your evidence that prophecies were actually intended to have dual fulfilllments.

Carin Nel

Hi Sven!!!
I'm back, BUT I don't have much time while we're building our house.
My husband and I had a wonderful trip to New Orleans, Baten Rouge, Housten and Xcaret (Mexico) with my daughter and her husband.

You asked about duality in Bible prophecy-
Dual themes are common in Bible prophecy. In such cases a prophet speaks under inspiration of God and a first fulfillment of the prophecy comes to pass. Then, later, often at the end of the age before the return of Christ, comes a final, ultimate fulfillment.
Example: In Matt. 17:11-12 when Jesus is asked about the prophecy of "Elijah," who would precede the coming of the Messiah (Mal. 4:5), Jesus responded: "Indeed, Elijah is coming first and will restore all things. But I say to you that Elijah has come already ..." (Matt. 17:11-12 ). Jesus Himself explained to the disciples who understood very well that the “Elijah”, who had come already, was John the Baptist (verse 13), and that John, already dead when Christ uttered these words, was a first fulfillment of Malachi's prophecy. Christ's clear implication is that another Elijah will precede His second coming, announcing His return just as John the Baptist preceded Christ's first coming. John himself had the understanding that he was not the final fulfillment of the prophecy (John 1:21), but as a forerunner, John had fulfilled, at least in part, Malachi's prophecy.

Another prophecy with dual application is Jesus' Olivet prophecy (Matt. 24; Mk 13; Lk 21) Christ makes it clear that similar conditions would prevail shortly before His return.

Another excellent example of duality is found in a prediction Joel made about the Holy Spirit: "And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.

"And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth: blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and awesome day of the LORD ... I will also gather all nations, and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there ..." (Joel 2:28 – 3:2).

God inspired the apostle Peter to quote from this passage to describe events on the Day of Pentecost, when God founded the Church after Jesus' resurrection (Acts 2:14-21). Miraculous manifestations of God's power through the Holy Spirit did indeed occur then (verses 1-13). But these were only the first fulfillment of Joel's prophecy. The ultimate fulfillment will come at the time of the end and will involve, among other things, the gathering of the nations to God's judgment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. This did not occur on the Day of Pentecost.

Another example of dual fulfillment is in references to the "Day of the Lord" such as in Is. 13:6: "Wail, for the day of the LORD is at hand! It will come as destruction from the Almighty." Verse 9, verse 10 – 13 all refer to “The day of the Lord” with obvious different time frames.

So we see that prophecies can be dual.

We must carefully examine the context of prophecies to understand their meaning and discern whether the prophecy seems incomplete after its first fulfillment. It is equally important to avoid reading duality into passages that do not support such interpretation. We should take great care to properly discern whether duality is a factor in any particular prophecy.
We should also understand that virtually all interpretations of how prophecies may be fulfilled are speculative to some degree. Often we may recognize a prophecy's fulfillment only after it is well under way or already has taken place.


Sources: Excerps taken from -
http://www.ucgstp.org/lit/booklets/usbbp/ch6dual.html
http://www.ucgstp.org/lit/booklets/u...leprophecy.htm

Regards,
Carin Nel

Diogenes the Cynic

Carin, you've regurgitated a lot of assertions in that post but you haven't actually provided any evidence to support any of them. Simply declaring something is true doesn't make it so. What is your evidence that any of the authors of the OT intended anything to be read as a "dual propehcy?"

Please be advised, the way that NT authors used the OT is evidence of nothing. We know the NT authors misused Hebrew scripture and twisted it for their own purposes. I'm only interested in evidence for authorial intent in the OT.

Peter did not write Acts, by the way. Or anything else, for that matter. Peter's words in Acts are the creation of that author, not actual transcriptions of anything anybody said in real life.

Carin Nel

1. The Sceptic's Bible did not know about the LXX translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. This translation was made around 200 B.C. by 70 Hebrew scholars. In Isaiah 7:14, they translated the word "almah" into the Greek word "parthenos." According to A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, parthenos means "virgin." This word is used in the New Testament of the Virgin Mary (Matt. 1:23; Luke 1:27) and of the ten virgins in the parable (Matt. 25:1, 7, 11). If the Hebrews translated the word into the Greek word for virgin, then they understood what the Hebrew text meant here.
Isaiah probably used the word almah and not bethulah because he wanted to demonstrate that the virgin would also be a young woman.

http://www.carm.org/diff/Isaiah7_14.htm

2. As for the sign - The sign for Ahaz was Isaiah's son who would be a certain age when the 2 kings would be destroyed.

The sign of the virgin birth was for the descendants of David that God would always provide for them. Ahaz did not necessarily know about the duality of the prophecy at the time.

BUT, I must mention here that I have found in my search for a better knowledge of God and the Scriptures that God is mysterious and unfathomable as His Name suggests: "I AM" which comes from the verb "to be" which some read as "I will be who I will be". Others suggest it may read: " I always have been, I am, and I always will be". Perhaps this is God's way of saying, "If your goal is to figure me out and totally understand me, it's not going to happen." When Moses asked God to show him His glory, He said "I will remove My hand and you will see My back" In the original Hebrew language it is an euphemism for "where I.. just.. was" So God said the closest you're going to get is seeing where I just was! What I'm getting at here, is that the moment we think we have figured God out, we are not dealing with God, but with somebody we've made up and then we are in control.
So, this truth about God being beyond and bigger and more than we can imagine, is the reason why study, discussion and doctrines (statements and beliefs about our faith) are so necessary. They give us insight and understanding into the experience of God we are having and they serve the greater cause - finding our lives in God and living the Way of Jesus. They are like flexible springs in a trampoline. They are the means and not the end.

One of these beliefs (springs) are the virgin birth of Jesus. What if someone (like you) prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth is a myth that the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra or Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Or what if as you study the origin of the word "virgin" in the gospel of Mathew, that it comes from actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language, at that time, the word "virgin" could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being "born of a virgin" also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?
It should not be a problem to me, because it is only one spring out of many flexible ones and if this one is seriously questioned, I could still be a Christian, love God and the Way of Jesus is still the best possible way to live.

I affirm the virgin birth, but I want to show you that even if this is proven a myth, I can still love God and live the Way of Jesus, and this is true of al the other "myths" you are trying to prove to me.

(The ideas of the trampoline was taken from the book "Velvet Elvis" by Rob Bell)

Regards,
Carin Nel

Diogenes the Cynic

Yes, everybody here knows that almah was incorrectly translated as parthenos in the LXX. We also know that the author of Matthew used this (erroneous) translation when he created his nativity story. This does not solve your problem for you. The fact still remains that the author of Isaiah did not say "virgin" but "young woman." The context of the story in Isaiah identifies both the woman and the child that 7:14 refers to, and does not so much as hint that the woman is supposed to be virgin nor that the verse is supposed to have any Messianic significance. It's not a Messianic prophecy, period. Even if you want to argue (wrongly) that the LXX translation better represents the author's intent than the author's own words in Hebrew, it's STILL not a Messianic prophecy. It would just mean that the kid in Isaiah, for no reason at all, was born of a virgin.

Can you show any evidence from the text of Isaiah itself (not from Matthew, not from anything in the NT), that the author intended 7:14 to be a Messianic prophecy?

Carin Nel

Even you should know that a prophecy is given by a prophet who speaks under inspiration of God. If it is a dual prophecy a first fulfillment of the prophecy comes to pass. Then, later, often at the end of the age before the return of Christ, comes a final, ultimate fulfillment. Many times the prophet himself does not even understand or grasp fully the implications or the meaning of the prophecy, because it is being given under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, in Isaiah's case, he may as well not have known the full meaning of this prophecy as the second fulfillment only took place in the time of the New Testament. You know very well that therefore it is only possible to test the accuracy of an Old Testament prophecy by the fullfillment of it years later, many times in the time of the New Testament.

BTW, I don't have a problem, you have.

Regards,
Carin Nel