The history you were handed over says that Jews were promised a messiah; they were also given prophecies the messiah would fulfill, and in the first century, Jews in Judea were waiting for this unique savior. Then Jesus came along, fulfilling every prophecy to the extent that it would be ridiculous to call it a coincidence.
To name a few, seven centuries before Bethlehem, the prophets described a virgin birth, a flight to Egypt, a donkey ride into Jerusalem, and a suffering servant wounded for our sins. If you grew up around this stuff, fulfilled prophecy was probably the strongest card in the deck, since nobody could fake predictions written hundreds of years in advance.
Yet Jews not only chose not to believe in him, but in the end got him killed.
So how did the Israelites fail to recognize the messiah right in front of them, knowing all that he was fulfilling the prophecies that they were desperately waiting for?
Isaiah’s Young Woman Was Standing in Front of the King
Let's start with recapping something we previously covered at length.
Isaiah 7 opens around 735 BCE with Ahaz, king of Judah, in a panic. The kings of Aram and northern Israel have teamed up and are marching on Jerusalem. Isaiah tells Ahaz to calm down and offers him a sign: a young woman is pregnant and will have a son named Immanuel, and before that boy is old enough to tell good food from bad, the lands of those two kings will be deserted (Isaiah 7:16). The sign is a countdown. By the time a baby born this year hits toddlerhood, your enemies will be gone. It only works as a sign if Ahaz lives to watch it happen, and the very next chapter has Isaiah fathering a son of his own with a nearly identical countdown attached (Isaiah 8:3-4).
To sum up:
A young girl gave birth, not a virgin.
Gave birth in the 8th century BCE, not 1st century CE
The boy is called “Emmanuel” and not Jesus
The virgin bit comes from a translation mistake made centuries before Jesus was born, when someone mistranslated or at the very best made a poor choice of words.
The Hebrew word is almah, a young woman of marriageable age. Hebrew has a specific word for virgin, betulah, and Isaiah didn’t use it. When Jewish scholars translated scripture into Greek a few centuries later, they rendered almah as parthenos, a word that usually means virgin but could stretch to cover a young girl. Matthew read the Greek, saw a virgin, and wrote in 1:22-23 that Mary’s pregnancy happened to fulfill what the prophet had said. A sign meant to reassure a frightened king in the 700s BCE became a prediction about a birth that happened long after Ahaz, his enemies, and the toddler in question were all dead.
The writer of Matthew either didn’t know or didn’t care that the original Hebrew text had no virgins.
Jews have never expected a messiah born to a virgin because the Hebrew Bible doesn't say anything like that.
Hosea’s Son Was a Whole Nation
Christian theology claims that Hosea's prophecy about God calling his son out of Egypt was fulfilled when Jesus returned from Egypt as an infant.
Matthew 2:15 has the holy family fleeing to Egypt and staying until Herod dies, to fulfill the prophet’s words, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” That line is Hosea 11:1, and here’s the full verse: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Hosea names the son in the same breath. He’s looking back at the Exodus, with God describing the nation of Israel as a child he raised. The next verse says the more God called them, the more they ran off to sacrifice to the Baals and burn incense to idols.
If Matthew wants Jesus to be the son in Hosea 11:1, he’s stuck with Jesus as the son in Hosea 11:2 too, the one who can’t stop worshipping other gods. Nobody applies the verse that way because nobody reads the verse at all. They read Matthew’s clipping of it.
Rachel Was Crying About the Exile
Matthew asserts that Jeremiah's elegy for Babylonian exiles returning home was fulfilled in the slaughter of infants in Bethlehem, keeping the weeping and cutting the promise of return since dead children weren't coming back from anywhere.
After Herod slaughters the boys of Bethlehem (an event no other ancient source mentions, including the Jewish historian Josephus, who cataloged Herod’s cruelties in loving detail), Matthew 2:17-18 quotes Jeremiah 31:15 about Rachel weeping for her children in Ramah. Rachel was Jacob’s wife and the ancestral mother of the northern tribes. Ramah was where the Babylonians gathered captives for deportation around 586 BCE, and Jeremiah 40:1 places the prophet himself there in chains. The verses immediately after Rachel’s weeping tell her to dry her eyes because her children will come back from the land of the enemy.
In reality, Jeremiah wrote a poem of comfort about exiles coming home. Matthew kept the weeping and cut the promise, because the dead boys of Bethlehem weren’t coming home from anywhere.
The Prophecy That Doesn’t Exist at All
Matthew 2:23 says Joseph settled the family in Nazareth so that what the prophets said would be fulfilled: “He shall be called a Nazarene.” If you check out the verse and you won’t find it in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek translation, or in any Jewish text we know of. Nazareth doesn’t appear anywhere in the Old Testament.
Defenders have tried to rescue it with wordplay. Isaiah 11:1 calls the coming king a netzer, a branch, which sounds a bit like Nazareth. Judges 13:5 says Samson will be a Nazirite, a man under a vow to skip wine and never cut his hair, which is an odd fit for a man the gospels themselves say was mocked as a drunkard (Matthew 11:19). When the best available defense of a fulfilled prophecy is a pun on the Hebrew word for a twig, the prophecy was written after the fact to explain an awkward detail of Jesus’ biography. He came from a nowhere village in Galilee, and Matthew needed scripture to have planned it.
Matthew Put Jesus on Two Donkeys
Zechariah 9:9 describes a king coming to Jerusalem humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. Anybody familiar with Hebrew poetry recognizes the pattern. The Psalms and the prophets say things twice, with the second line restating the first in slightly different words, so what Zechariah describes is one donkey mentioned two ways.
Mark, Luke, and John all have Jesus riding one animal. Matthew 21:2-7 has the disciples fetch a donkey and a colt, drape cloaks on both, and Jesus sits on them. Matthew read the poetic doubling as two separate animals and rewrote the scene so it matched his reading of the text, which tells you which direction the process ran. Nobody watched a man straddle two donkeys and then went searching for a verse to explain it. Matthew started with the verse and adjusted the event until it fit.
The Servant Was Israel
Isaiah 53 carries more weight in Christian apologetics than any other passage: despised and rejected, wounded for our transgressions, led like a lamb to the slaughter. It reads beautifully as a portrait of the crucifixion, and Christians have been reading it that way since the first century.
The servant poems in the second half of Isaiah were written around the time of the Babylonian exile, and the author tells you who the servant is. Isaiah 41:8 addresses “Israel, my servant.” Isaiah 44:1 says it again. Isaiah 49:3 is as blunt as it gets: “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” The suffering servant is the exiled nation, beaten down and humiliated in the eyes of its neighbors, and the prophet insists that suffering will be vindicated. The kings in 52:15 and the speakers in 53:1-6 are the surrounding nations watching Israel restored and realizing they’d misjudged it. Jewish readers have understood the passage this way for centuries, and the text backs them up.
Psalm 22 got the same treatment. It’s a lament by someone who feels abandoned by God and surrounded by enemies, and it ends with the speaker rescued and praising God in the assembly. The gospels mined it for the crucifixion: the opening cry, the mocking crowd, the soldiers gambling for clothes. The famous line “they pierced my hands and my feet” leans on the Greek translation and a disputed reading. The standard Hebrew text says “like a lion, my hands and my feet,” which is clumsy Hebrew, but it’s what the manuscripts say.
Micah Was Talking About Assyria
Micah 5:2 does say a ruler will come from Bethlehem, and it’s the one prophecy that seems to fit on its face. Keep reading, though, and it’s clear Micah is promising a new king from David’s line (David came from Bethlehem, so the town stands in for the dynasty), and verses 5-6 say this ruler will save Israel when the Assyrians invade and will rule Assyria with the sword. Assyria was the superpower of Micah’s day and collapsed around 609 BCE, and Jesus never came within six centuries of fighting one.
The gospels can’t even agree on how Jesus got to Bethlehem. Matthew has Joseph and Mary already living there and moving to Nazareth later to dodge Herod’s son. Luke has them living in Nazareth and traveling to Bethlehem for a Roman census that took place about a decade after Herod died, even though Luke also sets the story in Herod’s reign (Luke 1:5). Two writers with two incompatible stories arriving at the same town is what you’d expect if scripture fixed the destination and each writer built his own road to it.
Reading Backward Was Standard Practice in the First Century
Matthew was doing what Jewish interpreters of his day did, and he’d have been baffled by the accusation of cheating. The community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls wrote commentaries on Habakkuk and Nahum that treated those old prophets as if they’d been writing coded messages about the sect’s own leader and his enemies in the first century BCE. Readers of that era assumed the prophets had their own moment in view.
The early Christians believed Jesus was the messiah, got blindsided when Rome executed him, and went back to their scriptures to work out how that could have been God’s plan. They found verses, lifted them out of context, and read them as predictions. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that Christ died “according to the scriptures” without naming a single one, which is what you’d expect from a movement convinced the answer was in there somewhere and still hunting for the page.
The trouble started when a first-century method for coping with a crisis got repackaged in the modern era as evidence. Apologists present fulfilled prophecy as a statistical miracle, dozens of specific predictions that came true against impossible odds, and they count Hosea 11:1 and the Nazarene verse toward the total. A prediction counts as evidence when the writer meant it as a prediction, stated it clearly before the event, and it came true without anybody shaping the story to match. Almost none of these meet the first condition, and Matthew’s two donkeys show the third one failing in plain sight.
In the end we're left with three options: God either didn't know how to relay a message that would be clear to Israelites so that they'd know what to expect, He knew but intentionally chose not to, or Matthew was hunting for fulfilled prophecies in the Hebrew Bible in Greek to convince his readers. If it's the third one, was he evil? Not necessarily. If making the stories more colorful would bring people to Jesus, what could be wrong with it?
But that’s not all.
There’s one more fulfillment in Matthew that falls apart even faster when you take into account that he names the wrong prophet, and his account of Judas’ death flatly contradicts the other one in the New Testament. Paid subscribers get the full breakdown below: the thirty pieces of silver, the potter’s field, and how two writers built two different deaths for Judas out of scraps of scripture. If you’re on the free list, upgrading unlocks this and every bonus section in the archive.
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How Matthew Built Judas’ Death From the Wrong Prophet
Matthew 27:3-10 says that Judas regrets betraying Jesus, throws his thirty pieces of silver into the temple, and hangs himself. The priests can’t put blood money back in the treasury, so they buy a potter’s field to bury foreigners in, and that’s why it’s called the Field of Blood. Matthew then says this fulfilled what the prophet Jeremiah said about thirty pieces of silver, the price set on a man, being given for the potter’s field.
Yet that quote isn’t from Jeremiah but from…