Have you ever done this? You are reading the first chapter of Matthew. You get to the part where he says that all of this happened to fulfill what the prophet said. He gives you the quote. Then you do the honest thing that every serious reader does, which is flip back to Isaiah to check him.

And the words are different.

Not slightly different. Different in the one place where the whole argument lives. Here is what Matthew writes:

"Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel," which is translated, "God with us."

(Matthew 1:23)
Theologians Bible

Now go open most modern English Old Testaments at Isaiah 7:14 and you will not find "virgin." You will find "young woman." And if you have ever argued with a skeptic online, you already know what comes next. They will tell you that Matthew misquoted Isaiah. They will tell you the virgin birth is built on a translation mistake. They will tell you the Church invented the whole thing out of a bad reading of a Hebrew word.

So who is right? Let us actually look.

What Isaiah says in the Bible the Apostles read

Open Isaiah 7 in the Theologians Bible and read verse 14 for yourself:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel.

(Isaiah 7:14)
Theologians Bible

There it is. Virgin. Not young woman. And now look at the Greek line underneath it, because this is the whole ballgame:

ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ λήψεται, καὶ τέξεται υἱὸν

The word is παρθένος. That word does not mean "young woman." It means virgin. It is the same word the Greek world used for the virgin goddess. It is the word Matthew uses. It is the word Isaiah uses. They match, because Matthew was not translating the Hebrew himself and hoping nobody checked. He was quoting a Greek Old Testament that already said παρθένος, and it had said παρθένος for roughly two hundred years before Christ was born.

That Old Testament is the Septuagint.

So what about the Hebrew?

Let us be fair, because I am not interested in cheap wins. The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is almah. And it is true that almah is not the narrowest possible Hebrew word for virgin. There is another word, bethulah, that is more technical.

Here is what the skeptic never tells you. The Jewish scholars who translated Isaiah into Greek, long before there was any Christian claim to defend, looked at almah in this verse and rendered it παρθένος. Virgin. They were not Christians. They had no motive. They were native readers of Hebrew choosing the Greek word they thought carried the sense.

So the argument is not "Christians mistranslated a Hebrew word." The argument is that pre-Christian Jewish translators understood the verse the way the Church has always understood it, and Matthew simply quoted them.

And think about the verse on its own terms. Isaiah says the Lord will give a sign. A sign. What kind of sign is a young woman having a baby? That happens every single day in every village on earth. That is not a sign. That is Tuesday. The verse only makes sense as a sign if something has happened that does not happen.

This is not one verse

If this were a single odd quotation you could shrug it off. It is not. Once you start checking, you find it everywhere. The majority of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow the Greek rather than the Hebrew, and in many places the argument the Apostle is making only works in the Greek.

I will show you the sharpest example of this in another article, where the author of Hebrews builds an entire argument about the Incarnation on a phrase that exists in the Septuagint Psalms and is not there in the Hebrew. Read Hebrews 10 and Psalm 39 side by side sometime and see for yourself.

The point is this. The Apostles were not working from the Old Testament that sits on the shelf at a Protestant bookstore. They were working from the Greek. The Church that they founded kept working from the Greek. The Fathers preached from the Greek. This is not an Orthodox quirk. This is the original situation, and the Hebrew-only Old Testament in English is the later arrangement.

The Fathers already had this argument

Here is the part that should settle it for you. This is not a modern debate. Christians were having this exact argument in the second century.

St. Justin Martyr, writing in his Dialogue with Trypho, deals directly with Jewish interlocutors who wanted to render the verse "young woman" instead of "virgin." St. Irenaeus takes up the same question in Against Heresies. Both of them argue that the Septuagint reading is the older and the true one, and both of them point out that the translators who produced it had no Christian axe to grind.

You can read them yourself. They are free, in full, in the Fathers Library, and where the Fathers comment on a verse the comment is attached to the verse in the Church Fathers section.

So when someone tells you the virgin birth rests on a translation error, understand what they are actually saying. They are saying that pre-Christian Jewish translators, the Apostle Matthew, St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and the entire Church for two thousand years all got it wrong, and that it took modern scholarship to fix it.

Go check it yourself

I do not want you to take my word for any of this. That is the whole reason the Theologians Bible exists. Do this:

That is the whole method. Read the passage. Check the original. Check the Fathers. Do not settle for what somebody told you a verse says.

Isaiah said a virgin. Matthew said a virgin. The Church said a virgin. And the men who first put Isaiah into Greek, who had no reason on earth to help the Christian case, said a virgin two centuries before there was a Christian case to help.