It is the evangelist, not the angel, who points to Isaiah’s prophecy.  He does so with a certain awe, as he thinks of the greatness of ’all these things’.  Undoubtedly the Hebrew word rendered in Matthew, after the Septuagint, ‘virgin’, does not necessarily imply the full meaning of that word; and as undoubtedly the prophecy, as it stands in Isaiah, pointed to an event to occur in the immediate future; yet it is clear, from the further development of the prophecy by Isaiah, and especially from the fourfold name given to the child in Isaiah ix. 6, and the glorious dominion there foretold for Him, that Isaiah conceives of Him as the Messiah.  And, since any ‘fulfilment’ of the glowing prophecies attached to the Child were, in Isaiah’s time, but poor and partial, the great Messianic hope was necessarily trained to look further down the stream of time.  He who should fill the role set forth was yet to come.  Matthew believed that it was completely filled by Jesus, and we know that he was right.  The fulfilment does not depend on the question whether or not the idea of Virginity is contained in the Hebrew word, but on the correspondence between the figure seen by the prophet in the golden haze of his divinely quickened imagination, and the person to be described in the gospel, and we know that the correspondence is complete.  The name Immanuel, to be given to the prophetic child, breathed the certainty that in ‘God with us’ Israel would find the secret of its charmed existence, even while an Ahaz was on the throne.  The name takes on a deeper meaning when applied to Him to whom alone it in fullest truth belongs.  It proclaims that in Jesus God dwells among us, and it lays bare the ground of the historical name Jesus, for only by a man who is one of ourselves, and in whom God is with us, can we be saved from our sins.  The one Name is the deep, solid foundation, the other is the fortress refuge built upon it.  He is Jesus, because He is Immanuel.

How different the world and his own life looked to Joseph when he woke!  Hesitations and agonising doubts of his betrothed’s purity had vanished with the night, and, instead of the dread that her child would be the offspring of shame, had come a divinely given certainty that it was ’a holy thing.’  In the rush of the sudden revulsion, all that was involved would not be clear, but the duty that lay nearest him was clear, and his obedience was as swift as it was glad.  He believed, and his faith took the burden off him, and brought back the sweet relations which had seemed to be rent for ever.  The Birth was foretold by the angel in a single clause, it is recorded by the evangelist in another.  In both cases, Mary’s part and Joseph’s are set side by side (’she shall bring forth ... and thou shalt call:  she had brought forth ... and he called’), and the birth itself is in verse 25 recorded mainly in its bearing on Joseph’s marital relations.  Could such a perspective in the narrative be conceived of from any other point of view than Joseph’s?