Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 34

Just as the prophets also foretold, the Messiah would come from a virgin. This came about in fulfillment of a promised sign: the one who would give birth to the child bearing the name that embodies the reality, showing that God would be with human beings at his birth. It also seems appropriate to me, in addressing the Jew’s persona, to set forth the prophecy of Isaiah, which declares that Emmanuel will be born of a virgin—a passage that Celsus omitted. He may have omitted it because he did not know it, despite his claim to know everything, or because he read it yet deliberately kept silent, so as not to appear to be constructing against his will an argument that ran counter to his own preference. The text reads as follows: ‘And the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, “Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God, whether in the depths or in the heights.” But Ahaz replied, “I will not ask, and I will not test the Lord.” Then he said, “Hear now, O house of David: Is it too little for you to weary men, that you also weary my God? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel”’ (Isaiah 7:14), which is interpreted ‘God with us’. That Celsus acted maliciously in omitting this prophecy is clear to me from the fact that he passed over many things from the Gospel according to Matthew—such as the star that rose at the birth of Jesus and other remarkable events—and did not even mention the beginning of that account (Matthew 1:23). But if a Jew, seeking something to argue, claims that ‘Behold, the virgin’ is not written but rather ‘Behold, the young woman,’ we will reply that the Hebrew word ‘almah,’ which the Seventy translators rendered as ‘virgin’ and others as ‘young woman,’ is also found, they say, in Deuteronomy concerning a virgin. The passage reads: ‘If a virgin betrothed to a man is found in the city, and a man lies with her, you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and stone them to death—the young woman because she did not cry out in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife’ (Deuteronomy 22:23–24). And immediately afterward: ‘If a man finds a betrothed girl in the open country, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die; but you shall do nothing to the girl, for the girl has committed no offense punishable by death.’