No matter who says otherwise, the prophesy of Isaias predicted that a virgin, not merely “a young girl,” would conceive and bear a son!
Read the following, from Brother Francis, for insights on the matter (emphasis mine):
At the direction of our great teacher and spiritual guide, Father Leonard Feeney, I made it a practice over considerable period of time to copy, as part of a daily meditation, one passage a day from the New Testament where it was quoting directly from the Old. The number of these passages added up to 411. These can be easily found in any Bible, being prominently printed in italics in most editions.
The very first of my 411 copied passages is the following quotation from the Prophet Isaias, given by Saint Matthew to prove that the virginal birth of Jesus fulfills a Messianic prophecy:
Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call His name Emmanuel. (Is. 7-14; Matt. 1:23)
Now if this were not a Messianic prophecy understood by the ancient Jews as such, there would have been absolutely no point in Matthew — a Jew himself — using it, since he wrote the first Gospel in the language of the Jews of his time precisely to show how the prophecies of the Messias were fulfilled in Jesus. But if we do not heed the right teachers — the Catholic Bible, the saints, and the Church — then the “scholars,” those scribes of our time (many of whom work for the devil), will certainly mislead us. For this same breed of “scholars,” using Hebrew dictionaries written by Jews already committed to reject Jesus as the Messias, and written centuries after Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language, have convinced many, including some publishers of “Catholic” Bibles, that the word “alma” in the prophecy of Isaias does not mean “virgin” at all, but “a young girl.”
Bottom line: That a “young girl” would conceive and bear a son is hardly miraculous, hardly a sign, and that’s what the prophet is talking about: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (7:14).
Brother Thomas Mary, in his paper, “The Infancy Narratives,” cites Fr. Stephano Manelli, F.I. (emphasis mine):
Biblical theological exegesis correctly insists on the one literal, messianic, and Marian interpretation of this well-known prophecy: the Emmanuel of whom the prophet speaks is exclusively the future Messiah, Jesus Christ, and the child-bearing virgin is exclusively Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus. Apart from the great number of Catholic scholars who, on strictly exegetical grounds, support such an interpretation of the oracle of Isaiah, one must also consider the well-nigh unanimous agreement with this interpretation on the part of the Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, both in the East and in the West, from St. Justin on. So, too, the uninterrupted teaching of the Magisterium of the Church, the witness of the liturgy and of sacred art (as early as that of the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome) have favored this interpretation. All this unquestionably lends weight to the Church’s belief that the announcement made by the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz is an unequivocal proclamation heralding the Messiah, Jesus, and Mary, His Mother.
Notwithstanding the impressive Faith of the Church, however, there are some scholars, Catholics included, especially in recent years, who propose interpretations of Isaiah’s prophecy denying that in the literal sense its content is to be understood as exclusively messianic and Marian. They allow such content only in an indirect, oblique, and typical sense and deny in particular that the prophecy has any relations to the virginal conception and parturition of Mary most holy as affirmed in the Gospels. For them, the so-called virgin in Isaiah would, in fact, be an already married woman – either the wife of Ahaz and mother of Hezechiah; the wife of the prophet himself; or an unidentified spouse. As Mattioli states, these are the interpretations favored by ‘a modern rationalistic exegesis’, and they run counter to the practically unanimous view of exegetical tradition and the Faith of the Church. Yet modern, rationalistic exegetes cannot avoid facing the fact that if there are any prophecies of the Old Testament expressly cited in the New as fully verified, one is this precise passage from Isaiah, cited verbatim by St. Matthew and clearly referred to by St. Luke.
Fathers of the Church, like St. Justin Martyr, held that the word “virgin” was the correct translation, whereas modernist heretics like Raymond Brown held otherwise. Enough said.
