Isaiah the Fifth Evangelist

Isaiah (feast 9 May) is called by the Church “the fifth evangelist,” so full is his book of prophecies the Church reads of Christ — above all the Immanuel born of a virgin and the Suffering Servant who bears the sins of many. This file treats the Church’s christological reading of these great texts, reports fairly the Jewish and historical-critical readings per METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2, and defers the source-critical “unity of Isaiah” question to the Scripture collection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Fifth Evangelist

No prophet is quoted more often in the New Testament, or read more constantly in the Church’s worship, than Isaiah, and the tradition gave him a title to match: the “fifth evangelist.” The epithet crystallizes St. Jerome’s judgment in the preface to his commentary on Isaiah — that Isaiah “should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, because he describes all the mysteries of Christ and the Church so clearly that you would think he is composing a history of what has already happened rather than prophesying what is to come” (Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, prologue). The Church keeps his feast on 9 May (Prophet Isaiah, 9 May, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org). Isaiah’s book supplies the reproaches of Holy Week, the Nativity prophecies, the Baptism’s “voice of one crying in the wilderness” (Isaiah 40:3), the vision of the Sanctus (Isaiah 6:3, treated in the companion file), and above all the two great Messianic complexes on which the Church’s reading turns: the Immanuel prophecy and the Suffering Servant.

Immanuel Born of a Virgin

To King Ahaz, wavering under the Syro-Ephraimite threat, Isaiah gives the sign: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14) — “God with us.” The Church reads this as a prophecy of the virgin birth of Christ, and does so on the authority of the Gospel itself, which cites the verse as fulfilled in the conception of Jesus by the Virgin Mary: “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child” (Matthew 1:22–23). The christological reading rests on a textual point the Orthodox tradition regards as providential. The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament of the Church and the Apostles, renders the Hebrew ʿalmāh by parthenos, “virgin” — the reading Matthew follows. The Hebrew ʿalmāh means “young woman” (of marriageable age), not specifically “virgin” (for which Hebrew has bĕtûlāh); and this difference is the crux of the ancient and modern debate.

The Church’s reading: the LXX parthenos discloses the true, Spirit-intended sense — a virginal conception — fulfilled in the Theotokos; the LXX is the Church’s authoritative Old Testament, and its reading here is confirmed by the Gospel (see The Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament).
The Jewish reading, going back to the second-century translators Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion who rendered ʿalmāh by neanis (“young woman”), and continued in the rabbinic tradition: the verse speaks of a young woman of Isaiah’s own day (often taken as Ahaz’s wife or Isaiah’s), and the sign is the birth of a child within the crisis of the eighth century BC, not a distant virgin birth.
The historical-critical reading: the oracle addresses the immediate political situation under Ahaz; “Immanuel” is a child born in Isaiah’s time whose growth measures the deliverance of Judah, and the Matthean application is a Christian re-reading through the LXX.

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the Orthodox reading is presented as the reading of the Church, and the Jewish and critical readings are reported accurately and in their own terms; the difference is one the Church has long known and has answered not by denying the Hebrew philology but by confessing the fuller sense the Spirit gave and the Gospel confirmed (the LXX/Masoretic question and the parthenos/almah crux are treated at length in the Scripture collection; see Text, Numbering, and the Masoretic Question).

The Suffering Servant

The other great Isaian complex is the fourth Servant Song (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), the portrait of the Servant of the Lord “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows,” who “hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows,” who “was wounded for our transgressions… and with his stripes we are healed”; who “is brought as a lamb to the slaughter” and “opened not his mouth”; who “made his grave with the wicked” yet “shall see his seed” and “shall justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities” (Isaiah 53). The Church reads this as the clearest Old Testament prophecy of the Passion — of Christ crucified for the sins of the world — and again the New Testament leads the way: the Ethiopian eunuch is reading precisely this passage (“he was led as a sheep to the slaughter”) when Philip, “beginning at the same scripture, preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8:32–35); and the Gospel and Epistles apply the Servant’s silence, wounds, and vicarious suffering to Christ (Matthew 8:17; 1 Peter 2:22–25). Isaiah 53 is woven through the services of Holy Week; it is one of the pillars of the Church’s reading of the Cross.

Here too the readings diverge, and the honest course is to name them. The traditional Jewish reading (developed especially in the medieval commentators) understands the Servant collectively, as the people of Israel, suffering among the nations and vindicated by God — a reading with roots in the Servant Songs’ own language, where “Israel” is at points named as the servant (Isaiah 49:3). The historical-critical reading situates the Songs in the exile (“Second Isaiah,” Isaiah 40–55), and debates whether the Servant is Israel, a prophetic figure, or an idealized individual. The Orthodox reading does not deny that the Servant language has a corporate dimension — the Church reads Christ as the true Israel who gathers His people into Himself — but confesses that the Song’s deepest and intended reference is to the Messiah crucified, as the Apostolic preaching declares (§4.1; and see Christ the Key to the Scriptures).

The Unity of Isaiah — Deferred

Underlying the discussion of the Immanuel and Servant texts is the great source-critical question of the book’s composition: whether the sixty-six chapters are the work of the eighth-century prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, or whether chapters 40–55 (“Second Isaiah,” addressing the Babylonian exile and the return under Cyrus, named in Isaiah 44:28; 45:1) and 56–66 (“Third Isaiah”) derive from later hands, as the dominant critical view holds (John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed., Fortress, 2018, on First, Second, and Third Isaiah). This is a source-critical and factual question, and per METHODOLOGY §4.2 the present collection does not adjudicate it. The Church’s liturgical and traditional usage speaks of “the prophet Isaiah” as the single author of the book that bears his name and reads the whole as one prophetic witness to Christ; the critical partition of the book is a matter of scholarly evidence, deferred, with the method, to the Scripture collection (see The Historical-Critical Method). What the Church affirms in venerating Isaiah is not a position on the number of authors but the Spirit-given testimony of the book to the Christ — the virgin’s Son and the wounded Servant — whom the fifth evangelist described as though he had already seen Him.

References

The Holy Bible, KJV (Isaiah 7:14; 40:3; 44:28; 45:1; 49:3; 52:13–53:12; Matthew 1:22–23; 8:17; Acts 8:32–35; 1 Peter 2:22–25), with LXX readings noted (parthenos for ʿalmāh).
Jerome. Commentary on Isaiah, prologue (Isaiah “an evangelist rather than a prophet”).
Prophet Isaiah (9 May), Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feast; the life.)
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The Orthodox reading of Isaiah; the LXX and the christological sense.)
Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018. (First, Second, and Third Isaiah; the critical reading of the Immanuel and Servant texts.)