The prophetic period.--The fourteenth verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah explained. The claims of Christ to be the Logos or Son of God, in the Alexandrian sense, are made manifest by prophecy and miracles. The Jews, influenced by the prophets of their nation, believed that a deliverer would some day appear, who would deliver them out of the hands of all their enemies, and establish a temporal kingdom on the earth. But up to the time when Christ appeared, and even to the present day, no one had shown himself who realized their idea of this divine mission. The Christians at the time of Christ believed that he was the one spoken of by the old prophets, and that a spiritual deliverer, one who was to deliver men from the power of Satan, had been mistaken for one who with temporal power would rescue the Jewish people from the hands of their foes. Barnabas, the companion of Paul, firmly believed this to be so, and took pains to cite many texts from the Old Testament to prove it. He cites numerous passages from Daniel, and all the prophets, and especially searched the pages of Isaiah, where he claims to have found at least sixteen different references made to Christ as the coming Saviour. But in all his references to the prophecies he makes none to the celebrated passage in the seventh chapter of Isaiah, on which is founded the doctrine of the divine conception of Christ from a Virgin. He makes no allusion to the fourteenth verse of the chapter at all, so that he was ignorant of the very foundation on which the Christianity of the second century was reared. Nor does Polycarp or Ignatius, except where their writings have been clearly defaced by the forgeries of men, who wished to establish the new ideas of the day by the authority of the fathers. But when we come down to the second century, as far as the times of Justin Martyr, we find pages in the writings of the day filled with a new class of citations from the Old Testament, all of which foreshadow the appearance of Christ, his birth from a virgin, and point him out as the one foretold by the prophets. In his Apology to the emperor, Justin Martyr quotes numerous passages from the Old and New Testaments to prove the divine mission of Christ, and speaks of his miraculous conception from the Virgin. (_Apology_, sec. 43)