In all this, even though we may suppose that there may have been some Messianic reference, there is no prediction at all of a conception from a virgin or of a miracle of any kind. Indeed, the prophecy appears to find some sort of fulfilment in what happens immediately afterwards (Isaiah viii. 1-4), when the prophet contracts a marriage, and calls the son who springs from it by a name implying the vengeance imminent on Samaria and Assyria: “Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz (_i.e._ booty, quick, spoil, speedy): for before the boy shall have knowledge to cry my father! my mother! the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria.” No doubt it may be said that this son was not called “Immanuel,” so that the prophecy was not fulfilled in him. But the same argument might be urged against the application to our Lord; for He also was not called “Immanuel,” but received the old national name of “Joshua,” “Jeshua,” or “Jesus.” Reviewing all the circumstances of the prophecy, I think we may say, without exaggeration, first, that there are no grounds for seeing in it any reference to a Miraculous Conception; secondly, that, when isolated, it might easily be misinterpreted so as to convey such a reference.[33] Even if no such prophecy had existed, the language and preconceptions of the earliest Christians and their converts would almost necessarily have introduced a belief in the Miraculous Conception. The language of Philo—who represents not a mere individual eccentricity but the current phraseology of the Alexandrine school of thought, and whose influence may be traced in almost every page of the Fourth Gospel—consistently affirms that, whenever a child is mentioned in the Old Testament as having been born to be a deliverer in fulfilment of a divine promise, that child is “begotten of God.” The words of Sarah, he says, indicate that, in reality, “The _Lord begot_ Isaac.” God is also spoken of as “the _husband of Leah_.” Zipporah is described as being “pregnant by _no mortal_.” Samuel, in words that contain an implied belief that only his maternal parentage was mortal, is declared to be “perhaps a man,” and “born of a human mother.” I have already quoted one passage about Isaac but another asserts that he is to be considered “_not the result of generation_ but the work of _the unbegotten_.” Sometimes the language of Philo is so worded as to convey even to a careful reader the impression that he believed in a literally Miraculous Conception, as for example when he says that “Moses introduces Sarah as being _pregnant when alone_, and as being _visited by God_.” Elsewhere, he removes the possibility of misunderstanding by saying that “the Scripture is cautious, and describes God as the husband, not of a virgin, but of virginity.” None the less, you can easily see how expressions of this kind, current among Jewish philosophers a generation before the time of St.