The Old Testament book known as the ‘Fifth Gospel’

People of the Book- Isaiah

Since very early in the history of Christianity, the book of Isaiah has been a central text of our faith, even called by many patristic authors the “Fifth Gospel.” In fact, St. Jerome (c.342-420) claimed 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 about what is to come.” Isaianic concepts and terms that have become integral to Christian worship, texts, and iconography include, but obviously are not limited to: “beating their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks” (2:4), “the wolf dwelling with the lamb” (11:6), “a voice crying out in the wilderness” (40:3), “a man of sorrows” (53:3), “a light to the nations” (42:6), “good news to the poor’ (6:11), the “Prince of Peace” (9:6), “a new heaven and a new earth” (65:17) and of course “the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (7:14).

Modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated with almost undeniable certainty that the multiple genres and forms which are compiled in what we currently call the Book of Isaiah are an amalgamation of multiple authors, rather than a monolithic whole attributable to one figure. It is now widely accepted that First Isaiah (chapters 1-39), Second or Deutero-Isaiah (40-55) and so-called Trito-Isaiah (56-66) were distinct elements, composed over a wide range of three or four centuries surrounding the Jewish exile experience in Babylon. (See John F.A Sawyer’s masterful study of Isaiah and the history of Christianity for more on this topic.)

Jews and Christians have always shared a devotion to the text, so much so that the early cultic leader Marcion was labeled a heretic for misreading certain passages of the book which led him to reject any unity between the God of the Old and New Testaments. Rather Christians from the time of the Pauline writings until today continue to maintain that the predictions made in the Judaic Scriptures are fulfilled in the person of Jesus, and thus respect the Covenant given to the Hebrews. “The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant…God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues” (Nostra Aetate 4, cf. Rom. 11).

Thinkers as varied as Augustine, Luther, Handel and Ratzinger return again and again to Isaiah for the light he sheds on the Christian experience. Perhaps chief among these contributions in understanding the Incarnation is Isaiah’s description of the Suffering Servant motif. Here we have the devotional image that best typifies the medieval and Renaissance reflections on the Passion which so heavily mold our interpretation and visualization of the Gospel account today.

To appreciate its impact, it is worth quoting at length: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. Oppressed and condemned he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of his people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and a burial place with evildoers, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth” (53).

Without delving too deeply into textual analysis and exegetical criticism here, the past tense employed above and in passages like, “For to us a child has been born…” (9:6), underscore the fact that a prophet is not a soothsayer, divining the future and predicting what will come to pass in some shadowy emerging moment which has not yet arrived. (In the Inferno, Dante marvelously displays divine justice in the perfect contrapasso of having such figures who sought to inappropriately foretell the future having their heads twisted around so they can only see behind them.)

Rather, a prophet in the biblical sense is one given by God the task of interpreting and addressing the present, in every age. And thus, Isaiah, while predating Christ, speaks to the ever-contemporary “now” of a relationship with God and his Word and the constant call to conform our lives to his will, by beating the spears of our self-interested desires into pruning hooks used to tend the fruitful branches of a life devoted to service of the Lord and our neighbor.

Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.