HE WAS NAMED “IMMANUEL” AT BIRTH, NOT “JESUS” –
SO SAY EVIDENCE PLUS LOGIC

Recent argumentation, leaving aside the Talmud of Jmmanuel, shows this. It goes as follows:

A.) Isaiah’s Immanuel prophecy (Isa 7:14) could be true and verified only if the would-be Messiah had been named “Immanuel” at birth. (It was to be his name, at birth, not just a title or characterization or symbology.)

B.) John the Baptist probably thought the prophecy had come true (Matthew 11:3-4); Paul definitely thought Isaiah’s prophecy had come true (Rom 15:12); the writer of Matthew definitely thought it was true (Mt 1:23) although he wrote that his name at birth was to be “Jesus” (Mt 1:21,25); Justin Martyr definitely believed it had come true (Dialogue with Trypho, Chaps. 43,66); and Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, definitely believed it had come true (Adv. Haer. III.9.2, 19.1, 20.3, 21.4).

C.) If these persons were correct in believing that Isaiah’s Immanuel prophecy had come true, then the messiah had indeed been named “Immanuel” at birth and during his life, until someone somehow had renamed him “Jesus.”

Supporting clues for this from Gnostic Gospels and elsewhere, along with a scenario of how it could all have come about, are given here.

If the prophesied messiah had been named "Immanuel" at birth, John the Baptist would have known this, of course, and would not have been confronted with any contradiction. But how could Paul have ignored this contradiction (and never ever mentioned "Immanuel" in his Epistles), and so also the writer of Matthew, Justin and Irenaeus? The latter even emphasized "the name Emmanuel" and "born Emmanuel of the virgin." One may also ask, how could NT scholars have ignored the contradiction for so long? Just because modern science has no clue how a particular long-range prophecy could be fulfilled is no reason for ignoring the fact that 4 or 5 important personages of that era believed it had been fulfilled and thereby accepted the contradiction.