Is Hosea 11:1 a prophecy about Jesus? Matthew 2:15

The passages

When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.

Hosea 11:1

And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.

Matthew 2:15

The problem

In Hosea the sentence is about the past. "Israel" is the child, and God's calling him out of Egypt is the Exodus. The next verse (11:2) describes how the people turned to the Baals. It does not read as a prediction. Matthew uses the verse as if it had been waiting for Jesus, whose family returned from Egypt after Herod's death.

What believers and scholars say

Typology. The usual Christian answer is that Matthew is reading Israel's history as a pattern that Jesus repeats and completes. Jesus is the true Israel, the son who passes through Egypt and comes out. "Fulfilled" in Matthew can mean "brought to its full sense" and not "predicted". France and Hays develop this reading in detail.

Jewish-style interpretation. Matthew's method has parallels in contemporary Jewish interpretation, which linked verses by shared words and themes (as at Qumran), and was not concerned with the original sense in the way modern readers are. On this view Matthew is doing something ordinary for his time, and the objection assumes a modern standard.

A sign of invention. Critics hold that the Egypt episode may have been shaped to fit the verse, since the flight to Egypt appears in no other Gospel. If so, the "fulfillment" came first as a text and then as a story. Defenders reply that the story and the text could have been connected in either direction.

A pattern with Moses. Brown stressed that the infancy narrative as a whole parallels the infancy of Moses, and that Hosea's verse fits that larger scheme.

Where this leaves it

If prophecy means a prediction that could be checked in advance, Matthew's use of Hosea does not qualify, and it was not written as one. If prophecy includes the idea that patterns in Israel's story recur, it does. That is a question about what the word means, and it affects many of Matthew's other quotations.