Isaiah Used the Words SICKNESSES and PAINS, But Matthew Quotes Him as Saying INFIRMITIES and DISEASES.  How Can That Be a Correct Translation?

I need to start by stating that all of Scripture is God-breathed, so therefore there are no errors or contradictions in it.  Thus, we have to accept that Matthew’s rendering of Isaiah is OK by God’s standards.

One could also ask how Matthew could say that He “took” our infirmities and “bore” our diseases when Isaiah said that He “bore” our sicknesses and “carried” our pains.

I don’t believe that the Holy Spirit was confused when He made both of these verses part of Scripture.  If anything, it underscores what Isaiah said.  You could read Isaiah by itself and perhaps think that “He bore our sicknesses” only means was that He happened to get sick with the same kind of sicknesses that we get.  Well, it certainly is true that He was made sick – Isaiah 53:10 says so explicitly (see Isaiah’s Prophecy of Redemption).  Even a careful reading of Isaiah shows you that He bore OUR sicknesses, not His own.  Matthew uses the word “took” to emphasize that fact.  What Jesus did for us was not just to bear sickness, but to take it away from us, just as He took it away from the multitudes on the basis of His future atonement.  He TOOK the sicknesses we deserved from us so that we need not bear them.  Likewise, He carried OUR pains, and Matthew uses the word “bore” there.  This emphasizes that Jesus did not just endure spiritual agony; He actually BORE the agony of our diseases in His own body.  (Peter refers to His bodily bearing of sin in 1 Peter 2:24.)

So the exact wording is admittedly different, but the Holy Spirit was trying to show us through Matthew’s wording some nuances of Isaiah’s prophecy that might otherwise have been missed.

KJV readers could easily mistake “griefs” and “sorrows” for emotional issues, and while emotional healing is provided in Christ’s atonement, Matthew’s quotation makes it crystal clear that Isaiah 53:4 referred to physical healing.  (Emotional healing is also mentioned in the next verse – Isaiah 53:5.)