No, not that Hallelujah is a transliteration of the Hebrew word הללו יה, meaning “Praise Jah” (from the first two letters of YHWH).
THAT everybody knows.
No, it was amazing to discover that the Jesus story was anticipated eight hundred years ahead of time by the Prophet Isaiah. We are in good company. Saint Jerome (c. 342–420) also discovered it. “He was more of an Evangelist than a Prophet,” he wrote, “because he described all the Mysteries of the Church of Christ so vividly that you would assume he was not prophesying about the future, but rather was composing a history of past events” (Wikipedia).
The alto recitative – #8 in Part 1 – Behold a virgin will conceive was written by the Prophet Isiah, as was the aria #23, He was despised and rejected, and the Chorus #12 – For unto us a child is born, and the government shall be upon His shoulder and His name shall be wonderful.
Trust the angry old prophet with his messianic vision, 800 years before the event, to have originated not only the virgin birth but also the Christmas story.
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A video about life at the University of Toronto in 1942 has been posted on YouTube.
Eric Koch’s new book, The Golden Years: Five Stories, was launched on Saturday, March 16. The book is available from the 
It is generally agreed among bibilical scholars (other than the ‘every word delivered from the pen of God’ groups) that the Christian bible was written with a close eye on Isaiah – e.g. the choice of Bethlehem as the birthplace, to fulfil prophecies about David’s line. The very earliest accounts of Christ’s life did not include such details, but they accreted to the story in the late first century and later.
So there was a certain amount of retrospective prophesy going on.
OTOH I was perhaps alone among your readers in not knowing the derivation of ‘hallelujah’.
No John, you were not alone
And Joseph Campbell long ago documented that the virgin birth, like many other aspects of the Jesus story, is a common motif in many pre-Christian mythologies around the world. The whole thing has to be read mythologically, not literally. IMHO.