“And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.” Matthew 2:23 ESV

When I first became a Christian and I started to read the Bible I came to this verse and then I did what I always did when I got to a fulfilled prophesy, I looked it up in the Old Testament. Or should I say I tried to look it up in the Old Testament? I soon found out this one was different, I was surprised to learn there was no direct Old Testament prophesy that Matthew was citing.

Because there is no direct Old Testament prophesy that we can point to, skeptics have used this verse to challenge the inerrancy of the Bible, so I think it is important to take a closer look at this. Where did Matthew get this prophecy from? There are a few theories.

One theory states that this prophesy was passed down by oral tradition and it would have been known to Matthew’s original readers. This seems highly unlikely to me as we can trace the other fulfilled prophesies in the Gospels back to the Old Testament. Why would this one be any different? Still, this is possible because the ancient Hebrews did have a lengthy oral tradition.

Another theory says that this prophesy was referencing an extra-biblical source. That theory seems slightly more likely to me because there are two instances of references to apocryphal books in the Book of Jude.¹ There are also references to extra-Biblical books in the Old Testament as well, the Book of Jasher in Joshua 10:13 is just one example. This answer was still not satisfactory to me either. Why would Matthew choose to cite from an authority which was not in the official Jewish scripture to show that the Jewish scripture pointed to Jesus?

A third theory states that Matthew was making a play on the word Nazarene because it has the same root as the Hebrew word for branch which is used in Isaiah 11:1. The Hebrew word for branch is נצר while the word for Nazareth is נצרת. This would make it a direct prophesy to the Branch of David in Isaiah. This seems like a plausible explanation, and this would not be the first example of an author using a play on words in the Bible.

The fourth theory, and the one at least two study Bibles (the ESV Study Bible and the CSB Apologetics Study Bible) seem to endorse, is that Matthew was using the term Nazarene as a general term for the total of the Old Testament prophesies which showed the Messiah would be despised.

In Biblical times the term Nazarene was used as an insult, or in a derogatory manner, we see an example of this in John 1:46 when Nathaniel asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” This can also be seen in Acts 24:5 where Paul is called a “plague” and a “ringleader of the sect of Nazarenes.” (ESV)

I wasn’t really sold on this theory until I noticed one particular part of the text I hadn’t really focused on before. Matthew pluralized the word prophets in 2:23, it is the only place in Matthew where it is pluralized.

I found four instances in the book of Matthew where he cites a prophet directly and names the prophet (4:14, 12:17, 13:14, and 27:9). And I found two instances of Matthew citing a prophet in the singular tense without mentioning the prophet’s name (13:35, and 21:4) but these two prophecies can be found in the Old Testament.

The word prophets being pluralized seems to lend credence to the theory that Matthew was summing up all of the Old Testament prophesies concerning Jesus which stated He would be rejected and despised. This leads me to believe this is the most likely explanation, although not being a scholar of ancient Hebrew, I am not willing to rule out the third possibility either.

So even though there is no one specific direct link back to the Old Testament that can clearly be seen, this prophesy is not in error. There are two viable options which explain the so-called error, so it can be concluded that this verse has been misused by those who want it to be an example of a mistake, or misunderstood by those who haven’t looked into it.

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1. See Jude 1:9 and 1:14 ↩︎