Flight Into Egypt - Nazarenes, Nazareth, and Nazirites

Nazarenes, Nazareth, and Nazirites

While Luke places Jesus' family as being originally from the town of Nazareth, Matthew has the family moving there, though gives no specific reason for why they did so. Nazareth, now a town, is not mentioned by the Old Testament, Josephus or rabbinical sources, though many Christian Bible archaeologists, such as the evangelical and egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, state that they are fairly sure that a village existed in the area at the time of Jesus. Clarke notes that the location of Nazareth is just to the north of where the large town Sepphoris was located. At the time, Sepphoris had been largely destroyed in the violence following the death of Herod the Great, and was being rebuilt by Herod Antipas, hence Clarke speculates that this could have been seen as a good source of employment by Joseph, a carpenter.

The difficulty with the brief quote he will be called a Nazarene is that it occurs nowhere in the Old Testament, or any other extant source. At the time the canon was not firmly established and it is possible that Matthew is quoting some lost source, although all the other quotations in Matthew are from well known works and if a prophecy so closely pointing to the town that Jesus grew up in existed, it would be likely to have been preserved by Christianity.

The most similar known passage is Judges 13:5 where of Samson it says the child shall be a Nazirite, where a nazirite was a specific type of religious ascetic. That the Nazirite and Nazareth are so similar in name, while Nazareth isn't mentioned in any other source until after the Gospels have been written, and that the passage almost parallels one about the birth of a hero that was a Nazarite, has led many to propose that Matthew originally had Jesus being a Nazarite, but it was changed to Nazarene, inventing a location named Nazareth, when the ascetic requirements fell foul of later religious practices. Other scholars such as France reject this explanation, stating that Jesus was not a nazirite and claiming that he is never described as one.

Another theory is that it is based on a prophecy at Isaiah, which states that he grew up before him like a tender shoot — the Hebrew for shoot is nasir. While this piece of wordplay is meaningless in Greek, Hebrew wordplay is not unknown in Matthew, and so Goulder has proposed that the author of Matthew felt a need to justify as much as possible by prophecy, so looked for the closest thing he could find, which was this verse.