The gospel of Matthew tells how the holy family came back from Egypt after the death of Herod and settled in a town called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled: he shall be called a Nazarene. It is one of the strangest sentences in the gospels, because no prophet says it. There is no verse in the Hebrew scriptures, in any version that has come down to us, that reads he shall be called a Nazarene. The writer of the gospel, who quotes the prophets more carefully than any other evangelist, has pointed at a prophecy that is not there.
The fellowship does not think he was careless. We think he was punning, in the way the readers of his time loved to pun, and that he expected his readers to hear in the word more than one thing at once. This page sets out the things they might have heard.
Two Greek Forms
The New Testament spells the name two ways. The gospel of Mark, the earliest, nearly always writes Nazarenos, which is the ordinary Greek way of saying a man from Nazareth. The gospels of Matthew and John and the Acts of the Apostles prefer Nazoraios, which is not the ordinary way and is much harder to explain as a simple name of origin. Luke uses both. The longer form is the one used for the sect in Acts and for the title over the cross in John, and it is the one later Christian writers used for the Law-keeping believers of Syria.
Something, then, was pulling the name away from mere geography. Here are the candidates.
The Branch
In the eleventh chapter of Isaiah: there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. The Hebrew word for branch is netzer, and its consonants are the consonants of Nazareth. Of all the explanations of Matthew's missing prophecy, this is the one most readers have found most likely. The prophets did say he would be called the branch, and the evangelist heard the branch in the name of the village. Jesus the Nazarene is Jesus the shoot from Jesse's stump, the king who comes from a felled house.
The fellowship notes that the desert community loved this chapter of Isaiah too, and that its hymns speak of the community itself as a shoot that will grow into an eternal planting. A student who reads the article The Branch will find what one of the keepers has made of this.
The Keepers
The same Hebrew consonants make a verb, natsar, which means to keep, to guard, to watch over. In one of the psalms the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies, and the word for those who keep is formed from this root. In Jeremiah, the watchmen on the hills of Ephraim cry out, arise, and let us go up to Zion, and the word for watchmen is notzrim, the very word that later Hebrew used for Christians. A Nazarene, heard this way, is a keeper: of the covenant, of the commandments, of the watch.
The desert community called itself the keepers of the covenant, though the scrolls usually use a different verb for keeping. The baptizing people of the southern marshes call their priests Nasoraeans and explain the name as those who keep the secret knowledge. And the fellowship, which took its name from the Morning Watch before any of us had looked up the word for watchmen in Jeremiah, was glad to learn it afterward.
The Consecrated
A third candidate is the Nazirite, the man or woman of the old Law who took a vow of separation to God: no wine or strong drink, no razor on the head, no touching of the dead. Samson was a Nazirite from the womb, and in the Greek scriptures the angel's words to his mother are given in two forms, he shall be a Nazirite of God and he shall be holy to God. In the first chapter of Mark, a man with an unclean spirit cries out in the synagogue: what have you to do with us, Jesus the Nazarene? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. The two titles stand side by side as they stand in the Greek of Judges, and some readers have heard Samson's annunciation behind them.
The difficulty is that the Nazirite word is spelled with a different letter in Hebrew, and that Jesus drank wine and touched the dead. He was called a glutton and a drunkard by his critics, which no one would have said of a Nazirite. John who baptized, of whom the angel said that he would drink neither wine nor strong drink, fits the vow far better, and so does James, the brother of the Lord, as the James page describes. The fellowship thinks the Nazirite is an echo in the name rather than its root.
The Villager
And then there is the plainest explanation: that Jesus was called the Nazarene because he came from Nazareth, as Simon of Cyrene came from Cyrene and Mary of Magdala from Magdala. Every gospel connects him with the place, and two say plainly that he was brought up there. The village was real, as the Nazareth page sets out, and a man from an obscure place is often named by it when he goes somewhere else. Many scholars think this is the whole of it and that the other meanings are later decoration.
Other Echoes
Students will meet still other proposals. The Roman naturalist, in his survey of Syria, mentions a tetrarchy of the Nazerini near Apamea on the Orontes, and some have taken this as the earliest pagan notice of the Nazarenes. It is almost certainly not; his information on that region came from an imperial survey made a generation before Jesus was born, and the name probably belongs to a local people. Others have derived the name from the Hebrew word for a prince of the congregation, or from roots meaning to rise up or to forgive, or from a word for fish. Some of these are learned and some are wishful. The fellowship lists them so that a student who meets them elsewhere will know they have been weighed, and found lighter than the four above.
How the Fellowship Holds the Name
We think the name began with the village and did not end there. A man from Nazareth was called the Nazarene; his followers heard in it the branch of Isaiah and the keepers of the psalm and perhaps the holy one of Judges; the evangelist built a prophecy out of the chord. Hebrew is written without vowels, and a reader of the scriptures in that age heard every word as a cluster of possible words. The first believers would not have asked which meaning was right. They would have asked how many were true at once.
The fellowship has said of the word Essene that a name is a door, not a house. The same is true of this one, except that it has more doors than most. Go through any of them and you arrive in the same room: a man from a small place, of the royal stump, keeping the covenant, holy to God, whose followers were called by his village's name until the whole world called them by it.