What Was Matthew Thinking?

Matthew 2:23 (NET) says, “He came to a town called Nazareth and lived there.  Then what had been spoken by the prophets was fulfilled, that Jesus would be called a Nazarene.” “Spoken by the prophets” can be interpreted two different ways.  It can either mean it was spoken by more than one prophet, or it can mean that the prophecy is recorded in a section of the Hebrew Bible known as “The Prophets.”  But the word Nazarene doesn’t appear in the Hebrew Bible.  So what prophecy was Matthew referring to? 

In the New Testament, Jesus’ contemporaries called Him a Nazarene. Calling Jesus a Nazarene didn’t just mean He lived in Nazareth. The residents of Nazareth were considered to be the lowest of the low.  “Philip found Nathanael and told him, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and the prophets also wrote about – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’” (John 1:45-46a NET). 

To the literate Jews of Matthew’s day, calling someone a Nazarene was synonymous with calling them trash or riffraff or the scum of the earth, or (another Jewish insult) an am ha’aretz--a member of the unlearned rural masses. And that’s why Matthew saw being called a Nazarene as a fulfillment of Isaiah 53:3--“He was despised and rejected by people. . . people hid their faces from him; he was despised, and we considered him insignificant.” (NET)  Little did they know that the Nazarene they despised would one day be acknowledged as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords!

Margot Armer