And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.—Matthew 2:23
On face value it seems like a plausible statement from the Gospel according to Matthew. Yet, religious scholars have searched the Old Testament with a fine tooth comb and have never unearthed such a prophesy. Well, at least we know that he was called a Nazarene because he must have lived in a city called Nazareth. Let us see what Christian scholars have to say about that. "If our reasoning is correct, they [the Essenes] were not left out [of the Gospels], but appeared under the name nazoraioi, a word which has been mistakenly assumed to refer to the little town of Nazareth in Galilee (and never mentioned in the Old Testament)...Accordingly, Jesus of Nazareth' would be a mistranslation of 'Jesus the Nazorean' or grecicised, Jesus the Essene."—(Ellegard, 1999, p. 241) "There is no such place as Nazareth in the Old Testament or in Josephus' works, or on early maps of the Holy Land."—(Holley, 1994, p. 190)	Buy at AllPosters.com
"...[people in Nazareth were] living in wretched caves...from about 900 BC to about 600 AD."—(Keller, 1980, p. 337) "The prophecy [that Jesus is a Nazarene from Nazareth] is based on Matthew's total misunderstanding of a passage from Isaiah (11:1), where the Messiah is called a nezer (branch); in other words, a branch from Jesse's (father of David) "stump". Matthew reads into "nezer" the city of Nazareth..."—(Uta Ranke-Heinemann , 1994, p. 22) Continued / Contents / Forum / Summation / Timeline / Roman Origins