Note 76 — Chapter IV · BIRTH AND EARLIEST EVENTS OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

The false interpretations of Old Testament passages in this chapter are crowned by the last verse, where it is said that by the settlement of the parents of Jesus at Nazareth was fulfilled the saying of the prophets: He shall be called a Nazarene. Now this passage is not to be found in the Old Testament, and unless expositors, losing courage, take refuge in darkness by supposing that it is extracted from a canonical76 or apocryphal77 book now lost, they must admit the conditional validity of one or other of the following charges against the evangelist. If, as it has been alleged, he intended to compress the Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah would be despised, into the oracular sentence, He shall be called a Nazarene, i.e. the citizen of a despised city,78 we must accuse him of the most arbitrary mode of expression; or, if he be supposed to give a modification of ‏נזיר‎ (nasir) we must tax him with the most violent transformation of the word and the grossest perversion of its meaning, for even if, contrary to the fact, this epithet were applied to the Messiah in the Old Testament, it could only mean either that he would be a Nazarite,79 which Jesus never was, or that he would be crowned,80 as Joseph, Gen. xlix. 26, in no case that he would be brought up in the petty town of Nazareth. The most probable interpretation of this passage, and that which has the sanction of the Jewish Christians questioned on the subject by Jerome, is, that the evangelist here alludes to Isa. xi. 1, where the Messiah is called ‏נֵעֶר יִשַׁי‎ (surculus Jesse) as elsewhere ‏צֶמַח‎.81 But in every case there is the same violence done to the word by attaching to a mere appellative of the Messiah, an entirely fictitious relation to the name of the city of Nazareth.