John 1:46

Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?— Philip, not knowing that Jesus was born at Bethlehem, calls him Jesus of Nazareth: upon which occasion Nathanael applies a proverb, by which the rest of the Israelites ridiculed the Nazarenes; and he applied it the rather, as the Messiah's nativity had been determined by the prophet Micah to be at Bethlehem. Nazareth was a mean town, inhabited by fishermen and mechanics of the lowest degree, made up of ignorant Jews, and a mixture of Gentiles: as Nathanael was a native of Galilee, it appears that the Galileans themselves had but an ill opinion of Nazareth, as worse than the rest of that country; and, indeed, by the figure its inhabitants make in the evangelists, they seem to have deserved it. See Matthew 13:54; Matthew 13:58 and Luke 4:16; Luke 4:28. In this place Jesus spent a great part of his life, and in that respect might fairly be called a Nazarene. But the Jews, in calling him Jesus of Nazareth,—the prophet of Nazareth, &c. added, to that of his country, the idea of scorn and contempt: "What! that poor despicable fellow, that mean mortal,—he our Messiah! Can any good, any great and enterprizing person, any thing suitable to the character of Christ, come out of Nazareth?" Pilate wrote his inscription, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, with design probably to have it read in this light. He joins together two contradictory titles, in his opinion, that of Nazareth, and that of a king, in order to expose the Jewish hope, and the Christian belief: but the evangelist prepares his reader against prejudices from this appellation. Though the Jews call him a Nazarene in derision, we are not ashamed of that name. What do they mean by it, but a despised, afflicted, suffering man?—And so the Messiah is foretold to be, not in one, but in all the prophets. While therefore theyreproach Jesus as a Nazarene, they actually fulfil the prophesies which describe him as such, and prove Jesus to be the Messiah. See the note on Matthew 2:23. To obviate Nathanael's objection, Philip replies to him, "Do not suffer yourself to be borne away by a vain popular prejudice; but come and see; converse with him yourself, and you will soon be satisfied." The same answer had been received from our Lord the day before. By the way, we may hence learn how cautiously we should guard against popular prejudices, which possessed so honest a heart as that of Nathanael, and led him to suspect that the blessed Jesus himselfwas an impostor, and that no good could be expected from him, because he had been brought up at Nazareth. But his integrity prevailed over that foolish bias, and laid him open to the conviction of evidence, which a candid inquirer will always be glad to admit, even when it brings the most unexpected discovery.