Matthew 2:23 says Jesus settled in Nazareth 'so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He will be called a Nazarene."' No such statement exists anywhere in the OT. The objection ties this to Isaiah 11:1's netzer ('branch/shoot'), calling Matthew's move an equivocation — conflating the Hebrew word netzer with the place-name Nazareth to manufacture a fulfilled prophecy that isn't there.

This is a genuine, honestly-debated exegetical crux, and it should be conceded up front that there is no single OT verse this quotes. Notably, Matthew himself signals this: unlike his other formula quotations, which name a specific prophet ('through the prophet Isaiah,' 'through the prophet Jeremiah'), here he writes 'through the prophets' (plural, unattributed) — a formula found nowhere else in his Gospel, which most commentators read as Matthew flagging that he is summarizing a theme distilled from multiple prophetic texts rather than citing one verbatim. The leading scholarly explanations, none claiming certainty, are: (1) the netzer wordplay — Isa 11:1 ('a shoot [netzer] shall come out from the stump of Jesse') is a recognized messianic Davidic-Branch text, and Nazareth's Hebrew/Aramaic name (Natzrat) shares the same n-ts-r consonantal root, so 'Nazarene' evokes 'Branch-man' to an ear attuned to Hebrew; (2) a despised/lowly-status theme — Nazareth was an obscure, looked-down-upon Galilean village (cf. John 1:46, 'can anything good come out of Nazareth?'), so 'he shall be called a Nazarene' evokes the composite prophetic theme of a Messiah who is despised and lowly (Isa 53:3 'despised and rejected'; Ps 22:6 'a worm, and no man; scorned by others, and despised by the people'), possibly combined with Nazirite-adjacent associations; (3) a general pun on the wider cluster of Davidic 'Branch' texts (Isa 4:2, Jer 23:5, 33:15, Zech 3:8, 6:12), of which netzer is one term among several (tsemach being the more common). R.T. France (Matthew, NICNT) and Craig Blomberg (Matthew, NAC) both treat this verse as a genuine crux in their commentaries and decline to claim certainty, generally favoring some combination of the netzer wordplay and the despised-town/despised-Messiah theme, while explicitly noting the difficulty. The honest scholarly posture is exactly theirs: present the live options, concede no single verse is being quoted, and do not overclaim.

Matthew's citation practice across chapters 1-2 is demonstrably not naive proof-texting; it ranges from direct verbal quotation (Isa 7:14; Mic 5:2) to thematic/typological summary (as here, and as in the Hosea 11:1 and Jeremiah 31:15 citations discussed elsewhere in this sheet). The plural 'prophets' is itself evidence of a deliberate, self-aware literary technique — Matthew is weaving together a recognized biblical theme (the despised Davidic Branch) rather than inventing a citation, which is precisely why he does not claim to quote a single text verbatim here as he does elsewhere.