Matthew quotes a prophecy that Jesus would be called a Nazarene (2:23), but no such prophecy exists in the Old Testament.

You are right about the surface fact, and any answer has to begin there: there is no verse anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures that reads "he shall be called a Nazarene." What Matthew is doing is more interesting than a misquotation.

1. Matthew says "the prophets," not one prophet. Everywhere else in the infancy narrative he names his source: "spoken by the prophet Isaiah," "spoken by the prophet Jeremiah." Here he generalizes to "the prophets," which suggests a summary of a prophetic theme rather than a citation of a line. That is a deliberate signal, not a slip.

2. The Hebrew word for branch sounds like Nazareth. Nazareth appears to derive from netzer, meaning branch or shoot. Isaiah 11:1 promises, "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit." If the pun is intended, Matthew is saying the town's name itself encodes the messianic title.

3. The branch theme runs through the prophets. Jeremiah 23:5 speaks of a righteous Branch raised for David, and Zechariah 6:12 names the coming king "the Branch." A reader soaked in the prophets would hear the cluster, not a single verse. Matthew writes for exactly that kind of reader.

4. The lowliness theme is the other strong reading. Nazareth was a backwater, and Nathanael's response is the giveaway: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46). The prophets did foretell a Messiah "despised and rejected by men" (Isaiah 53:3), and being called a Nazarene was a term of contempt. On this reading, the fulfillment is in the contempt, not the consonants.

5. The Nazirite suggestion should be handled honestly. Some have connected Nazareth to the Nazirite vow of Samson in Judges 13:5. The words are similar in English and different in Hebrew, and most scholars today do not accept the link. It is worth mentioning only to set aside.

6. Matthew does this elsewhere, openly. In Matthew 2:15 he quotes "Out of Egypt I called my son," which in Hosea 11:1 refers to Israel, not to a prophecy about a future individual. Matthew reads Israel's story as a pattern that Jesus recapitulates. Once you see that method, verse 23 stops looking like an anomaly.

7. Turn it around: prophecy is not only prediction. The objection assumes fulfillment must be a verbatim prediction matched to an event, which is a modern idea imposed on ancient texts. The prophets themselves worked by type, pattern, and motif, and the New Testament reads them that way consistently. Judged by the method the objection demands, most of the Old Testament's messianic reading collapses, including readings the critic is not objecting to.

8. The identification is not arbitrary. Matthew is not inventing a connection from nothing; he is linking Jesus to a recognized messianic title and to a recognized social stigma. Both are checkable claims about the Hebrew Bible and about first-century Galilee. That is a very different thing from fabricating a citation.

9. Scholars genuinely disagree about which he meant. R.T. France stresses the plural as a signal of summary; D.A. Carson and Craig Keener weigh the branch and lowliness readings and consider both defensible. Nobody in the field thinks Matthew accidentally quoted a verse that does not exist, because the plural shows he knew he was summarizing.

The critic is correct that no verse says this in those words, and the Christian is correct that the prophets described a lowly Davidic deliverer. Matthew is arguing by pattern and by name, which was a recognized way to make the point, and the reader can check both halves of the claim.

Sources: R.T. France; D.A. Carson; Craig Keener.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!