A Nazarite or Nazirite, Nazir in Hebrew, was a Jew who took an ascetic vow described in the Book of Numbers at 6:1-21. The term Nazarite comes from the Hebrew word nazir meaning "consecrated" or "separated". The Nazarite is "holy unto the Lord" (Numbers 6:8) and must keep himself from becoming ritually unclean. The regulations which apply to him actually agree with those for the High Priest and for the priests during worship, as described in Leviticus and in Ezekiel. This vow required the man (and in the Hellenistic period the woman too) to observe the following:
* Abstain from wine, vinegar (which was made from wine), grapes, raisins, and all intoxicants;
* Refrain from cutting one's hair and beard;
* To avoid corpses and graves, even those of a family member.
The vow was usually for a fixed period of time — 30, 90 or even 100 days. At the end of that time, the man would immerse in water and make an offering that included a lamb, an ewe, a ram, and a basket of bread and cakes. There are cases where a parent would make this vow for her or his child, which the child would observe for his entire life.
There is scriptural evidence that the word "Nazarene" was applied to the early followers of Jesus. In the New Testament book of Acts Paul is tried in Caesarea, and Tertullus is reported as saying:
"We have, in fact, found this man a pestilent fellow, an agitator among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes" (Acts 24:5, New Revised Standard Version).
According to the New Testament, "Christian" was not the earliest term for the followers of Jesus, since Acts 11:26 reports its first use, in Antioch - at a time and in a place at least 10 and possibly 20 or more years after the death of Jesus. Many authors have argued that "Nazarene" was not just one term that was used before "Christian" came into use, but the dominant term, and that it was also used to describe Jesus himself.
The chief argument for this claim rests on an interpretation of the way Jesus is referred to by the writers of the gospels. The original Greek forms of all four gospels call him, in places, "Iesou Nazarene" (e.g. Matthew 26:71; Mark 1:24, 10:47, 14:67; Luke 4:34; John 17:5; Acts 2:22). Translations of the Bible, from the fifth century Vulgate on, have generally rendered this into a form equivalent to "Jesus of Nazareth". This is a reasonable translation given that it is clear that all four evangelists did believe that Jesus came from Nazareth. However, it is not the only possible translation. Linguistically, "Jesus the Nazarene" would be at least as correct, and some critics have argued that it is more plausible, given that Nazareth seems to have been a place of no significance at the time; it is unmentioned in contemporary history, and there is no evidence outside the gospels that it even existed in Jesus' time. The Vulgate does use a form equivalent to "Nazarene" in one verse (Matthew 2:23), where its reading is Nazaroeus (Nazoraios), but here the original Greek has the word Nazarene on its own, without Iesou.
It is noteworthy that the name "Iesou Nazarene" is applied to Jesus in the Gospels only by those who are outside the circle of his intimate friends. In Acts, however, it is employed by Peter and Paul— and even attributed to the risen Christ himself, in Paul's account of his conversion that he gave to the multitude of angry Jews who had attacked him in the Temple (Acts 22:8).
However we translate these verses from the gospels, the evidence from Acts 24 does support the claim that "Nazarene" was an early outsiders' term for the followers of Jesus. But it does not appear to have been the term most used by those followers: the earliest Christian writings we have, the letters of Paul (which predate the gospels by ten to forty years), use the phrase "followers of the way" or, by far the most common, "the church" from the Greek ecclesia or assembly.
So there's that.
