Notzrim (נוֹצְרִים) is the Hebrew name for the followers of Yeshua of Natzeret. The root family is נ-צ-ר, to guard, to keep, to watch, and its noun netzer, branch, is the very word Yeshayahu 11:1 uses for the shoot that rises from the roots of Yishai. Matthew 2:23 hangs the identification on that family: he shall be called a Natzri. Whether the name reached the community through the town or through the prophecy, the resonance was heard early, and it was not an insult to them: the people of the Branch, the keepers.

In the Brit Chadashah the name appears from the mouth of a prosecutor. Tertullus, arguing before Felix, calls Sha'ul a ringleader of the sect of the Natzrim, Acts 24:5. The community that name pointed at was Jewish through and through: Torah-keeping, Shabbat-keeping, feast-keeping, many thousands strong and all zealous for the Torah, Acts 21:20, confessing Yeshua as Messiah from inside Israel, not from outside it.

They did not disappear when the apostles died. Hadrian's decree of 135 CE expelled them from Jerusalem with all their people; the synagogue's benediction against the minim squeezed them from one side, and the gentile church's heresy catalogs anathematized them from the other. Epiphanius (Panarion 29) condemns them in the fourth century, and Jerome still knows their communities in the fifth, for the documented crime of practicing what Ya'akov and the elders of the Jerusalem assembly practiced. They were erased twice, by two institutions drawing borders, and the border-drawing is its own testimony to what they were: the seam where the two garments had been one.

Modern Hebrew calls all Christians Notzrim, which is a late irony, since the original Notzrim are precisely the believers the imperial church defined out of Christianity. But Revelation 12:17 describes a people who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Yeshua, clause for clause the Notzrim profile, and calls them the rest of the woman's offspring, the ones the dragon wars against. The name never stopped fitting somebody. There are Notzrim today.