a member of a group of Jews who (during the early history of the Christian Church) accepted Jesus as the Messiah; they accepted the Gospel According to Matthew but rejected the Epistles of St. Paul and continued to follow Jewish law and celebrate Jewish holidays; they were later declared heretic by the Church of Rome
Inspired by the religious sobriety of the early-19th-century German painters who called themselves "Nazarenes, " by England's Gothic-revival movement and by the straightforward imagery of early-Renaissance painters like Giotto, they looked to the Bible, to the poetry of Keats and Tennyson and to Shakespeare for subject matter, proclaiming their intention to shun vulgar or sentimental subjects and to paint directly from nature.