Nathanael said to him, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see."
It was true, of course, that prophecy had named Bethlehem as the place where the Messiah would be born, but nothing was said about his continued residence there.  Perhaps the obscurity and insignificance of Nazareth, more than other things, accounted for Nathaniel's incredulity that so ordinary a village should be the home of the Messiah.  If that is not the explanation of Nathaniel's remark, then, as Adam Clarke suggested: