If you only need to search in the first 100 primes or so, just create a sorted table of those primes, and do a binary search. This will either get you to one prime number, or a spot between two, and you check which of those is closer.
Edit: Given the distribution of primes in that range, you could probably speed things up (a tiny bit) by using an interpolation search -- instead of always starting at the middle of the table, use linear interpolation to guess at a more accurate starting point. The 100th prime number should be somewhere around 250 or so (at a guess -- I haven't checked), so if (for example) you wanted the one closest to 50, you'd start about 1/5th of the way into the array instead of halfway. You can pretty much treat the primes as starting at 1, so just divide the number you want by the largest in your range to get a guess at the starting point.