The Year at Antioch

Between the resurrection and the first line Paul ever wrote there are about fifteen years, and it is easy to assume they are simply lost. They are not. Four windows survive onto the church that grew in Antioch in that gap, and one of them is a text Paul himself says he did not compose. What follows is what can actually be known, what cannot, and why the church there ended up with a name nobody inside it had chosen.

1. A creed older than any letter

The oldest Christian statement we possess is not in a Gospel. It is quoted inside a letter, and the man quoting it says plainly that he is passing on something he was handed:

1 Corinthians 15:3-5

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:

Delivered and received are the ordinary words for handing on a fixed tradition, the way a rabbi hands on what he was taught. Paul is not writing there. He is reciting. Which means these four lines were already formed and already being repeated before he wrote them down, in the years he spent in Damascus, in Arabia, in Jerusalem and in Antioch.

So the question “what were they taught before the letters?” has at least this much of an answer, and it is short. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was buried. He rose the third day according to the Scriptures. He was seen, and here are the names.

Notice what is not in it. No theory of how the cross works. No church order. No eschatological timetable. It is a report with a witness list attached, and most of that list was still alive and could be asked. Maclaren, on the Corinthian passage, makes the same observation about how early it is: the account “dates long before any of the Gospels, and goes up, probably, to somewhere about five and twenty years after the Crucifixion.”

2. Who was actually in the room

Luke names the teaching staff, and the roster is the most surprising sentence in the chapter:

Acts 13:1

Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.

Read it slowly. Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus. Simeon called Niger, that is, the Black. Lucius of Cyrene, North African. Manaen, raised in the household of Herod Antipas, which means he grew up alongside the man who beheaded John the Baptist and mocked Christ before Pilate. And Saul, the former persecutor, listed last.

Nobody inventing a founding legend produces that list. It tells you the character of the place before it tells you a word of its content: a congregation with no single centre of gravity, in the third city of the empire, where nobody could be the default.

3. What was preached, and who started it

The breakthrough was not made by an apostle. It was made by refugees, and Luke does not know their names:

Acts 11:19-21

Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phenice, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only. And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the LORD Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord.

The whole message is compressed into three words: preaching the Lord Jesus. Not preaching about Him. And the men who first crossed the line to the Greeks are anonymous, which is worth sitting with on a site that spends a good deal of time on famous names.

Jerusalem hears and sends Barnabas to look. What he does when he arrives is the second thing worth noticing:

Acts 11:23-24

Who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad, and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord. For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith: and much people was added unto the Lord.

He inspects and finds grace, and his entire recorded instruction to a church full of new Gentile believers is cleave unto the Lord. That is abiding, taught in Antioch before John wrote it down, and it is the whole of what Barnabas thought they needed.

4. The year itself

Acts 11:25-26

Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus, for to seek Saul: And when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.

A whole year of teaching, and not one sentence of it survives. That is the gap this page cannot fill and will not pretend to.

What can be said is why Saul was there at all, and Calvin says it better than a summary would:

Barnabas’ simplicity is commended to us now the second time, that whereas he might have borne the chiefest swing at Antioch, yet went he into Cilicia that he might fetch Paul thence, who he knew should be preferred before him. Therefore we see how, forgetting himself, he respecteth nothing but that Christ may be chief.

John Calvin, on Acts 11:25

The man in charge went and got the man who would eclipse him. Whatever was taught that year, that is what the teaching looked like from the outside.

And the year had a shape. Prophets came down from Jerusalem, and Agabus foretold a famine, and the church’s first corporate act as a congregation is recorded in the next breath: “every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea” (Acts 11:29). The Gentile church’s first recorded decision is to send money to the Jewish one that had been suspicious of it.

5. What Antioch cost, and what it settled

The church there is also where the hardest question of the first century was forced, and it was forced from outside:

Acts 15:1-2

And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved. When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question.

The Jerusalem council happens because Antioch would not let the question lie. And Antioch is also where Paul faced down Peter: “I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed… why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (Galatians 2:11-14). Both of the New Testament’s great public arguments about who belongs happen in this one city, and both are settled in favour of the outsiders.

6. And then Ignatius

The line does not stop when Acts does. Gill preserves the succession, and cites a letter attributed to Ignatius for the first name in it:

the first bishop, or pastor of this church, was Evodius, as Ignatius observes unto them; Remember Evodius, your worthy and blessed pastor, who was first ordained over you by the apostles; and Ignatius himself was the next, of whom Origen speaking, says, that he was the second bishop of Antioch after Peter, who in persecution fought with beasts at Rome.

John Gill, on Acts 11:26

Two cautions belong on that, and the second one matters. The Epistle to the Antiochians Gill is quoting is among the Ignatian letters generally judged spurious, later than Ignatius and written in his name, and the line about Evodius does not appear in the text of it we hold. So Evodius as first bishop is a tradition Gill passes on, not something this page can verify. Origen’s statement that Ignatius was second bishop of Antioch after Peter is the sturdier half of it, and it is the half that matters here.

Ignatius himself wrote around AD 107, on his way to be killed in Rome. He is not a witness to the year Barnabas and Saul taught, and this page will not pretend he is. But he is the same church two generations on, and what he is most urgent about is worth setting beside what began there.

He is urgent about the Table being real:

They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.

Ignatius of Antioch, to the Smyrnaeans · c. AD 107

And urgent about the church being one:

I exhort you to have but one faith, and one kind of preaching, and one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ; and His blood which was shed for us is one; one loaf also is broken to all, and one cup is distributed among them all… and one Church which the holy apostles established from one end of the earth to the other.

Ignatius of Antioch, to the Philadelphians · c. AD 107

The city where Jew and Greek first sat down together is the city that produces, sixty years later, a bishop whose one theme is that there is only one of everything. That is not a coincidence anyone can prove, and it is hard to read as unconnected.

The Didache belongs here too, with a caution. The earliest church manual we have is often placed in Syria, which would make it a picture of roughly this world: baptism, fasting, the Eucharist prayers, the Two Ways. But that placement is an inference, not a fact, and this page will not build on it. It is set out at The Witnesses.

7. The name they did not choose

Which leaves the sentence everyone remembers, and almost nobody reads closely:

Acts 11:26

And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.

The verb is strange. “Were called” is chrēmatisai, and everywhere else in the New Testament it is nearly always God speaking: the wise men warned of God in a dream (Matthew 2:12), Joseph warned of God (2:22), Simeon to whom it was revealed by the Holy Ghost (Luke 2:26), Cornelius warned from God by an holy angel (Acts 10:22), Moses admonished of God (Hebrews 8:5), Noah warned of God (Hebrews 11:7). Only one other place in the New Testament uses it flatly, of bearing a name: a woman “shall be called an adulteress” (Romans 7:3).

The Pulpit Commentary states the grammar exactly, and does not overreach:

Were called; χρηματισαι, bore the name. It is a peculiar use of the word occurring in the New Testament only in Romans 7:3 besides, but found also in Polybius, Strabo, Josephus, and some other writers. Its common meaning is, in the passive voice, “to be warned of God.”

The Pulpit Commentary, on Acts 11:26

So the commentators divide, and they divide three ways.

A nickname from outside. The ending is Latin, not Greek, the form used for a partisan or a household: Herodians, Marians, Pompeians, Caesariani. The Pulpit Commentary concludes the word “must have been invented by the Gentiles,” and Maclaren gave a whole sermon the title A Nickname Accepted:

It was given at the first by the inhabitants of the Syrian city of Antioch, to a new sort of people that had sprung up amongst them, and whom they could not quite make out. They would not fit into any of their categories, and so they had to invent a new name for them… It is never used in the New Testament by Christians about themselves.

Alexander Maclaren, on Acts 11:26

Or a name given from heaven. Calvin, of all people, takes the other sense of the verb, and notices something Maclaren does not:

such a holy concord was blessed from heaven; for this was no small honor that the holy name of Christians began there for all the whole world. Though the apostles had been long time at Jerusalem, yet God had not vouchsafed to bestow upon his Church, which was there, this excellent title of his Son.

John Calvin, on Acts 11:26

Or we do not know. Barnes lays out all three possibilities and declines to settle it: whether it was given by enemies in derision, “as the names Puritan, Quaker, Methodist, etc., have been,” or assumed by the disciples themselves, “or whether it was given by divine intimation, has been a matter of debate.”

This page holds it open. Romans 7:3 proves the plain sense of the word exists, so the case cannot be closed from the grammar. But seven of the nine uses are God speaking, and Luke had an ordinary word available and did not use it. Both readings are honest, and a reader is better served knowing the question is there than being handed a verdict.

8. What they called themselves instead

Whoever coined it, no Christian in the New Testament ever uses it of himself. They are disciples, brethren, saints, believers, and above all the Way: “if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women” (Acts 9:2). Paul owns that name in court and refuses the other one his accusers use: “after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers” (Acts 24:14), the accusers having just called him “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” (24:5). Wesley notes it in a line: before Antioch “they were termed Nazarenes and Galileans.”

The word appears three times in the whole New Testament, and a Christian never says it about himself in any of them. Luke reports it here. A king says it half-mocking: “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian” (Acts 26:28). And Peter uses it once, in the one context that explains everything:

1 Peter 4:16

Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.

You do not tell people not to be ashamed of a name unless the name is being used against them. It began as what the neighbours called you, and Peter tells them to wear it.

Where this lands

The year itself is gone. No sermon from Antioch survives, and this page has not invented one. What survives is a creed Paul says he received, a roster of teachers no one would have made up, a one-line summary of the preaching, a first corporate act that was a collection for people who had been suspicious of them, two arguments about who belongs that were both settled in favour of the outsiders, and a bishop sixty years later who could not stop saying one.

And a name. They were not called Christians in Jerusalem, where every believer was a Jew who had come to believe and the old categories still worked. They were called it in Antioch, where a Cypriot, an African, a black man, a courtier raised in Herod’s house and a former persecutor taught Jews and Greeks together, and the neighbours ran out of words.

Which is why, when someone asks what denomination this site belongs to, the honest answer is the oldest one, and it is still not a claim anybody here invented: Christian. A name given from the outside, to a church that could not be described any other way.

The creed Paul says he received is taken up on its own in What They Preached, and What They Taught Next. Related: The Church, One Story, The Witnesses, Every Line Drawn Is Another Division, The Canon, The Lord's Table. Calvin, Gill, Barnes, Maclaren, Wesley and the Pulpit Commentary quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library; Ignatius from the Ante-Nicene Fathers, likewise public domain. Scripture from the King James Version. The Syrian placement of the Didache is an inference and is named as one; no sermon from the year at Antioch survives, and none is reconstructed here.