A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

There was Alexandria, capital of Egypt, home to the largest single Jewish community beyond Palestine itself, and there was also Antioch of Syria, the old Seleucid capital, still then the chief city in Rome’s eastern imperial provinces. It was in fact in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that colonial Latin-speakers coined a word for Christ-followers (in no friendly spirit) – Christiani.90 This name ‘Christian’ has a double remoteness from its Jewish roots. Surprisingly in view of its origin in the Greek eastern Mediterranean and amid the Semitic culture of Syria, the word has a distinctively Latin rather than Greek form, and yet it also points to the Jewish founder not by his name, Joshua, but by that Greek translation of Messiah, Christos.