A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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. With its Latin development of a Greek word summing up a Jewish life-story, this very name ‘Christian’ embodies a violent century which had set Rome against Jerusalem, and the word has resonated down nearly two thousand years, during which Christianity in turn has set itself against its surviving parent, Judaism. ‘Christian’ embodies the two languages which became the vehicle for talking about Christianity within the Roman Empire: Latin and Greek, the respective languages of Western Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy.