Paul, the greatest theoretician of the new movement, was never merely a theoretician. Pretty much every idea he later articulated had been road-tested in the narrow, crowded streets of Antioch. Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”2 That claim has been challenged by those who rightly point out that our word “Christian” implies an organized movement separate from the Jewish world and that there is no evidence of such a thing for at least a generation or
