The city where the disciples were first called Christians
Antioch on the Orontes was the third city of the Roman Empire — behind only Rome and Alexandria — and the most consequential city in the early church that wasn't Jerusalem. Founded by Seleucus I in 300 BC and named for his father Antiochus, it sat at the meeting point of the Mediterranean and the inland trade routes east. Half a million people lived there in the first century. It had Greek philosophers, Persian merchants, a famous Jewish quarter, a colonnaded main street more than two miles long, and the kind of cosmopolitan churn that made it a natural staging ground for a faith built on "Go into all the world."
The gospel reached Antioch by accident, in the best sense. Acts 11 records that believers scattered by the persecution after Stephen's martyrdom traveled north and began preaching to Gentiles in Antioch — not because they had been sent, but because they were already there. A great number believed. The Jerusalem church, hearing the news, sent Barnabas to investigate. He saw the grace of God and was glad; he went to Tarsus to find Saul and brought him back; the two of them taught in Antioch for a year. "In Antioch the disciples were first called Christians" (Acts 11:26) — likely a Gentile nickname, possibly mocking, but the church took it and kept it.
Why Antioch matters more than people realize
Antioch is the first city where the faith stopped being a Jewish renewal movement and started being something the empire couldn't categorize. The Antioch church was multi-ethnic from day one — Jewish believers, Gentile God-fearers, freed slaves, North Africans, citizens of three continents — and it produced the church's first sustained missionary push. Paul's three missionary journeys all start and return to Antioch. The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) was convened to settle a dispute that started in Antioch over whether Gentile converts had to keep the Mosaic law.
Antioch was also the first church to take material responsibility for another church. When the prophet Agabus predicted a famine, the Antioch believers — Gentiles, mostly — sent relief to the Jewish believers in Judea (Acts 11:27-30). It is one of the quietest, most radical moments in the New Testament: a young Gentile church carrying its mother church through a crisis.
The bishop who walked from Antioch to martyrdom
A generation after the apostles, the Antioch church produced Ignatius of Antioch (died ca. AD 110), traditionally the third bishop after Peter and Evodius. Arrested under Trajan and marched overland to Rome to be thrown to the beasts, Ignatius wrote seven letters along the way that survive — the earliest extended snapshot of post-apostolic Christianity. He used the word *catholic* of the church for the first time on record, wrote against early forms of docetism, and described his coming death as "becoming the wheat of God, ground by the teeth of the beasts."
Antioch's later history is harder. Earthquakes leveled it more than once; Persian, Arab, and Crusader armies took and re-took it; the patriarchate fragmented into multiple branches that still exist today. The modern city of Antakya in southern Turkey sits on the same ground. But for one stretch of decades in the first century, this was the second capital of the Christian movement — and the place where the church first learned it was big enough to need a name.
*Related entries: Jerusalem, Paul, Barnabas, Peter, The Council of Jerusalem, Stephen, Damascus Road, Pentecost.*