Where were Jesus’s followers first called Christians?

What Acts says

After Stephen was stoned, Acts says, believers scattered from Jerusalem as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, at first speaking only to Jews. Then some men from Cyprus and Cyrene began telling Greeks too, and a mixed community grew (Acts 11:19–21). Jerusalem sent Barnabas to see what was happening. He went on to Tarsus to fetch Saul, the future Paul.

When he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they were gathered together with the assembly, and taught many people. The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.

The timing matters. Antioch was the first place where Jews and Gentiles met in one community in large numbers, and the city needed a word for people who did not fit its categories. From Antioch, too, the community fasted, prayed and sent Barnabas and Saul on their first journey (Acts 13:1–3).

What the word means

Christianos is a Greek word built the Latin way. The ending -ianus marked a man’s partisans: Romans spoke of Caesariani and Pompeiani, and Mark already knows the Herodians, Herod’s party (Mark 3:6). A Christianos was one of Christ’s party, and Christ is Greek for anointed, the Messiah; see What does “Christ” mean? Because it sounds like a label from officials or the street, most scholars think outsiders coined it. The believers themselves spoke of disciples, brothers, saints, or followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2).

A label that became a name

The New Testament uses the word only three times, each time where an outsider might say it. King Agrippa II, hearing Paul’s defense at Caesarea, asks, “With a little persuasion are you trying to make me a Christian?” (Acts 26:28). A letter to believers under pressure says:

But if one of you suffers for being a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God in this matter.

Roman writers used it the same way. Around AD 112 Pliny, governing Bithynia, asked the emperor Trajan whether the name alone was a crime (Letters 10.96), and Tacitus says the crowd in Rome called these people Christians (Annals 15.44). Around 110 Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, became the first writer known to use Christianismos, Christianity, in his letter to the Magnesians. Another name stuck elsewhere: a lawyer in Acts calls Paul a ringleader “of the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5), and Christians are still Notzrim in Hebrew and Nasara in Arabic.

Where Antioch is today

Antioch on the Orontes was founded around 300 BC by Seleucus I, one of Alexander’s generals, and named after an Antiochus of his family. Pompey made it Roman in 64 BC, and it became the capital of the province of Syria. Josephus ranks it the third city of the Roman world, after Rome and Alexandria (Jewish War 3.29), and it had a large Jewish community. Its ruins lie under modern Antakya, in Turkey’s Hatay province, near the Syrian border. A cave church on the hillside is traditionally linked with Peter, whom Paul says he opposed to his face in Antioch (Galatians 2:11). The region belonged to French-ruled Syria until 1939, when it passed to Turkey, which is why people still ask whether Antioch is in Turkey or Syria. On February 6, 2023, two great earthquakes left much of the city in ruins.

Don’t confuse it with Pisidian Antioch, in the highlands of central Turkey, where Paul preached on his first journey (Acts 13:14). The name Christian was born in the Syrian one.