Acts 11:19

4. The New Gentile Christian Centre formed Antioch, Acts 11:19-26 .

19. Now Luke now resumes the previous thread of his narrative, a thread which, beginning from the scattering of the Church by Saul’s persecution, (viii, 4,) more than three years before, stretches through the conversion of Saul, his return to Jerusalem and Tarsus, and through the admission of uncircumcised Gentiles by Peter, to the establishment of a new Gentile metropolis of Christianity coequal with Jerusalem, namely, at ANTIOCH. The holy and zealous refugees from the Sauline persecution are here said to have scattered the Gospel in Phenice, (Phenicia,) Cyprus, and Antioch a province, an island, and a city.

For Phenicia, see our note on Acts 8:40.

CYPRUS is an island near the northeast angle of the Mediterranean Sea, next to Sicily in size, remarkable for its richness of soil and the dissoluteness of its inhabitants. In Christian history it is celebrated as the birthplace of Barnabas, and as one of the fields of Paul’s memorable labours.

ANTIOCH was the great capital of the East, ranking third after Rome and Alexandria among the great cities of the world. It was about three hundred miles north of Jerusalem, and thirty miles from its own seaport, Seleucia. It was a centre of trade with Europe by the Mediterranean on the west, and by caravans with the regions of the Tigris and the Euphrates on the east.

Antioch was built by Seleucus, surnamed the Conqueror, who upon the death of Alexander the Great took by inheritance or conquest the Asiatic share of his great territories, and founded the empire of Syria, which lasted for more than two centuries and a half, nearly filling the interval of time between Alexander and Christ.

Antioch, strange to say, in consequence of the visit and labours of these refugees from the Sauline persecution and their successors, became first a centre and rallying point of Christianity, then one of the three great Christian metropolises of Christian history, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome The first represents the Syrian Church; the second the Greek; the third the Latin Church. And here be it noted, that when the Church of Rome claims to be the most ancient, the most original Church she bears false witness for herself. She is younger than the Churches of Syria or Greece.

ANTAKIA, (ANTIOCH IN SYRIA.)

In thirty years from this time Jerusalem was leveled to the earth. What became of the mother Church, the unequal successor of the dispersed Church of the Pentecost? Eusebius reckons from and including St. James, fifteen bishops before the city’s destruction. They seem never to have accepted the Gentile title, invented at Antioch, of Christians, but were always Nazarenes, and they probably observed the temple service as long as the temple stood. When the destruction of the city approached, warned by the predictions of Christ, a large number of them fled to Pella and the Jordanic regions. When Peter and the other apostles left Jerusalem the Church felt the pressure of the hierarchy, and were kept under its weight.

The Jerusalem city pride and patriotism were heavy upon them. Their attachment to the ritual narrowed their piety. To them, and Jews like them, the Book of Hebrews addressed its warning against apostasy. A section of them, descended, perhaps, from these opponents of Peter, declined so far as to deny the miraculous birth and divinity of Christ, maintained the merit of voluntary poverty, and were called by the name of EBIONITES or paupers. Upon them the generosities of the Gentile Christians had no effect to liberalize and bring them into sympathy with the Catholic Church. The persevering section of the Nazarenes, though narrow, were admitted by the Church to be orthodox. The destruction of Jerusalem was necessary in order to emancipate the Church in the full liberty of Christ.

In contrast with this ultra Judaism of the Ebionites there was an ultra Gentilism introduced into the Church (which acquired the name of Gnosticism) by the converts from paganism. Though existing at the beginning, as we have noted in our comment on Simon Magus, it did not attain its perfect organic form, at least its most accomplished leaders, until near the close of the first century. These heretics took the proud name of Gnostics, (derived from Γνοω , Gnoo, the Greek form of the verb to know,) signifying knowers, intellectualists, rationalists, and from the height of their lofty speculations looked with contempt at the believers in a simpler Christianity. Gnosticism culminated in the most brilliant of ancient heretics, Marcion. He was son of the Bishop of Sinope, on the Euxine Sea, and, coming to Rome in the second century, became a great leader. Adopting the fundamental oriental maxim of the innate evil of matter, (see note on Acts 8:9,) he not only with Paul rejected circumcision, but he severed the whole Old Testament from the New, condemning even the Jehovah of the old dispensation as an inferior and malignant former of and dealer with matter; and he maintained the true God to be the absolutely pure, unutterable, inconceivable, spiritual Essence. Christ he held to have been bodily only in appearance. Marcion not only rejected the Old Testament, but mutilated the New, accepting only Luke’s Gospel in a modified form and some of Paul’s Epistles. Against him Tertullian exerted his great eloquence, exposing his forgeries and heresies by appealing to the authentic copies of the New Testament books then in possession of all the great Churches, (see our Introduction, p. 6,) and to the uniform faith of the true Catholic Church, historically demonstrable to be derived from the teaching of Christ’s apostles. (See note on Acts 15:6.)