Acts 11:26

26. Whole year… assembled… much people For one year these two apostolic men perform heroic work in this great metropolis with a success that tells upon its future history. We doubt not they assembled weekly, upon the Lord’s day; for the earliest ecclesiastical history finds Sunday the sacred day at Antioch, and it is utterly improbable that any alteration took place of the day then first by the apostles established.

John Malela, an historian of Antioch, (says Mr. Lewin,) in the sixth century, tells, on the authority of Domninus, an antiquary of a much earlier age, the spot where Paul and Barnabas hold their public meetings. It was in Singon Street, near the Pantheon. So public a matter may perhaps have been transmitted by the Christian Church.

Christians first in Antioch Antioch was celebrated for its Greek wit and levity, and these it often displayed in inventing nicknames. The term Christ is not a name, but a title, the Christ; that is, the Anointed or Messiah. But a Greek, like an English speaker, naturally taking it for a proper name, and hearing that this sect styled themselves followers of Christ, would very easily add the usual adjective termination, and call them Christians. On the other hand, a hostile Jew would feel that to call them after the glorious name of their nationally expected Messiah would be a blasphemy. He would prefer to call them Galileans, Nazarenes, or perhaps Ebionites, paupers. For themselves the Christians had preferred the title brethren, believers, disciples, saints, etc. The word Christian is but twice found elsewhere in the New Testament, and in neither is it uttered as an accepted name. The termination in ian belongs, indeed, rather to the Latin than to the Greek language; but it had at this time become naturalized to the Greek, and it is little likely that the grave Romans, who were comparatively few, and connected generally with the government, would have invented this epithet. For this Greek appellation, which is now naturalized in all civilized languages, we must doubtless thank the genius of the lively Greek pagans of Antioch. Yet Luke, though he never uses the epithet himself, evidently recognises that the name has now acquired a prevalent currency, so that its first invention is a fact worth mentioning. Chrysostom, when preacher at Antioch, with a stroke of Greek wit, once told the Antiochians that, though they had invented the Christian name, they left to others the practice of the Christian virtues.