“Quos, per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat.” TAC. Ann.xv. 44.
Χριστιανός εἰμί.—Mart.Polyc. iii.
Εὐχαριστοῦμεν σοὶ ὅτι τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου ἐπικέκληται ἐφ ἡμᾶς, καὶ σοὶ προσῳκειῴμεθα.—CLEM. ROM.
Οὐκ αὐτὸι βλασφημοῦσι τὸ καλὸν ὄνομα τὸ ἐπικληθέν ἐφʼ ὑμᾶς;—JAS. 2:7.
Εἰ ὀνειδίζεσθε ἐν ὀνόματι Χριστοῦ, μακάριοι.—1 PET. 4:14.
“Nomen … quod sicut unguentum diffusum longe lateque redolet.”—GAL. Tyr. iv. 9.
“Oditur ergo in hominibus innocuis etiam nomen innocuum.”—TERT. Apol. 3.
THE overruling Providence of God is so clearly marked in the progress of human events that the Christian hardly needs any further proof that “there is a hand that guides.” In the events of his own little life the perspective of God’s dealings is often hidden from him, but when he watches the story of nations and of religions he can clearly trace the divine purposes, and see the lessons which God’s hand has written on every page of history. What seems to be utter ruin is often complete salvation; what was regarded as cruel disaster constantly turns out to be essential blessing.
It was so with the persecution which ensued on the death of Stephen. Had it been less inquisitorial, it would not have accomplished its destined purpose. The Saul who laid in ruins the Church of Jerusalem was unconsciously deepening the foundations of circumstance on which hereafter—the same and not the same—he should rear the superstructure of the Church of God. Saul the persecutor was doing, by opposite means, the same work as Paul the Apostle.
For when the members of the infant Church fled terror–stricken from the Holy City, they carried with them far and wide the good tidings of the Jerusalem above. At first, as was natural, they spoke to Jews alone. It would be long before they would hear how Philip had evangelised Samaria, and how, by his baptism of the eunuch, he had admitted into the Church of Christ one whom Moses had excluded from the congregation of Israel. The baptism of the pious soldier had taken place still later, and the knowledge of it could not at once reach the scattered Christians. In Phœnicia, therefore, and in Cyprus their preaching was confined at first within the limits of Judaism; nor was it until the wandering Hellenists had reached Antioch that they boldly ventured TO PREACH TO THE GENTILES.1 Whether these Gentiles were such only as had already embraced the “Noachian dispensation,” or whether they included others who had in no sense become adherents of the synagogue, we are not told. Greek proselytes were at this period common in every considerable city of the Empire,2 and it is reasonable to suppose that they furnished a majority, at any rate, of the new converts. However this may have been, the work of these nameless Evangelists was eminently successful. It received the seal of God’s blessing, and a large multitude of Greeks turned to the Lord. The fact, so much obscured by the wrong reading followed by our English Version, is nothing less than the beginning, on a large scale, of the conversionoftheGentiles. It is one of the great moments in the ascensive work begun by Stephen, advanced by Philip, authorised by Peter, and finally culminating in the life, mission, and Epistles of St. Paul.
When the news reached Jerusalem, it excited great attention, and the members of the Church determined to despatch one of their number to watch what was going on. Their choice of an emissary showed that as yet the counsels of the party of moderation prevailed, for they despatched the large–hearted and conciliatory Barnabas. His Levitical descent, and the sacrifice which he had made of his property to the common fund, combined with his sympathetic spirit and liberal culture to give him a natural authority, which he had always used on the side of charity and wisdom.
The arrival of such a man was an especial blessing. This new church, which was so largely composed of Gentiles, was destined to be a fresh starting–point in the career of Christianity. Barnabas saw the grace of God at work, and rejoiced at it, and justified his happy title of “the son of exhortation,” by exhorting the believers to cleave to the Lord with purpose of heart. His ministry won over converts in still larger numbers, for, as Luke adds with emphatic commendation, “he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and faith.”
The work multiplied in his hands, and needed so much wisdom, knowledge, and energy, that he soon felt the need of a colleague. Doubtless, had he desired it, he could have secured the co–operation of one of the Apostles, or of their trusted adherents. But Barnabas instinctively perceived that a fresher point of view, a clearer insight, a wider culture, a more complete immunity from prejudices were needed for so large and delicate a task. Himself a Grecian, and now called upon to minister not only to Grecians but to Greeks, he longed for the aid of one who would maintain the cause of truth and liberality with superior ability and more unflinching conviction. There was but one man who in any degree met his requirements—it was the delegate of the Sanhedrin, the zealot of the Pharisees, the once persecuting Saul of Tarsus. Since his escape from Jerusalem, Saul had been more or less unnoticed by the leading Apostles. We lose sight of him at Cæsarea, apparently starting on his way to Tarsus, and all that Barnabas now knew about him was that he was living quietly at home, waiting the Lord’s call. Accordingly he set out, to seek for him, and the turn of expression seems to imply that it was not without difficulty that he found him. Paul readily accepted the invitation to leave his seclusion, and join his friend in this new work in the great capital of Syria. Thus, twice over, did Barnabas save Saul for the work of Christianity. To his self–effacing nobleness is due the honour of recognising, before they had yet been revealed to others, the fiery vigour, the indomitable energy, the splendid courage, the illuminated and illuminating intellect, which were destined to spend themselves in the high endeavour to ennoble and evangelise the world.
No place could have been more suitable than Antioch for the initial stage of such a ministry. The queen of the East, the third metropolis of the world, the residence of the imperial Legate of Syria, this vast city of perhaps 500,000 souls must not be judged of by the diminished, shrunken, and earthquake–shattered Antakieh of to–day.3 It was no mere Oriental town, with low flat roofs and dingy narrow streets, but a Greek capital enriched and enlarged by Roman munificence. It is situated at the point of junction between the chains of Lebanon and Taurus. Its natural position on the northern slope of Mount Silpius, with a navigable river, the broad, historic Orontes, flowing at its feet, was at once commanding and beautiful. The windings of the river enriched the whole well–wooded plain, and as the city was but sixteen miles from the shore, the seabreezes gave it health and coolness. These natural advantages had been largely increased by the lavish genius of ancient art. Built by the Seleucidæ4 as the royal residence of their dynasty, its wide circuit of many miles was surrounded by walls of astonishing height and thickness, which had been carried across ravines and over mountain summits with such daring magnificence of conception as to give the city the aspect of being defended by its own encircling mountains, as though those gigantic bulwarks were but its natural walls. The palace of the kings of Syria was on an island formed by an artificial channel of the river. Through the entire length of the city, from the Golden or Daphne gate on the west, ran for nearly five miles a fine corso adorned with trees, colonnades, and statues. Originally constructed by Seleucus Nicator, it had been continued by Herod the Great, who, at once to gratify his passion for architecture, and to reward the people of Antioch for their good–will toward the Jews, had paved it for two miles and a half with blocks of white marble.5 Broad bridges spanned the river and its various affluents; baths, aqueducts, basilicas, villas, theatres, clustered on the level plain, and, overshadowed by picturesque and rugged eminences, gave the city a splendour worthy of its fame as only inferior in grandeur to Alexandria and Rome. Mingled with this splendour were innumerable signs of luxury and comfort. Under the spreading plane–trees that shaded the banks of the river, and among gardens brightened with masses of flowers, sparkled amid groves of laurel and myrtle the gay villas of the wealthier inhabitants, bright with Greek frescoes, and adorned with every refinement which Roman wealth had borrowed from Ionian luxury. Art had lent its aid to enhance the beauties of nature, and one colossal crag of Mount Silpius, which overlooked the city, had been carved into human semblance by the skill of Leïos. In the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, a pestilence had ravaged the kingdom, and to appease the anger of the gods, the king had ordered the sculptor to hew the mountain–mass into one vast statue. The huge grim face, under the rocky semblance of a crown, stared over the Forum of the city, and was known to the Antiochenes as the Charonium, being supposed to represent the head of
“That grim ferryman which poets write of,”
who conveyed the souls of the dead in his dim–gleaming boat across the waters of the Styx.
It was natural that such a city should attract a vast multitude of inhabitants, and those inhabitants were of very various nationalities. The basis of the population was composed of native Syrians, represented to this day by the Maronites;6 but the Syrian kings had invited many colonists to people their Presidence, and the most important of these were Greeks and Jews. To these, after the conquest of Syria by Pompey, had been added a garrison of Romans.7 The court of the Legate of Syria, surrounded as it was by military pomp, attracted into its glittering circle, not only a multitude of rapacious and domineering officials, but also that large retinue of flatterers, slaves, artists, literary companions, and general hangers–on, whose presence was deemed essential to the state of an imperial viceroy. The autonomy of the city, and its consequent freedom from the property tax, made it a pleasant place of abode to many others. The soft, yielding, and voluptuous Syrians, the cunning, versatile, and degraded Greeks, added their special contributions to the general corruption engendered by an enervating climate and a frivolous society. Side by side with these—governed, as at Alexandria, by their own Archon and their own mimic Sanhedrin, but owning allegiance to the central government at Jerusalem—lived an immense colony of Jews. Libanius could affirm from personal experience that he who sat in the agora of Antioch might study the customs of the world.
Cities liable to the influx of heterogeneous races are rarely otherwise than immoral and debased. Even Rome, in the decadence of its Cæsarism, could groan to think of the dregs of degradation—the quacks, and pandars, and musicians, and dancing–girls—poured into the Tiber by the Syrian Orontes. Her satirists spoke of this infusion of Orientalism as adding a fresh miasma even to the corruption which the ebbing tide of glory had left upon the naked sands of Grecian life.8 It seems as though it were a law of human intercourse, that when races are commingled in large masses, the worst qualities of each appear intensified in the general iniquity. The mud and silt of the combining streams pollute any clearness or sweetness they may previously have enjoyed. If the Jews had been less exclusive, less haughtily indifferent to the moral good of any but themselves, they might have checked the tide of immorality. But their disdainful isolation, either prevented them from making any efforts to ameliorate the condition of their fellow–citizens, or rendered their efforts nugatory. Their synagogues—one, at least, of which was a building of some pretensions, adorned with brazen spoils which had once belonged to the Temple of Jerusalem,9 and had been resigned by Antiochus Epiphanes, in a fit of remorse, to the Jews of Antioch—rose in considerable numbers among the radiant temples of the gods of Hellas. But the spirit of those who worshipped in them rendered them an ineffectual witness; and the Jews, absorbed in the conviction that they were the sole favourites of Jehovah, passed with a scowl of contempt, or “spat, devoutly brutal, in the face” of the many statues which no classic beauty could redeem from the disgrace of being “dumb idols.” There were doubtless, indeed, other proselytes besides Nicolas and Luke; but those proselytes, whether few or many in number, had, up to this period, exercised no appreciable influence on the gay and guilty city. And if the best Jews despised all attempts at active propagandism, there were sure to be many lewd and wicked Jews who furthered their own interests by a propaganda of iniquity. If the Jewish nationality has produced some of the best and greatest, it has also produced some of the basest and vilest of mankind. The Jews at Antioch were of just the same mixed character as the Jews at Alexandria, or Rome, or Paris, or London; and we may be quite sure that there must have been many among them who, instead of witnessing for Jehovah, would only add a tinge of original wickedness to the seething mass of atheism, idolatry, and polluted life.
And thus for the great mass of the population in Antioch there was nothing that could be truly called a religion to serve as a barrier against the ever–rising flood of Roman sensuality and Græco–Syrian suppleness. What religion there was took the form of the crudest nature–worship, or the most imbecile superstition. A few years before the foundation of a Christian Church at Antioch, in the year 37, there had occurred one of those terrible earthquakes to which, in all ages, the city had been liable.10 It might have seemed at first sight incredible that an intellectual and literary city like Antioch—a city of wits and philosophers, of casuists and rhetoricians, of poets and satirists—should at once have become the dupes of a wretched quack named Debborius, who professed to avert such terrors by talismans as ludicrous as the famous earthquake–pills which so often point an allusion in modern literature. Yet there is in reality nothing strange in such apparent contrasts. History more than once has shown that the border–lands of Atheism reach to the confines of strange credulity.11
Into this city of Pagan pleasure—into the midst of a population pauperised by public doles, and polluted by the indulgences which they procured—among the intrigues and ignominies of some of the lowest of the human race at one of the lowest periods of human history12—passed the eager spirit of Saul of Tarsus. On his way, five miles from the city, he must have seen upon the river–bank at least the fringe of laurels, cypresses, and myrtles that marked
“—that sweet grove Of Daphne by Orontes,”13
and caught sight, perhaps, of its colossal statue of Apollo,14 reared by Seleucus Nicator. But it was sweet no longer, except in its natural and ineffaceable beauty, and it is certain that a faithful Jew would not willingly have entered its polluted precincts. Those precincts, being endowed with the right of asylum, were, like all the asylums of ancient and modern days, far more a protection to outrageous villany than to persecuted innocence;15 and those umbrageous brageous groves were the dark haunts of every foulness. For their scenic loveliness, their rich foliage, their fragrant herbage, their perennial fountains, the fiery–hearted convert had little taste. He could only have recalled with a sense of disgust how that grove had given its title to a proverb which expressed the superfluity of naughtiness,16 and how its evil haunts had flung away the one rare chance of sheltering virtue from persecution, when the good Onias was tempted from it to be murdered by the governor of its protecting city.17
Such was the place where, in the street Singon, Saul began to preach. He may have entered it by the gate which was afterwards called the Gate of the Cherubim, because twenty–seven years later18 it was surmounted by those colossal gilded ornaments which Titus had taken from the Temple of Jerusalem. It was a populous quarter, in close proximity to the Senate House, the Forum, and the Amphitheatre; and every time that during his sermon he raised his eyes to the lower crags of Mount Silpius, he would be confronted by the stern visage and rocky crown of the choleric ferryman of Hades. But the soil was prepared for his teaching. It is darkest just before the dawn. When mankind has sunk into hopeless scepticism, the help of God is often very nigh at hand. “Bitter with weariness, and sick with sin,” there were many at any rate, even among the giddy and voluptuous Antiochenes, who, in despair of all sweetness and nobleness, were ready to hail with rapture the preaching of a new faith which promised forgiveness for the past, and brought ennoblement to the present. The work grew and prospered, and for a whole year the Apostles laboured in brotherly union and amid constant encouragement. The success of their labours was most decisively marked by the coinage of a new word, destined to a glorious immortality;—the disciples were first called CHRISTIANS at Antioch.
It is always interesting to notice the rise of a new and memorable word, but not a few of those which have met with universal acceptance have started into accidental life. It is not so with the word “Christian.” It indicates a decisive epoch, and was the coinage rather of a society than of any single man. More, perhaps, than any word which was ever invented, it marks, if I may use the expression, the watershed of all human history. It signalises the emergence of a true faith among the Gentiles, and the separation of that faith from the tenets of the Jews. All former ages, nations, and religions contribute to it. The conception which lies at the base of it is Semitic, and sums up centuries of expectation and of prophecy in the historic person of One who was anointed to be for all mankind a Prophet, Priest, and King. But this Hebrew conception is translated by a Greek word, showing that the great religious thoughts of which hitherto the Jewish race had been the appointed guardians, were henceforth to be the common glory of mankind, and were, therefore, to be expressed in a language which enshrined the world’s most perfect literature, and which had been imposed on all civilised countries by the nation which had played by far the most splendid part in the secular annals of the past. And this Greek rendering of a Hebrew idea was stamped with a Roman form by receiving a Latin termination,19 as though to foreshadow that the new name should be coextensive with the vast dominion which swayed the present destinies of the world. And if the word was thus pregnant with all the deepest and mightiest associations of the past and of the present, how divine was to be its future history! Henceforth it was needed to describe the peculiarity, to indicate the essence, of all that was morally the greatest and ideally the most lovely in the condition of mankind. From the day when the roar of the wild beast in the Amphitheatre was interrupted by the proud utterance, Christianussum—from the days when the martyrs, like “a host of Scævolas,” upheld their courage by this name as they bathed their hands without a shudder in the bickering fire—the idea of all patience, of all heroic constancy, of all missionary enterprise, of all philanthropic effort, of all cheerful selfsacrifice for the common benefit of mankind is in that name. How little thought the canaille of Antioch, who first hit on what was to them a convenient nickname, that thenceforward their whole city should be chiefly famous for its “Christian” associations; that the fame of Seleucus Nicator and Antiochus Epiphanes should be lost in that of Ignatius and Chrysostom; and that long after the power of the imperial legates had been as utterly crumbled into the dust of oblivion as the glittering palace of the Seleucidae in which they dwelt, the world would linger with unwearied interest on every detail of the life of the obscure Cypriot, and the afflicted Tarsian, whose preaching only evoked their wit and laughter! How much less could they have conceived it possible that thenceforward all the greatest art, all the greatest literature, all the greatest government, all the greatest philosophy, all the greatest eloquence, all the greatest science, all the greatest colonisation—and more even than this—all of what is best, truest, purest, and loveliest in the possible achievements of man, should be capable of no designation so distinctive as that furnished by the connotation of what was intended for an impertinent sobriquet! The secret of the wisdom of the Greek, and the fervour of the Latin fathers, and the eloquence of both, is in that word; and the isolation of the hermits, and the devotion of the monks, and the self–denial of the missionaries, and the learning of the schoolmen, and the grand designs of the Catholic statesmen, and the chivalry of the knights, and the courage of the reformers, and the love of the philanthropists, and the sweetness and purity of northern homes, and everything of divine and noble which marks— from the squalor of its catacombs to the splendour of its cathedrals—the story of the Christian Church. And why does all this lie involved in this one word? Because it is the standing witness that the world’s Faith is centred not in formulæ, but in historic realities—not in a dead system, but in the living Person of its Lord. An ironic inscription on the Cross of Christ had been written in letters of Greek, of Latin, and of Hebrew; and that Cross, implement as it was of shame and torture, became the symbol of the national ruin of the Jew, of the willing allegiance of the Greeks and Romans, of the dearest hopes and intensest gratitude of the world of civilisation. An hybrid and insulting designation was invented in the frivolous streets of Antioch, and around it clustered for ever the deepest faith and the purest glory of mankind.
I have assumed that the name was given by Gentiles, and given more or less in sport. It could not have been given by the Jews, who preferred the scornful name of “Galilæan,”20 and who would not in any case have dragged through the mire of apostasy—for so it would have seemed to them—the word in which centred their most cherished hopes. Nor was it in all probability a term invented by the Christians themselves. In the New Testament, as is well known, it occurs but thrice; once in the historical notice of its origin, and only in two other places as a name used by enemies. It was employed by Agrippa the Second in his half–sneering, half–complimentary interpellation to St. Paul;21 and it is used by St. Peter as the name of a charge under which the brethren were likely to be persecuted and impeached.22 But during the life–time of the Apostles it does not seem to have acquired any currency among the Christians themselves,23 and they preferred those vague and loving appellations of “the brethren,”24 “the disciples,”25 “the believers,”26 “the saints,”27 “the Church of Christ,”28 “those of the way,”29 “the elect,”30 “the faithful,”31 which had been sweetened to them by so much tender and hallowed intercourse during so many heavy trials and persecutions. Afterwards, indeed, when the name Christian had acquired a charm so potent that the very sound of it was formidable, Julian tried to forbid its use by edict,32 and to substitute for it the more ignominious term of “Nazarene,” which is still universal in the East. A tradition naturally sprang up that the name had been invented by Evodius, the first Bishop of Antioch, and even adopted at a general synod.33 But what makes it nearly certain that this is an error, is that up to this time “Christ” was not used, or at any rate was barely beginning to be used, as a proper name; and the currency of a designation which marked adherence to Jesus, as though Christ were His nameand not His title, seems to be due only to the ignorance and carelessness of Gentiles, who without further inquiry caught up the first prominent word with which Christian preaching had made them familiar.34 And even this word, in the prevalent itacism, was often corrupted into the shape Chrestiani, as though it came from the Greek Chrêstos, “excellent,” and not from Christos, “anointed.”35 The latter term—arising from customs and conceptions which up to this time were almost exclusively Judaic—would convey little or no meaning to Greek or Roman ears. We may therefore regard it as certain that the most famous of all noble words was invented by the wit for which the Antiochenes were famous in antiquity, and which often displayed itself in happy appellations.36 But whatever may have been the spirit in which the name was given, the disciples would not be long in welcoming so convenient a term. Bestowed as a stigma, they accepted it as a distinction. They who afterwards gloried in the contemptuous reproaches which branded them as sarmenticiiand semaxii37 from the fagots to which they were tied and the stakes to which they were bound, would not be likely to blush at a name which was indeed their robe of victory, their triumphal chariot.38 They gloried in it all the more because even the ignorant mispronunciations of it which I have just mentioned were a happy nomenetomen. If the Greeks and Romans spoke correctly of Christus, they gave unwilling testimony to the Universal King; if they ignorantly said Chrestus, they bore witness to the Sinless One. If they said Christiani, they showed that the new Faith centred not in a dogma, but in a Person; if they said Chrestiani, they used a word which spoke of sweetness and kindliness.39 And beyond all this, to the Christians themselves the name was all the dearer because it constantly reminded them that they too were God’s anointedones—a holy generation, a royal priesthood; that they had an unction from the Holy One which brought all truth to their remembrance.
The name marks a most important advance in the progress of the Faith. Hitherto, the Christians had been solely looked upon as the obscure sectarians of Judaism. The Greeks in their frivolity, the Romans in their superficial disdain for all “execrable” and “foreign superstitions,” never troubled themselves to learn the difference which divided the Jew from the Christian, but idly attributed the internal disturbances which seemed to be agitating the peace of these detested fanaticisms to the instigations of some unknown person named Chrêstus.40 But meanwhile, here at Antioch, the inhabitants of the third city in the Empire had seen that there was between the two systems an irreconcilable divergence, and had brought that fact prominently home to the minds of the Christians themselves by imposing on them a designation which seized upon, and stereotyped for ever, the very central belief which separated them from the religion in which they had been born and bred.
The necessity for such a name marks clearly the success which attended the mission work of these early Evangelists. They could not have tilled a soil which was more likely to be fruitful. With what a burst of joy must the more large–hearted even of the Jews have hailed the proclamation of a Gospel which made them no longer a hated colony living at drawn daggers with the heathen life that surrounded them! How ardently must the Gentile whose heart had once been touched, whose eyes had once been enlightened, have exulted in the divine illumination, the illimitable hope! How must his heart have been stirred by the emotions which marked the outpouring of the Spirit and accompanied the grace of baptism! How with the new life tingling through the dry bones of the valley of vision must he have turned away—with abhorrence for his former self, and a divine pity for his former companions—from the poisoned grapes of Heathendom, to pluck the fair fruits which grow upon the Tree of Life in the Paradise of God! How, in one word, must his heart have thrilled, his soul have dilated, at high words like these:—” Such things weresome of you; but ye washed yourselves, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, by the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”