The word appears exactly three times in the entire New Testament, and not once in circumstances suggesting the people it names chose it for themselves. The first occurrence is in Acts 11:26, at Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians. The second is in Acts 26:28, where Agrippa says to Paul, in the middle of an interrogation, almost you persuade me to become a Christian. The third is in 1 Peter 4:16, where the writer treats the name as something imposed from outside, a charge one might be made to answer for. In none of these three instances does a follower of Jesus use the word to describe himself, his community, or his faith. That observation isn’t new, but it tends to get noted briefly and then set aside without being pressed any further. I want to follow that implication here, because the word’s etymology and its grammar in Acts 11:26 together suggest something more exact than a neutral community label that simply caught on over time.

The Greek behind were called in Acts 11:26 is chrēmatisai, a verb Luke uses elsewhere in contexts of official transaction, legal designation, or the kind of naming that comes from an authoritative body rather than from within a group. Its other New Testament appearances cluster around divine oracles and official responses, the sort of language you’d reach for when a court or a god assigns a title rather than when a community adopts one informally.[1] The word’s form alone doesn’t prove Roman administrative involvement, and I don’t want to push the grammar further than it can bear. What it does, more modestly, is remove the assumption that the community in Antioch gathered one day and decided to call themselves Christians. The text doesn’t say that. It says they were called that, in Antioch, in a city that served as the administrative capital of the Roman province of Syria and that had Roman garrison infrastructure already in place. Ellicott’s commentary, writing in the nineteenth century, caught the point early: the word Christiani follows the Latin pattern of Pompeiani and Sullani, party names typically assigned to the followers of a political figure by outside observers rather than chosen by the followers themselves. The Roman soldiers and officials in Antioch, encountering a group whose members kept speaking of a figure called Christos as their head, gave them the name Christiani in their standard fashion for naming political factions. Whether the name was neutral, satirical, or purely administrative is a question the text can’t settle. What’s settled is that the community didn’t give it to themselves.

This matters because it means the word Christian, from its very first appearance in the documentary record, is an outsider’s label. It’s what Romans called the followers of Jesus in Antioch, not what the followers called themselves. And when you look at what the followers actually called themselves, in the documents closest to the movement’s origins, the picture holds together in a way that’s striking once you notice it. Paul, who wrote the earliest material we have from inside the movement and addressed it in his own hand within twenty years of the crucifixion, never once uses the word Christian in any of his letters. He doesn’t call himself a Christian anywhere in the salutations, the body, or the closing of a single letter. He doesn’t call his converts Christians. He doesn’t call the communities he founded Christian communities. This isn’t an argument from silence in any trivial sense, because Paul had a rich and extensive vocabulary for what he and his people were: brothers, saints, those who are in Christ, the ekklēsia tou theou, the church of God. What he never reaches for, not once across thirteen letters, is the very word that would go on to become the central self-identifier of the religion that later claimed him as its founding theologian.

What Paul calls himself instead, and what Luke reports the movement calling itself in Acts before the Antioch naming scene, is simply followers of the Way. The Greek hodos, the Way, appears as an internal designator for the movement in Acts 9:2, 19:9, 19:23, 22:4, 24:14, and 24:22, and in most of those instances it functions as a proper noun, the name a community uses for itself when speaking to people it considers hostile or indifferent. Before Paul’s conversion, when he goes to Damascus to arrest members of the movement, he asks for letters against those belonging to the Way. After his conversion, when he stands before Felix and answers the charge that he’s been a ringleader of the Nazarene sect, his counter-description says it directly:

 I confess to you that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers (Acts 24:14).

The they in that sentence are the accusers, the hostile outside, the ones applying the derogatory label sect. Paul’s own word is the Way. He isn’t hedging about Christianity here. He’s refusing, in a Roman courtroom, to accept the taxonomic frame his accusers have placed around him, insisting instead that what he practices isn’t a sect departing from Judaism but a way of living within it, grounded in the Hebrew scriptures and directed toward the God of his ancestors.

The significance here can’t be reduced to semantics. Paul in his letters teaches Jewish and Gentile converts to observe the same practices, draws no distinction between them in the fundamental content of the faith, and treats them as a single community. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. This reads like the language of a man who believes the Way he’s traveling is the continuation and fulfillment of the faith he already held, not the founding of a new religion with a new name for its members, extended now to Gentiles without requiring them to enter Judaism first, but without asking them to enter something else entirely either. He addresses the Corinthians on exactly this structure, telling them to give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, because for Paul it was one church, not two, one Way, not a Jewish track and a Gentile track running side by side. The unity is theological rather than organizational, and it’s grounded in a Hebrew framework, not built from a departure from one.

This brings us back to the two previous pieces in this series. If Paul persecuted the church of God, the ekklēsia tou theou, and if that community is most plausibly identified with the Stephen circle in Jerusalem and its scattered diaspora rather than with Peter’s Jerusalem circle, then what Paul violently opposed and then joined was a Hebraic, Torah-rooted, temple-critical movement that called itself the Way, nothing like Christianity as later centuries would define it, and nothing like a religion built around Easter, Christmas, the Trinity, or Sunday worship. Those elements arrive later, well after what one scholar described as a curtain falling on the first-century church, and rising again on something substantially different. The community Paul joined at Damascus, the one he preached to in Antioch, the one he addressed in his letters as the church of God, was a Jewish renewal movement following a Jewish teacher, using Jewish scripture as its architecture, and calling its common life by a name, the Way, borrowed from the Hebrew prophetic tradition and from the words of the teacher himself, who had said I am the Way.

That the movement’s later heirs would call themselves Christians, would name their faith after a label Roman administrators coined for a political faction in Antioch, and would look back at Paul as the founder of what they practiced is maybe the largest irony the New Testament never comments on. Paul never commented on it either. He’d already died before the curtain fell.

[1] The Greek verb at Acts 11:26 is chrēmatizō (χρηματίζω), aorist active infinitive chrēmatísai. Ellicott notes that the term carries a consistently oracular connotation across the New Testament, used of divine warnings, angelic directives, and Holy Spirit revelation, distinguishing it sharply from the ordinary verbs for naming, kaleō or phōneō. See C. J. Ellicott, Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (London: Cassell, 1905), on Acts 11:26.