Christians (Christian Church)
Protestant sect, it is the result of three nearly simultaneous religious movements that took place in the United States. The first occurred in Virginia (1792), where the Methodist pastor Giacomo O'Kelly, dissatisfied with a decision of his bishop and superintendent, after vainly requesting permission to appeal to the General Conference, separated with some of his followers, taking the name of Christians and rejecting any confession of faith outside the Bible. This schism spread in the southern United States. The second movement took place in New England (1801), where the Baptist minister Abner Jones, desiring greater freedom in ecclesiastical matters, separated from the Baptists, founded a Christian Church similar to the previous one, and spread it in the eastern United States. The third arose in Kentucky (1804) among various Presbyterian ministers, who decided to unite and form a Christian Church, free from the hindrance of a confession of faith, and spread it in the central and western United States.
These three movements, independent of one another but similar, united in 1819. The schism in 1832 of one of their leaders, Barton W. Stone, who joined with 52 Christian churches to the Campbellites (v. DISCIPLES), caused great confusion, since the Campbellites or Disciples indistinctly assumed the name of Christians or Disciples, and this same name of Christians was also retained by those who had not followed Stone. The confusion has not yet entirely disappeared. Finally, in 1929, they united with the Congregationalists (v.), and the two bodies thus united took the name "General Council of the Congregational and Christian Churches." It must be noted, however, that given the independence of the local Congregationalist churches, this union does not mean that there is a union between all Congregationalist churches and that of the Christians, but only with those churches that freely wished to accept II.
---
Christian
Name of the followers of Jesus. Acts 11:26 relates: "And it came to pass that in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians." This manner of expression suggests that the believers did not assume this name themselves, but were given it by others. In fact, throughout the New Testament, they refer to themselves with other names ("faithful," "elect," "saints," etc.) but never with this one; nor does it appear in Jewish sources (they are called "Galileans," "Nazarenes," "minnim," etc.). It remains, therefore, that it was the pagans who gave them this name, and the ignorance of the pagan is revealed in having chosen as a basis for the designation not a proper name, but an indeterminate adjective. Since "Christ" means "anointed" or "messiah," "Christian" was the believer in any Christ (and there were many) and not specifically in Jesus.
The author of Acts places the origin of the name in Antioch around 43 AD, and certainly Luke, being an Antiochene himself, could have been a witness to the fact. But rationalist criticism holds that Luke's phrase does not historically signify anything more than the differentiation at that time and in that place of a Christian community from the Jewish one, and not at all the appearance of a new name. For them, the followers of Jesus should have been universally called by other names ("Nazarenes," "Galileans," "the poor"); the name "Christian" would appear only in 1 Peter 4:16, more than fifty years later.
But this assertion that the faithful only around 100 AD began to be distinguished from the Jews in the mouths of pagans, and therefore only then could they receive from them a proper name, is ahistorical, because Tacitus already reports the name "Christian" as current in Rome in 64 AD; it is found in the preaching of Peter and in the Didache, and Pliny and St. Ignatius use it as common in Antioch and Bithynia at the beginning of the 2nd century, not to mention the famous graffito of Pompeii, where it is difficult not to see the name in question. Moreover, it is not true that those general designations of the faithful existed throughout the 1st century, nor that 1 Peter (v. PETER, APOSTLE) was written so late; besides, in it the name "Christian" appears as already current even in Asia Minor. Rather, it would seem to argue against an ancient origin the strictly Latin ending "-ianus," whence some have supposed that the name was born in Rome or at least was given to the faithful in Antioch by the Roman authorities themselves. This is not necessary, because the use of that ending had spread widely among the Romans in the East, and just as there were current names like "Asiani," "Herodiani," "Pompeiani," "Caesariani," etc., so, by analogy, even the natives who spoke Greek could well have created the form "Christian."
Its meaning was therefore "followers of Christ" or "propagandists of messianism," and from the beginning it had a derogatory sense. The derogatory sense seems to emerge from Acts 11:26; 26:28 and 1 Peter 4:16, and is often deplored by the apologists, and it must have derived not only from the poor esteem in which the faithful were held but also from the very nature of the name, for reasons now difficult to grasp.
Perhaps the common people saw in the word χριστιανός the ending χριστός, which, besides the sense of "anointed," also had that of "good" or "simpleton"; and it is a fact that at Rome at least the followers of Jesus were called by the common people "Christians" as early as 64 AD (Tacitus, Annales, XV, 44: "quos per flagitia invios volgus Christianos appellabat"; cf. also the "impulsore Chresto" of Suetonius (Claudius, 25), in which many see a distortion of the name of Christ, and "cretin," which is a Romance derivative of "christianus"). Indeed, some even assert that the primitive form of the name must have been "Christianus," appealing also to the fact that in the three cited passages of the New Testament it must originally have been written not χριστιανοί but χριστιανοί, as is often found even in the earliest Christian inscriptions. But this is a very common phenomenon of interchange of identical sounds (χ = i, itacism already common at the time), and there is no proof that for three centuries the pagans did not know what the true name of Christ was and that the Christians themselves were unaware of having been called thus from a χριστός and not from a χριστός.
Antonio Ferrara
St. Ignatius of Antioch uses the title χριστιανός 5 times, from which the name χριστιανός was formed (3 times); the Martyrium Polycarpi (ca. 160) has 3 times χριστιανός, 1 time χριστιανός. The apologists give apologetic explanations of χριστιανός (as if it were χριστιανός "beneficial," from χριστός). From the apologetic interpretation of the name "Christian," the Marcionites drew a tendentious explanation of the name: they called themselves "chrestiani," as adherents of the good god (chrestós), in contrast to the orthodox, who in Syria were called "Nation" and were seen as adherents of a Jewish messianism connected with a locality in Israel (Nazareth); the great Persian inscription of Kartir distinguishes "Nation" and "Christian," qualifying with the latter name the Marcionites.