CRISTIANO. - Name of the followers of Gesù. Act. 11, 26 relates: “And it happened to them (Paolo and Barnaba) ... that first in Antiochia the faithful received the name of c.” This manner of expression implies that the believers did not assume this name themselves, but that it was given to them by others. Indeed, throughout the New Testament they call one another by other names (“faithful,” “elect,” “saints,” etc.), but never by this one; nor does it ever appear in Jewish sources (which call them “Galileans,” “Nazarenes,” “minin,” etc.); it follows, therefore, that it was the pagans who gave it to them, and pagan ignorance is also revealed in having chosen as the basis of the designation not a proper name but an indeterminate adjective. Since Christ means “anointed” or “messiah,” c. was one who believed in any Christ (and there were many such) and not specifically in Gesù.
The author of Acts places the origin of the name in Antiochia around 43, and certainly Luca, himself an Antiochene, may have been a witness of the event. Rationalist criticism, however, believes that Luca’s phrase historically means no 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. According to them, the followers of Gesù must then have been universally called by other names (“Nazoreans,” “Galileans,” “poor ones”); the name “c.” would appear only in I Pt. 4, 16, more than fifty years later.
But this assertion—that only around the year 100 did the faithful begin to be distinguished from the Jews in pagan speech, and thus only then could they receive from them a proper name—is unhistorical, because Tacito already reports the name “c.” as current in Roma in 64; it occurs in Pietro’s preaching and in the Didache, and Plinio and s. Ignazio regard it as common in Antiochia and in Bitinia at the beginning of the second century, not to mention the famous graffito of Pompei, in which it is likewise difficult not to see the name in question. Moreover, it is not true that those general designations of the faithful existed throughout the first century, much less that I Pt. (v. PIETRO APOSTOLO), was written so late; besides, in it the name “c.” appears as already current even in Asia Minore. Rather, the distinctly Latin ending “-ianus” would seem to militate against the Antiochene origin, whence some supposed that the name arose in Roma or at least was given in Antiochia to the faithful by the Roman authorities themselves. This is unnecessary, because the use of that ending had spread widely in the East with the Romans, and just as the names “Asians,” “Herodians,” “Pompeians,” “Caesarians,” etc. were current there, so, by analogy, even Greek-speaking natives could quite well have created the form “c.”
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 Act. 11, 26; 26, 28 and I Pt. 4, 16; it is often lamented by the apologists, and 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 a reason now difficult to grasp.
Perhaps the populace perceived at the root of the name χριστιανός the adjective χρηστός, which, besides the meaning “good,” also had that of “simpleton”; and it is a fact that in Roma at least the followers of Gesù were, from 64 onward, called Chrestians by the populace (Tacito, Annales, XV, 44: “quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat”; cf. also the “impulsore Chresto” of Svetonio (Claudius, 25), in which many see the name of Christ transformed, and “cretino,” which is a Romance derivative of “christianus”). Indeed, some even maintain that the primitive form of the name must have been Crestianus, appealing also to the fact that in the three cited passages of the New Testament there must originally have been written not χριστιανοί, but χριστιανοί, as is also often found in the most ancient Christian inscriptions. But this is a very common phenomenon of interchange between two identical sounds (η = i, itacism already common at that time), and nothing proves that for three centuries the pagans did not know what the true name of Christ was, or that the c. themselves were unaware that they had been so called from a Χριστός and not from a Χρήστος.
Antonio Ferrua
S. Ignazio d'Antiochia uses the title χριστιανός 5 times, from which the name χριστιανισμός had been formed (3 times); the Martyrinus Polycarpi (ca. 160) has χριστιανός 3 times, χριστιανισμός once. The apologists give χριστιανός apologetic explanations (as though it were χρηστιανός, “beneficent,” from χρηστός). From the apologetic interpretation of the name “c.” the Marcionites drew a tendentious explanation of the name: they called themselves “Chrestians,” as adherents of the good god (chrestio), in contrast with the orthodox, who in Siria called themselves Nazoreans and showed themselves adherents of a Jewish messianism connected with a locality in Israele (Nazareth); the great Persian inscription of Kartir distinguishes Nazoreans and c., applying the latter name to the Marcionites.