A Letter Concerning the Name “Christian”

What follows is an examination of one word — the identifier first attached to the disciples at Antioch — weighed strictly by the King James text, and pursued to its conclusions wherever the text led. Nothing here rests on tradition; everything cited can be checked on the page.

I. The name was received, origin never claimed

The verse of record is Acts 11:26: “And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” The verb is passive. No agent is named. No man steps forward to claim the act of naming, and no voice from heaven ratifies it.

This silence is itself the datum. Whenever God names a man in Scripture, His voice is attached: “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel” (Gen. 32:28); “Thy name shall be Abraham” (Gen. 17:5); “Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas” (John 1:42). When God names, the text names Him. At Antioch, the verb stands blank. The question “where did the name come from?” must be answered in the individual.

There is one more witness inside the translation itself. The Greek verb behind “were called” (chreēmatizō) is rendered elsewhere in the King James exclusively in terms of divine agency: “warned of God” (Matt. 2:12, 22), “it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost” (Luke 2:26), “warned from God by an holy angel” (Acts 10:22), “admonished of God” (Heb. 8:5), “being warned of God” (Heb. 11:7). The translators knew the word’s usual force. Whether their rendering at Acts 11:26 signals a divine naming or a neutral one, the text deliberately does not say. That ambiguity was permitted to stand.

Consider also the city. Antioch on the Orontes was founded by Seleucus I Nicator — “Nicator” meaning Conqueror, a title he took for himself — who named the city after his father, Antiochus. The founder stamped a dead man’s name on geography to outlive the flesh; a self-declared victor’s memorial in the economy of the age. Into that city came disciples who were passively called a name derived from the title Christ, by no recorded agent. The city of a self-given conqueror’s title became the birthplace of a commodity name whose giver is absent from the record. Compare this to the city Enoch of Genesis.

II. The name Jesus actually promises is not this one

Two letters to the assemblies promise names, and neither names “Christian”:

“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Rev. 2:17).

“Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God… and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God… and I will write upon him my new name” (Rev. 3:12).

Observe the structure. The promised names are given — written by His hand, not conferred by consensus. Not laying about to be enjoined. The hidden name is expressly withheld from every economy of the age: it cannot be known, therefore it cannot be traded, borrowed, counterfeited, or defamed. “No man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” A name that cannot be known cannot be seized; it can only be given. The letter to Philadelphia adds a condition foreign to the age’s naming: “he shall go no more out” — permanence in a fixed temple, not portable identity in a passing world.

The world’s monikers, by contrast, do not survive the age they are minted in: “the world passeth away, and the lust thereof” (1 John 2:17). Seleucus’ dynasty is dust; his father’s name persists as a word on maps. The commodity outlives the substance it labeled — Esau’s stew economics: the birthright despised (Heb. 12:16), the meal eaten, the name of the transaction remembered.

III. The pattern of Peor: consent as the weapon of the defeated accuser

The Balaam material governs this examination. Balaam could not curse Israel — “there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel” (Num. 23:23) — because God had justified them: “He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel” (Num. 23:21). The court was closed. So the attack pivoted from verdict to consent. “Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor” (Num. 31:16). Israel bowed, joined themselves, ate the sacrifices of the dead (Ps. 106:28; Num. 25:5) — three verbs of willing participation. Balak, whose name means “waster,” hired the prophet; the prophet’s mouth was shut, so his counsel worked through appetite instead.

Paul reads the event as a standing warning: “let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12), culminating in “they were destroyed of the destroyer” (10:10). The destroyer never imposes; he reprices. He cannot obtain a curse the Judge forbids, so he teaches the justified to trade something real for something known — identity for commodity, birthright for pottage, the promised name for a label the whole marketplace can read. Israel priced independence from the council of God at 30 pieces of silver.

The same voice asks again in Galatia: “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” (Gal. 3:1). The charm did not remove what they had received — the Spirit by faith — it substituted an economy of flesh for grace, “another gospel.” The bewitcher’s method is always substitution, never subtraction.

And why does the enemy deal in consent? Because his standing to condemn is gone. “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth?” (Rom. 8:33-34). The accuser “is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Rev. 12:10). Denied the courtroom, he takes the marketplace. A name men seize by consent is his legal tender; the name given from the resurrected, glorified hand, he can not know or touch.

IV. The testimony examined: did the apostles consecrate the identifier?

Two texts have been leaned on to sanctify the name, and both prove on inspection to carry less than tradition loads onto them.

James 2:7 — “Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?” James never names the name. The Greek construction (“invoked over you”) suggests a name placed on the believer at baptism — most naturally the name of Christ, possibly the name of God upon the twelve tribes (cf. Amos 9:12 in Acts 15:17). Whether either reading is right, James’s “worthy name” is a name the text hides — structurally nearer to the hidden name of Rev. 2:17 than to the public label of Antioch.

1 Peter 4:16 — “Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.” The context is a charge-sheet: “Let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer… Yet if any man suffer as a Christian…” The “as” is the grammar of an imposed category — no one suffers “as a murderer” by self-designation. The name arrives from outside, exactly as at Antioch; Peter addresses the sufferer’s posture under it, not the provenance of it. And one verse earlier the distinction is made explicit: “if ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you” (4:14). The blessing of glory attaches to the name of Christ. The imposed category receives only a command against shame. Peter blesses the man standing under the label, not the label itself — the same liberty as the four in Babylon, who wore Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego without shame and without embracing them, confessing only “our God whom we serve” (Dan. 3:17), while Daniel wrote his own book under his God-given name.

V. Heaven uses the true name, and the errant one simply does not govern

The pattern is old. David took the stronghold of Milo and Jerusalem and “called it the city of David” (2 Sam. 5:9) — his own voice, his own name, on conquered Jebusite ground — and no correction was ever issued. The errant name stuck for a thousand years. But when heaven proclaimed the birth of the Messiah, the angel said: “the city of David” — and meant Bethlehem (Luke 2:11), where David came from, not the citadel David branded. Heaven did not contest the commodity name; it simply used the true one, at the moment it counted, to watchers in a field, confirmed by a sign “no man knoweth” except the one who arrives — “ye shall find the babe… lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). When Jesus stood before Solomon’s handiwork and said “destroy this temple” He did not clarify which temple He referred to. But He spoke of Himself. When He was later accused that He had said this of Solomon’s handiwork, He was silent.

Paul raises the same architecture to its full height: “For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all” (Gal. 4:25-26). One name, two realities — and “cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman” (4:30). Ishmael bore Abraham’s name, dwelt in Abraham’s tent, bore Abraham’s covenant-sign, and did not inherit. “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Rom. 9:6). The wheat and the tares grow in the same field, indistinguishable by divine design — “lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them” (Matt. 13:29) — and the separation belongs to the Owner at the harvest, not to servants sorting by label. The public name is worn identically by both; the discriminator is “The Lord knoweth them that are his” (2 Tim. 2:19), and the naming that accompanies the seal carries “depart from iniquity” with it.

The apostolic “pillars” themselves show the difference between reputation and installation. Paul writes of “James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars” (Gal. 2:9) — esteemed by men — and records that the chiefest of them dissembled at Antioch under pressure “fearing them which were of the circumcision” (2:12), their footing all the while anchored in the Jerusalem beneath and its estimations, its thrones and offices (“Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand” — Matt. 20:21), until they were straightened out. The pillar of Rev. 3:12 is different in kind: “I will make him a pillar” — appointed by Christ, fastened in the temple of God, beyond the reach of any committee from the Jerusalem below. And where do the twelve finally land? “The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:14). Not reputations — written names, in the city above.

VI. What “overcoming” actually is

The promise attaches to “him that overcometh,” and the vocabulary was already stamped on the world: Seleucus Nicator, the self-styled Conqueror, took territory outside himself and named cities for his father. The true Conqueror conquered otherwise. “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me” (John 14:30) — the victory was fought and finished in one man’s interior, where the prince found no purchase, no consent, no commodity traded…and he was offered everything. “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33) — perfect tense, complete before the believer takes the field.

The promised rule is the same weapon in the same direction. “He that overcometh… to him will I give power over the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father” (Rev. 2:26-27). “As I received” — and He received it inwardly. The rod of iron is not first an implement of outward governance; it is the breaking to shivers of “imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5). No one wields outwardly what was never applied inwardly. The overcomer’s field of conquest is the citadel between his own ears — every vain and raging imagination, broken on the iron that conquered in another man first. The opportunity is afforded to the vain imagining people of Psalm 2, to “come up hither” to the eternal throne- precisely the appeal of the Holy Spirit to the individual in the seven churches of Revelation.

VII. The conclusion

The case assembled from the text stands thus:

The name “Christian” was received, passively, at Antioch, by no recorded agent, in a city founded and named by a self-titled conqueror for his dead father. The apostolic writings neither claim nor consecrate it: James’s “worthy name” is unnamed; Peter’s usage addresses a man suffering under an imposed category and forbids shame in it — the posture of Daniel in Babylon, wearing the empire’s name without embracing it.

Meanwhile the only names Christ personally promises to give are written by His own hand: the name of His God, the name of His city, His own new name, and the one name “which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” That name is structurally immune to everything this examination has traced: it cannot be imposed (it is given, not taken), cannot be seized (it is hidden), cannot be traded (it is known only to its receiver), and cannot be defamed (the world has no referent for it). It is the anti-commodity. Balaam saw the people dwelling alone and taught them how not to.

The danger, therefore, is not bearing the imposed name — the four Hebrews in Babylon did, under worse empires, without shame. The danger is resting in the name as a possession: Laodicea’s condition, “thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods” (Rev. 3:17) — identity held, advertised, and empty. Sardis wore a name and was dead (Rev. 3:1). The congregation of Pergamos held a right-sounding standing and Balaam’s doctrine under the same roof (Rev. 2:13-14). A name in the age’s economy, however true its derivation, confers nothing; the seal is being known, not being called something.

So the answer to the old question — who gave the name that causes so much trouble? — is that the text refuses to say, and that refusal is the lesson. Every name God gives, He signs. Every name the age gives is unsigned, priced, and passing. Between them stands the man who may answer to the unsigned name without shame, suffer under it without fear, and yet wait for the white stone — given, written, hidden — which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it.

“He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh…”

The P.S.

Postscript: The Clean Assemblies and Psalm 133

An examination of two names in the second and third chapters of Revelation, weighed by the King James text.

Of the seven assemblies addressed in the Revelation, five receive rebuke in some degree: Ephesus, whose candlestick stands under threat though her doctrine is sound; Pergamos, holding Balaam’s doctrine under a faithful roof; Thyatira, suffering Jezebel; Sardis, bearing a name while dead; Laodicea, rich and blind, wretched and naked. Two alone stand without a word of correction: Smyrna and Philadelphia (Rev. 2:8-11; 3:7-13).

Their names are their testimony — and together they conspire, breath by breath, to spell one psalm. And note that their names are identifying where they assemble- not they themselves. For indeed, the assemblies of Revelation- a book of significations- are not head count. They are a description in every way, of manners of assembly.

The names themselves

Smyrna is the Greek word for myrrh — the first-listed principal spice of the holy anointing oil: “Take thou also unto thee principal spices, of pure myrrh… and of sweet calamus… and of cassia… and of olive oil an hin: and thou shalt make it an oil of holy ointment” (Ex. 30:23-25). Ground fine, beaten small, blended with oil — and expressly forbidden to the flesh of man or to strangers: “upon man’s flesh shall it not be poured, neither shall ye make any other like it” (Ex. 30:32). Myrrh is the scent of a life surrendered: it appears at the crib, gold, frankincense, and myrrh(Matt. 2:11), and at the tomb, “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight” (John 19:39). From birth to burial, the fragrance of a death freely accepted.

Philadelphia is compound and plain: philos, love, and adelphos, brother — brotherly love, the word itself carrying no ornament, no title, no rank. Of all the names the seven assemblies bear, it is the only one that describes a relation between men rather than a possession or a place.

The psalm they spell

Set the two names into the psalm of the ointment and the sentence assembles itself:

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments; as the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even life for evermore” (Ps. 133:1-3).

Brethren dwelling together — Philadelphia. The precious ointment running down — Smyrna. The psalm’s definition of a good and pleasant assembly is exactly the composition the two clean churches are named for: love among brothers, under a poured-out, burial-scented anointing descending from the Head. No other two names in the letters fit the verse; no other assembly escaped the rebuke. The correspondence is not announced by the text — it is hidden in it, requiring the reader to break the words open as an alabaster box which is how that Book prefers to work: “it is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Prov. 25:2)

So do we forsake assembling together? No. But keep it clean from the world and keep it in the tent of David. Learn to ignore the tents that the age offers.

Every year in Valle Crucis NC, I host a gathering that I have endeavored to keep clean. It has no name. No evident leadership. No strings attached. Offers nothing to join. It engages in no rituals. You are free when you come and free when you go. God willing, it will stay this way.

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