We see in Acts 11:24-26 (NRSVCE):
"For he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were brought to the Lord. Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. So it was that for an entire year they met with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called “Christians.”
I wish to know how the name Christians
used for followers of Jesus stuck . Antioch was a part of ancient Greece, and the word Christian
had its origin in Greek word Christos
meaning the Saviour, known as Messiah in Hebrew. That St. Luke wrote the Gospel and Acts of the Apostles in Greek, may also have contributed to the firming up of the name Christian
. But then, we see Jesus being addressed as The Nazarene
all through the Gospels and the Acts. It is therefore, strange that His disciples were not called Nazarenes
by the Jews who were more comfortable with Hebrew language than with Greek.
My question therefore is: Were the early Christians called by some other name in languages other than Greek? If they were, why did those names become defunct?
PS: In southern India, Christians in the good old days called themselves as Nasrani
, a name derived from the Syrian word for Nazarene.