Antioch

Antioch on the Orontes was founded around 300 BCE by Seleucus I Nicator and grew into one of the largest cities of the Roman east, with a Jewish population settled there for centuries and organised around its own synagogues. The book of Acts records that believers scattered from Jerusalem after the killing of Stephen reached the city and began preaching to Greeks as well as to Jews, and that the congregation which resulted was the first anywhere to be called Christian. Barnabas was sent from Jerusalem to look at it, went on to Tarsus to fetch Saul, and the two taught in the city for a year.

What happened next made Antioch the place where the terms of the new movement were argued out rather than merely a successful mission field. The congregation commissioned and funded Barnabas and Saul for the first missionary journey on its own initiative. It also produced the sharpest recorded quarrel of the apostolic generation: Paul writes in Galatians that he opposed Cephas to his face at Antioch, because Cephas had been eating with gentile believers and then withdrew when men came from James. The question of whether gentiles had to keep the law in order to belong went from Antioch to Jerusalem for a ruling, and the answer shaped every congregation founded afterwards.

Ignatius, bishop of the city early in the second century, was taken to Rome under guard to be killed and wrote letters on the road that are the earliest clear evidence for a single bishop presiding over a local church. Antioch became one of the five ancient patriarchates, and several churches trace a patriarchal succession to it today.

The school of interpretation associated with Antioch is better understood as a habit of reading than as an institution with a building. Its teachers, among them Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom, held that a passage meant what its writer meant in his own situation, and that any spiritual sense had to grow out of that history rather than float free of it. Alexandria read the same texts allegorically, treating the letter as a shell around a higher meaning. Neither side rejected the other method outright, but the difference in emphasis was real and it had consequences.

Those consequences were Christological. A reading that held firmly to the humanity of the gospel narratives tended to describe Christ in terms that kept the divine and human natures distinct. Nestorius, formed in this tradition, was condemned at Ephesus in 431 for what his opponents took to be dividing Christ in two, and Theodore of Mopsuestia was condemned posthumously in 553. The Church of the East, beyond the Roman frontier, kept Theodore as its principal commentator and reads him still, so the Antiochene method survived in Syriac long after it was suppressed in Greek.

John Chrysostom preached in the city for more than a decade before being taken to Constantinople as its bishop. His Antiochene sermons include a series aimed at Christians who kept the Jewish festivals with their neighbours, which is evidence of how closely the two communities lived and a body of text with a long and damaging afterlife in later Christian polemic.