Untitled Sermon (13)
Without question Antioch, called by Josephus “third among the cities of the Roman world” after Rome and Alexandria (War 3.29), was of great strategic importance to early Christianity. It was to be the first major cosmopolitan city outside Israel where Christianity clearly established itself as a force with which to be reckoned. Located on the Orontes, some eighteen miles upstream from its seaport on the Mediterranean (Seleucia Pieria), Antioch was a great commercial center and near an important religious center connected with Artemis and Apollo (Daphne). It was the Roman provincial capital for Syria, and by the middle of the first century had an estimated population of a half-million people. On its coins Antioch called itself “Antioch, metropolis, sacred, and inviolable, and autonomous, and sovereign, and capital of the East.” It had come a long way since its founding by Seleucus I about 300 B.C., who named it after his father Antiochus. For our purposes it is crucial to note that Jews had played a part in this city from its earliest days, and there was a considerable and well-established Jewish community in Antioch in the middle of the first century A.D. In a revealing remark Josephus tells us that proselytes to Judaism were especially abundant in this city (War 7.45; cf. Acts 6:5 above on Nicolaus). There were