Q. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, this is a swear word: "The word christianos was used twice in the Greek text [of the New Testament] as a device of scorn, since in the ancient world it conveyed a much different sense than it does today. The use of the word christianos did not name the sect, but it was a derisive, scornful label that meant they were like gullible, dumb beasts, or cretins. The word christianos (Latin, Christianus) was a term of scorn, traced back through a related word which history never revised: cre-tin (krêt'n) n. 1. A person affiliated with cretinism. Slang: An idiot [French crétin, from French dialectical, deformed and mentally retarded person found in certain Alpine valleys, from Vulgar Latin christianius, Christian, human being, poor fellow, from Latin Christianus, Christian; see Christian.]. So why Do You Use the Word 'Christian' to describe yourselves? Why not 'messianic', 'Nazarene' or some other biblical term?

A. As a matter of fact we use many terms - 'Messianic', 'Messianic Israelite', 'believer', 'Messianic Evangelical', 'Christian', 'New Covenant Christian', 'talmid', 'disciple', 'follower of the Way', etc., depending what we're trying to get across or emphasise. And whatever the word 'Christian' meant anciently, it doesn't mean that in modern English anymore. Today it simply means a 'follower of Christ' just as 'messianic' means a 'follower of Messiah'.

That aside, the Dictionary is in error (even dictionaries are not infallible, and, especially the small ones, and often make selections from a wide variety of interpretations). You also need to remember that modern dictionaries and liberal theological commentaries tend to reflect a strong secular bias against Christianity/Messianism and religion in general, and any opportunity to degrade or riddicule the Besorah (Gospel) is eagerly sought by their editors.

My Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), which is about 4,000 pages long and comes in two volumes, was published before the modernist era got under way and the language was still reasonably well preserved from secular left-wingers and the purveyors of 'Newspeak'. The entry for 'Christian' occupies nearly an entire page (p.390) and traces the etymology and use of the word throughout the ages. The word falls into two general categories:

• 1. Of persons and communities who believe, profess, or belong to the religion of Christ; or
• 2. Of things pertaining to Christ or His religion; or belonging to Christianity;

So let me critique the American Heritage Dictionary by making some observations:

Firstly, there are three occurrences of the word (in Acts 11:26, 26:26, and 1 Peter 4:16), not two. That its editors could make such a mistake bespeaks sloppiness and does not inspire confidence in their scholarship, I have to say.

Secondly, whatever the Greek christianos meant originally, by the time it was Latinised, it meant something quite different to the Heritage dictionary's claims. Indeed, scholars attribute the formation of the word 'Christian' to the Latin, not the Greek, where plural nouns ending in -iani may well denote the soldiers of a particular general (e.g. Galbiani, Galba's men [1]) and hence partisans of an individual. Both elements are combined in the quasi-military Augustiani. In the late 1st century AD at least, Caesariani was used of Caesar's slaves and clients, and in the Gospels we meet the Herodianoi or "Herodians" (Mt.12:16; Mk.3:6; 12:13, NIV), who may have been partisans or clients of Herod.

Christian(o)i, therefore, may have originally been thought of as 'soldiers of Christus', or 'the household of Christus', or 'the partisans of Christus'. It has even been suggested by one scholar (Mattingley) Christiani, by an Antiochene joke (Antioch was where Luke said the term originated - Ac.11:26), was modelled on Augustiani, the organised brigade of chanting devotees who led the public adulation of Nero Augustus - both the enthusiasm of the believers and the ludicrous homage of the imperial cheer-leaders being satirised by the implicit comparison with each other. But, who knows, the name 'Christian' may be older than the institution of the Augstiani.

I have to say that I tend to be rather sceptical of the linguistic puritans in the Messianic Movement. Take, for example, the word 'El' ('God') which is indisputably a pagan loan word in Hebrew and was used as a title of the Ba'als which comes from a root meaning 'strength' or 'might'. So it is hardly suprising that the pagans used it, since they obviously believed their deities were 'strong' and 'mighty' too. That doesn't mean 'strong' and 'mighty' are pagan by association - they are morally and religiously neutral words which is why they are not only used of Yahweh but of people and even of things (abstractly).

The same is true of 'Adonai' which is a loan word from 'Adonis', the pagan Greek god. The word simply means being 'full of life and power'. Interestingly, it was only later, after the Babylonian Exile and all the corruption of religion that took place there in a pagan environment, that 'Adonai' became popular amongst the Judahites and has continued to be popular even today amongst the Jews, messianic as well as non-messianic. Personally it's a word I avoid, not because its meaning is morally and religiously neutral, but because it tends to be superimposed on the Divine Name (YHWH - Yahweh) out of a sense of over-inflated piety.

If you tried to 'cleanse' every pagan loan word in English (or any other modern language) you would decimate the language and make it unusable. You would not be able to communicate. That is why I am very much against Bible versions that put so many Hebrew words in the text (like the RSTNE) that it becomes incomprehensible to any but the 'élite' of the group who alone have taken the trouble to learn them all. In such a case it would be better to read the text in the Hebrew or Aramaic original. At the other extreme, I don't like English Bibles which contain little or no explanatory notes that show alternative renditions, because then the translator can influence the reader to be uncritical towards the scholar's biases (see Bible Versions).

I used to be a zealot Hebrew purist when I was younger. No more. Many messianic purists go to great lengths to avoid anything to do with either the word or the group of people who call themselves 'Christian' because of the doctrinal chaos and apostacy in the churches. I can relate to that, up to a point. But by the same token I can think of many reasons to avoid the word 'Messianic' because there are some crazies and heretics amongst them too who use, for the most part, the 'right' terminology. Yet if you follow them they will lead you seriously astray.

If we become zealous language purists in the sense I am speaking, we will end up not using any labels for Yahweh's people at all because of strange groups that use all these terms - we could refuse to call ourselves followers of "the Way" (Ac.19:9; 19:23; 18:25, etc.) because of crazies like the 'Way International', refuse to call ourselves 'Netsarim' because of some heretical messianic groups who deny the deity of Messiah who use the same term, and so on. You will end up a rather objectionable legalist going absolutely insane and incapable to reaching people if you take that route. You will start making "every man an offender for a word" (Is.29:21, KJV) and miss the whole point, just as the politicially correct moderns do with all their pronouns and taboo words. The Besorah (Gospel) is really very simple and we don't want to complicate it by using words that confuse rather than enlighten.

Yahweh is interested in the substance far, far more than the outer shell which we call 'words'. He wants righteousness of the heart and in deeds and cares little how you roll your tongue, move your lips and vibrate your vocal cords. He can't even hear what you physically say anyway - He's listening inside to the thoughts and intents of your heart. Whether you say God, Lord, Yahweh, Yahuah, Jehovah, or any of the dozens of variants spawned by the messianic movement, will make no difference to Him, if your intent is to honour, love and obey Him. Remember, to worship the 'Name' is to worship the substance of the Being behind it. So long as we know what the meaning of words is, that is the most important thing. That means we need to know what words mean today, in our time, because they are continually evolving.

Were you aware that words at the beginning of the Tanakh (Old Testament), like Torah, evolved in meaning to mean something more that what it meant originally. That is why careful translations by honest scholars is needed and why a multiplicity of Bible versions is desirable, messianic and orthodox Christian.

Now I am not obviously saying that words don't matter at all - we still need to be careful in how we use them in order to be accurate and, where necessary, so we can honour Yahweh by not giving Him a name which means something blasphemous (like 'Jehovah' which means 'Jah is perverse'). If the word 'Christian' meant today what the American Heritage Dictionary claims it meant in the first century, I would definitely not be using it. Even liberal commentaries like Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible accept the scholarship that I have presented to you because it is not contested any more. I'm sorry, but linking 'Christian' to the French for 'cretin' just doesn't wash even if the French word for a Christian sounds like it, and may indeed have evolved in that language as a term of abuse, but I honestly don't know. You'll need to talk to a French linguistic scholar.

A word of advice - don't limit yourself to denomination-orientated 'dictionaries' such as the one you quoted from (see image at top). This is what sects and cults like the Jehivah's witnesses do with books like Make Sure of All Things and their two-volume, Insight into the Scriptures which are designed to conform you to the point-of-view and interpretations of a single man or group of men like the board of the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society. By all means use them - I consult the writings of practically every Christian and Messianic denomination under the sun that I come across - but do your own homework. Don't, like a lot of messianics do, limit yourself to single books like Fossilized Customs or the big appendix at the back of the Aramaic English New Testament (which occupies a third of the whole volume) because they do contain errors and opinions, and often work off false occultic assumptions like kabbalism (a weakness of messianics). Yet don't misunderstand me - I think this work is a fantastic resource! I use it all the time.

I hope this has helped.

Endnotes

[1] Tacitus, Hist. i.51

Comments from Readers

[1] "What if I were to tell you Christians were praising Serapis in 135 BC before they were praising Jesus?" (WK, Kenya, 28 September 2018)

Author's response: I would say you were basing the claim on very poor scholarship indeed. The accusation that Christianity/Messianism is based on some recycled myth, such as that of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, and Mithras - has been made many times, with Serapis Christus being one of the latest concocted by sceptics. The fact that 'Christus' or 'Christos' appears in the title of this Greek deity, artifically concocted by Ptolemy I Soter in a bid to unite the Greek and Egyptian areas of his Empire, proves nothing, any more that Ptolemy I Soter was an earlier version of the Christian 'Saviour' because his name included the word 'Soter', meaning 'Saviour' (from which we get the branch of theology called Soteriology), or because non-Messianic Jews also call themselves 'messianic Jews' because they are looking forward to a Messiah (Christ), even though they don't believe it was Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ). Shared names or terms do not necessarily prove a connection, nor the fact that Yah'shua (Jesus) had a beard like Serapis Christus, or because they supposedly looked alike (no one knows with any degree of certainty what Yah'shua/Jesus looked like). Indeed, there is a a book in the Apocrypha known as The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach (also known as Ecclesiasticus) that has been in Bibles for centuries, but no one believes this is the same 'Jesus' of the New Testament. For a good article on this subject, see Is the Account of Jesus Taken From the Story of Serapis Christus? on the website, Got Questions.

This page was created on 21 September 2018 Last updated on 21 September 2018

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