From the Elder's Pen "Antioch" 12/15/02 Past/Future Articles

 Antioch was the third city of the Roman Empire.  Its population was over a half million people.  It was surpassed only by Rome and Alexandria and was the Mediterranean Doorway to the Great Eastern Highways.  It was three hundred miles north of Jerusalem being called “Queen of the East”, and “Antioch the Beautiful.”  Embellished with everything that “Roman wealth, Greek Aestheticism and oriental luxury could produce.”

 Its worship of Ashtaroth was accompanied with immoral indulgence and unbelievable indecency.  Yet multitudes of its people accepted Christ.  It became the birthplace of the name “Christian,” and center of organized effort to Christianize the world.
 
The church of Antioch was founded soon after the stoning of Stephen, by those who were scattered abroad in the persecution that followed probably about A. D. 32 consisting of first only Jewish Christians.  (Acts 11:19).

 About ten years later, certain Christians of Cyprus and Cyrene, possibly having heard of the conversion and reception of Cornelius into the church, came to Antioch and began to preach to the Gentiles that they could be Christians without becoming Jewish Proselytes.  God Himself in some way was with them and showed His approval.  (Acts 11:21)  The Jerusalem Church, convinced of Peter’s story about Cornelius, that it was all the work of God, sent Barnabas to carry the blessing of the mother church, and multitudes of Gentiles were added to the Lord. (V. 24)

 Barnabas went to Tarsus, about 100 miles northwest from Antioch, and found Paul, and brought him to Antioch.  This seems to have been some ten years after Paul’s conversion, three years of which he had spent in Damascus and Arabia, and the rest, as far as is known, in Tarsus.  God had called Saul to carry the Gospel “far hence to the Gentiles.” (Acts 22:21)  No doubt, Paul had spent his time, wherever he may have been, unceasingly telling the story of Jesus.  Now he becomes an active leader in this new-born center of Gentile Christianity.