Antioch is where Christianity became Christianity. It’s one of the five ancient apostolic sees, churches founded directly by the Apostles, and the place where followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.”
The story starts in Acts 11. After Stephen’s martyrdom, believers scattered from Jerusalem and some ended up in Antioch, the third-largest city in the Roman Empire. They preached to Jews first, then to Greeks. The church grew so fast that the apostles sent Barnabas to check it out. He brought Paul. They taught there for a year, and the community exploded.
This wasn’t just another congregation. Antioch became the launching pad for Paul’s missionary journeys. When the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them,” it happened in Antioch (Acts 13:2). The church fasted, prayed, laid hands on them, and sent them out. Every time Paul finished a journey, he came back to Antioch to report. It was home base.
St. Peter served as Antioch’s first bishop around AD 44, staying about seven years before heading to Rome. That makes Antioch one of the Petrine sees, though we don’t make the jurisdictional claims Rome does. Peter appointed Evodius as his successor. Later, St. Ignatius of Antioch became bishop, the same Ignatius who wrote letters on his way to martyrdom in Rome around 107. Those letters are some of our earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament. He’s the one who first used the phrase “catholic church” and wrote powerfully about the Eucharist as Christ’s actual flesh and blood, not a symbol.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 formally recognized Antioch as the third patriarchate, after Rome and Alexandria. But its importance wasn’t about rankings. Antioch was a theological powerhouse. The Antiochene School of biblical interpretation emphasized the literal and historical sense of Scripture, balancing Alexandria’s more allegorical approach. This mattered when the Church had to articulate who Christ is, fully God and fully man, one Person in two natures. Antiochian theologians kept pushing for the concrete reality of the Incarnation.
Here’s something people don’t always realize. When you’re Antiochian Orthodox, you’re not just part of a jurisdiction or an ethnic club. You’re connected to the church that sent out the first missionaries, that argued through the hardest questions about Gentile inclusion, that gave us the word “Christian.” The Patriarchate of Antioch has endured Persian invasions, Arab conquests, Crusades, and Ottoman rule. It’s still there. The current Patriarch of Antioch (technically “Patriarch of Antioch and All the East”) oversees Orthodox Christians throughout the Middle East and the diaspora, including our Archdiocese here in North America.
We preserve ancient liturgies, the Divine Liturgy of St. James goes back to Jerusalem and Antioch’s earliest days. We’ve adapted to new contexts (bilingual worship, Western converts, life in Southeast Texas) without abandoning what we received. That’s very Antiochian, actually. The church in Acts 11 was already multicultural, already wrestling with how to be fully Christian and fully engaged with the world around them.
When you walk into St. Michael’s, you’re walking into a parish that traces its lineage directly back to St. Peter’s see, to the city where Paul launched his missions, to the community that first bore the name Christian. That’s not romantic nostalgia. It’s who we are. The same faith, the same Eucharist, the same struggle to follow Jesus in a complicated world. Antioch matters because it’s where the Church learned to be the Church, not just for Jews, not just for one city, but for everyone. We’re still learning that lesson.
