did not come until the fourth century-- the evolving institution began to interact with secular institutions in ways that very much determined the course of Western history throughout the first millennium and during much of the second. These dynamics to some extent overlap and converge.
Key events and issue resolution in the apostolic and postapostolic period must be located geographically because strands of thought and institutional praxis that were to become dominant in Christian history were associated with specific locations: Jerusalem, inland from the southeastern Mediterranean coast in Palestine; Antioch, northward from Jerusalem and inland from the northeastern Mediterranean coast in Syria; and Rome, seat of political power in the Christian era and subsequently the seat of Church power as well.
Antioch was an important center of Christian development. The core source for the establishment of Christianity as a religious movement organized around the figure of Jesus is the Bible, in particular Acts 11.26, which says that "the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch" and which prefigures the universalist/catholic character that the Church was later to assume. In the first part of Acts 11, Peter establishes that the mission of the Church extends to both Jews (circumcised) and Gentiles (uncircumcised), more specifically to those of Judea (Acts 11.1) and to the Grecians (Acts 11.20), i.e., pagan non-Jews on one hand and Hellenized Jews on the other.
Two overlapping issues are of special note with respect to Antioch's status. One has to do with what was to become the universalist spiritual claims of Christianity. In that regard, Campbell cites Paul's career as Christianity's first "organization man," who, "in turning from Pharisee to Christian, [] simply transferred his temperament to the other side of the line and that the Christian Church that he founded thus inherited and carried into Europe the stamp of his Levan...