Blackwell Reference Online

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Modern Antakya ( see hatay ). City founded c. 300 bc by Seleucus the Great on the Orontes to honour his father Antiochus, and serve as city of the newly established Seleucid realm. Antioch became the third city of the Roman empire, after rome itself and alexandria . By tradition Peter established his seat in Antioch before going to Rome, and in Antioch the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. Bishop and martyr Ignatius Theophoros, the God-bearer (d. c. 107), was one of the most important of the apostolic fathers. Under the Christian empire, the patriarch of its well-organized church ranked immediately after the pope of Alexandria. Like Alexandria, and often in opposition to it, Antioch became a centre of Christian learning with strong emphasis on grammatically and philologically sound historical interpretation of the bible . It produced leaders and thinkers as diverse as john chrysostom , Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius, severus and peter the fuller . Antioch was sacked by the Persians under Khosroe I in 540, restored under Justinian, taken by the Arabs in 636, returned to Byzantine rule in 969, taken by Seljuk Turks in 1084 and by the crusaders in 1098, becoming the capital of an independent principality until Muslim forces overthrew it in 1268. The Christological controversies tore the Antiochian church apart: supporters of Nestorius found a safer ... log in or subscribe to read full text