Marc’s Musings

Life’s short. Live passionately.

New take on the term “pagan”

July 13th, 2005 by Marc

I’m doing some reading up on baptism in preparation for VCW’s first baptism 10 days from now.

Today I read an interesting factoid about the term “pagan” in Henry Chadwick’s wonderful volume The Early Church. The term “paganus” had two meanings: (1) rustic and (2) non-military as in “civilian.”

According to Chadwick, Christians would refer to non-baptized believers as “pagans” because they had not yet joined the Lord’s Army!

I just love learning stuff like this.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 12:31 pm and is filed under church planting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 response about “New take on the term “pagan””

  1. Leeder said:

    oh marc -
    you’re such a dork. :) it was totally fun visiting your blog while i was in an ultra-boring software training session today!

    hope all is well!! :)

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