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.

Share and Enjoy:

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””

Leeder said:
July 14th, 2005 at 2:31 pm
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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