What we do know is that, while he was living in Tarsus, a man named Barnabas thought of Saul and came to Tarsus to find him. Barnabas was another man something like Stephen. He saw farther than most of the others did. He was always ready for new things and he was full of faith and activity. Like Saul, he could not rest—he wanted to tell everybody what he had discovered. He heard of a new movement in the great city of Antioch, the capital of the province of Syria, and he went off to Antioch to see what this movement really was. When he got there he found that some followers of Jesus who had been forced to leave Jerusalem, because of the persecutions, had come to Antioch and had begun a little church there and were preaching to everybody who would listen. It did not make any difference to them whether the people who came to hear were Jews or not. They were as ready to tell the good news about Christ to Greeks as to the people of their own race. It was the first time and the first place in all the world that anybody had done this. In Jerusalem, “those of the way” were all Jews and they had nothing to do with anybody else. They never dreamed that peoples of all races were alike and were equally dear to God and that Christ came to bless and save all men. They made a sharp distinction between Jews and Gentiles. But in Antioch it was all different. Those who formed the church in Antioch forgot about race and thought only about brotherhood. Greeks flocked into the same room with Jews and together they worshipped God like brothers. And here in Antioch where this new spirit was born and where this new movement began, the followers of Christ were for the first time called “Christians.” In Jerusalem this word was not used or thought of, because no outside people came in and there was no need of a new name. But in Antioch where the Greeks joined the movement and where everybody discovered that a new religion was born they needed a word to name it with and so they called these persons who talked so much about Christ, “Christians.” Barnabas was filled with joy when he found what was going on in Antioch. It looked like the beginning of a movement that would sweep across the world and change the whole empire. He saw at once that he must have the best man whom he could find to help him push the work along, and as he sat thinking of the different persons who could do this great work, suddenly he remembered the young man whose persecutions had driven these first Christians to Antioch and he knew that Saul was now a changed man and a powerful champion of the truth. Whereupon he hurried off through the Syrian gate in the mountains to fetch Saul to Antioch and Saul went back with him to begin the greatest work any man has ever done in the world. XII THE FIRST GREAT MISSIONARY JOURNEY