An important element in the population of Jerusalem in the time of our Lord was the Hellenist. This name was applied to the Jews who for various reasons, mainly for trade, had made their home in the commercial cities of the Levant. Here they had learned to speak the prevailing language of the countries around the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek, and had been, to a varying extent, intellectually broadened and quickened by contact with the Greek world. Large numbers of them returned to Jerusalem for educational purposes or to gratify their devout feelings, but they were regarded by the Palestinean Jews with something approaching contempt for their willingness to live away from the sacred soil of Palestine. It was in the Hellenist mind, thus stimulated and developed by the Greek spirit, that the first development of Christianity occurred. To the Hellenist Stephen, the first thinker, the first controversialist, and the first martyr of Christianity, belongs the honor of first discovering the universal principle of Christianity, and his interpretation of Christianity brought about his own death and kindled a persecution which scattered the Christians of Jerusalem up and down the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean. To some of these fugitive Hellenist Christians, partakers of the thought of the martyred Stephen, belongs the not less lofty honor of being the first to overleap the jealously guarded barriers of Judaism and to open the door of Christianity to the Gentiles. "They therefore that were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene [and therefore Hellenists] who, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." Acts 11:19-20. It is to be noted that it was, probably, this influx of Greeks into the Church hitherto composed only of Jews which made necessary a new name applicable to the composite body, and so it came about that "the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch." A Church, in part Jewish but, probably, in still larger part Gentile, thus sprang up in Antioch, which became the mother city of Gentile, or world-wide, Christianity. From this centre the greatest of all Hellenist Jews, Saul of Tarsus, fired by that very universalism which had at first aroused the hatred of his bitter Jewish particularism, carried Christianity westward through Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and, possibly, even to Spain.