No Robots

But this I confess to thee, that according to the way, which they call a sect, so do I serve the Father and my God, believing all things which are written in the law and the prophets.--Acts 24:14

They were called after the name of their leader: Jesus of Nazareth (Yeshua ha-Notzri). Many people bear surnames derived from their place of origin. The Jewish custom was to identify an individual by the father's name. In this case, though, calling him ha-Notzri rather than bar-Joseph emphasizes his humiliating status as a bastard.

No Robots

I made a mistake above. I thought you were questioning whether the sect called themselves The Way. I guess I was just anticipating what you would object to rather than actually carefully reading what you wrote.ops:

Anyway, to really answer your question, Acts tells us when they were first called Christians:

And Barnabas went to Tarsus to seek Saul: whom, when he had found, he brought to Antioch.
And they conversed there in the church a whole year; and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians.--Acts 11:26

From this we see that "Christian" originated as an insider term.

show_no_mercy

"Notzri" isn't a place though. It would be like saying "Jesus the Gnostic" or "Jesus the Essene" and then concluding that "Essene" is a place; the Notzrim were a sect of Samaritan Jews, not a town.

Chili

Where I live we have the Martenites the Torkelites and the Ramerites and they are a branch of a branch of a particular sect of Mennonites. There were also about 30 members that sold their farm and left the area because they did not think that any of these three were right.

Chili

That would be typical as a sign of the 'temple ruckuss' which I hold is a natural response to enlightenement in a Martin Luther kind of way.

Chili

Exactly, and Nazarenes they were until Jesus showed the us the right way and so Jesuits they are today in Christendom.

No Robots

Ha-Notzri, which has been variously understood as person from Nazareth or a person belonging to a group called Notzrim (Guardians, or watchmen)--Jewish view of Jesus.

Jeffrey Gibson

And there is the longstanding custom of Hassidic immigrants to name their communities and the religious movements of which they consider themselves a part after the villages they emigrated from (e.g. Lubavitchers), no?

Chili

Because all were called and among them were the chosen ones. That is why "he shall be a Nazoren" is written in contrast with "can anything good come from Nazareth."

Galilee, then, is where the lamb is nourished by the wolf and that is how it is done. Ie. all are called but few are chosen now means that the called ones nourish the chosen ones while not realizing that they are doing this (are in fact the pharisees needed for the trial and conviction).

No Robots

Something pertinent:

The ancient writers liked puns and plays on words. It has been suggested that Matthew is playing on the words of Isaiah in Isaiah 11:1: 'A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.' The word for branch is nezer; and it is just possible that Matthew is playing on the word Nazarene and the word nezer; and that he is saying at one and the same time that Jesus was from Nazareth and that Jesus was the nezer, the promised branch from the stock of Jesse, the descendant of David, the promised anointed king of God. No one can tell. What prophecy Matthew had in mind must remain a mystery.--The Gospel of Matthew / William Barclay (Westminster John Knox, 2001), p.3.