Adrienne Is Not in the Bible — and Neither Was “Christian”, at First

Adrienne is not in the Bible. It is the French feminine of Adrian, which is the Latin Hadrianus, “from Hadria” — a town on the north Italian coast that also gave its name to the Adriatic.

Which means the name is three removes from any meaning of its own: a feminine of a masculine of a place. And that, dear friends, is very nearly how Christians got their name too.

What does the name Adrienne mean?

From Hadria, by way of Adrian and then of French. Hadria was an Etruscan port; the Romans used Hadrianus as a family tag; the emperor who walled northern Britain carried it; saints and six popes carried it after him; and French gave it a feminine ending.

Nothing in that chain describes a virtue. It describes a route.

Is Adrienne in the Bible?

No — in no language and no spelling, and there is no Hebrew form. Latin place-names and French endings both lie well beyond the close of Scripture.

But the shape of the name is worth following, because it is the shape of our whole identity as Christians.

A name we did not choose for ourselves

Luke drops it into a single clause and moves on.

The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

Notice the passive. They were called. They did not adopt it, vote on it or announce it. Somebody in Antioch — outsiders, most likely, possibly the city’s famously sharp-tongued crowd — started referring to these people by the name of the man they kept talking about, and it stuck.

It is a derived name. Christ’s people. Christ-ians, with an ending added, in the same way a Roman would say a household belonged to someone.

The Church took the label handed to it and wore it for two thousand years.

Why a derived name is the right one

There is something fitting in this, and it is worth pausing over.

We have no name of our own. Everything we are called, we are called on account of somebody else. Christian. Child of God. Heir. Member of a body whose head is not us.

Paul makes the point about the family: I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. Derives. Nobody in that sentence generated their own.

And a name given by outsiders, possibly as a jibe, turning into the most-worn religious identity in history — that is a fair summary of how God tends to work with material.

For everyone who carries the name

Adrienne: from Hadria, twice removed, in French.

May we be content to be named after somebody else, since that is the only kind of name that finally matters.

May we wear the label well enough that whoever uses it of us is not being ironic.

And may we remember that the first people to be called Christians did not choose the word — they simply behaved in a way that made the city reach for it.

Related reading

• Adrian Is Not in the Bible — It Means “From Hadria”
• Adriana Is Not in the Bible — but the Adriatic Sea Is
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names