According to Luke the Evangelist- himself a Greco-Syrian member of that community: The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.St Peter and St Paul the Apostle are considered the cofounders of the Patriarchate of Antioch, the former being its first bishop.

[15]These ethno-cultural and social tensions were eventually surmounted by the emergence of a new, typically Antiochian Greek doctrine (doxa) spearheaded by Paul (himself a Hellenized Cilician Jew) and his followers be they 1.

Paul's efforts were probably facilitated by the arrival of a fourth wave of Greek-speaking newcomers to Cilicia, Northwestern Syria, Galilee and Jerusalem: Cypriot and 'Cyrenian' (Libyan) Jewish migrants of non-Egyptian North African Jewish origin and gentile Roman settlers from Italy — many of whom already spoke fluent Koine Greek and/or sent their children to Greco-Syrian schools.

[16]These subtle, progressive socio-cultural shifts are somehow summarized succinctly in Chapter 3 of the Epistle to the Galatians: There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither slave nor free: there is neither male nor female.

[17]The unique combination of ethnocultural traits inhered from the fusion of a Greek cultural base, Hellenistic Judaism and Roman civilization gave birth to the distinctly Antiochian "Eastern Mediterranean-Roman" Christian traditions of Cilicia (Southeastern Turkey) and Syria/Lebanon: The mixture of Roman, Greek, and Jewish elements admirably adapted Antioch for the great part it played in the early history of Christianity.

[18]Some of the typically Antiochian ancient liturgical traditions of the community rooted in Hellenistic Judaism and, more generally, Second Temple Greco-Jewish Septuagint culture, were expunged progressively in the late medieval and modern eras by both Phanariot European-Greek (Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople) and Vatican (Roman Catholic) theologians who sought to 'bring back' Levantine Greek Orthodox and Greek-Catholic communities into the European Christian fold.

But members of the community in Southern Turkey, Syria and Lebanon still call themselves Rūm (روم) which means "Eastern Romans" or "Asian Greeks" in Arabic.

In that particular context, the term "Rūm" is used in preference to "Yūnāniyyūn" (يونانيون) which means "European Greeks" or "Ionians" in Biblical Hebrew (borrowed from Old Persian Yavan = Greece) and Classical Arabic.

Members of the community also call themselves 'Melkites', which literally means "monarchists" or "supporters of the emperor" in Semitic languages – a reference to their past allegiance to Greco-Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine imperial rule.

Following the fall of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Tsarist Russian Empire (long the protector of Greek-Orthodox minorities in the Levant), and the ensuing rise of French colonialism, communism, Islamism and Israeli nationalism, some members of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch embraced secularism and/or Arab Nationalism as a way to modernize and "secularize" the newly formed nation-states of Northern Syria and Lebanon, and thus provide a viable "alternative" to political Islam, communism and Jewish nationalism (viewed as ideologies potentially exclusive of Byzantine Christian minorities).

Various (sometimes secular) intellectuals with a Greek Orthodox Antiochian background played an important role in the development of Baathism, the most prominent being Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the movement.

[19] In the early 20th century (notably during World War I), Lebanese-American writers of Greek-Orthodox Antiochian background such as Abraham Dimitri Rihbany, known as Abraham Mitrie Rihbany (a convert to Presbyterianism), popularized the notion of studying ancient Greco-Semitic culture to better understand the historic and ethnocultural context of the Christian Gospels: his original views were developed in a series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly, and in 1916 published in book form as The Syrian Christ.