The Way

Before anyone called them Christians, they called themselves something else. Saul, hunting them down, asked the high priest for letters "to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem" (Acts 9:2, ESV). Not "the church." Not "Christians" — that word doesn't exist yet. Just the Way — Greek ὁδός (hodos, G3598), the ordinary word for a road. The name shows up six times across Acts, always on the movement's own lips or its accusers', and it isn't invented there. It reaches back through a word the Old Testament had already loaded with meaning for a thousand years, and forward into a claim Jesus made about himself the night before he died: "I am the way" (John 14:6). This study follows hodos through the whole of the New Testament — where it names a literal road, where it means a course of life, where it becomes a title for Jesus, and where it becomes a name his followers wore before anyone called them anything else.

Key Takeaways

(This section follows the Key Takeaways format this site is prototyping — see that page for what each part is for and why.)

Types & Prophecy

Prophecy. Isaiah 40:3 — "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God" — is a direct verbal prediction of a forerunner, and all four Gospels independently quote it and apply it to John the Baptist (Matthew 3:3; Mark 1:2-3; Luke 3:4-6; John 1:23). No other Old Testament "way" text gets this treatment: four separate authors, writing for different audiences, converge on the same verse to identify the same man doing the same job — preparing a road for someone else to walk.

Lessons about Jesus

He doesn't point to a way. He claims to be one: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6, ESV).
The claim is exclusive, not one option among several — the same exclusivity Peter later states flatly of his name: "there is salvation in no one else" (Acts 4:12, ESV).
Being with him is already arrival, not merely direction: "he who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9, ESV). The way and the destination aren't two different things.
His death is what makes the way passable. Hebrews calls it "the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh" (Hebrews 10:20, ESV) — access to God that the Old Testament's own barred curtain had made impossible for anyone but one priest, once a year (Leviticus 16).
The name his earliest followers chose for themselves — "the Way" — names him before it names them. To belong to the Way is to belong to the one who said he is the way.

Memory verses

✝️ John 14:6 (ESV)

6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

✝️ Acts 24:14 (ESV)

14 But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets.

Be Transformed

Think: a "way" is walked, not just agreed with. If your Christianity is a set of beliefs you hold rather than a road you're on, that's a narrower thing than what the earliest believers meant by their own name for themselves.
Attitude: the label outsiders gave them — "Christian," at Antioch — was not the one they gave themselves. Let that reframe whatever labels get pinned on you for following Jesus now; they were never the point, and the earliest church didn't treat them as one either.
Do: name one place this week where "believing the right things about Jesus" and "walking his way" have quietly come apart for you — and take one concrete step back toward the second.

Prayer

Lord Jesus — you did not show us a way to the Father. You said you are the way, and the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to him except through you. Before your people had any other name, they were known simply as those who belonged to your Way.

So let me be one of them in more than name. Where I have settled for agreeing with the truth instead of walking in it, correct me. Open again for me the new and living way your own flesh and blood secured, and let me walk it — not admire it from the roadside. Amen.

Before "Christian": how this study is scoped

Hodos occurs just over a hundred times in the New Testament, and most of those are nothing more than the plain word for a road: the sower's seed that falls "along the path" (Matthew 13:4), the travelers on the Jericho road (Luke 10:31; 18:35), the two disciples walking to Emmaus (Luke 24:32, 35), Philip catching up to a chariot "on the road" (Acts 8:26, 36, 39). None of that is this study's subject, and a concordance survey has to say so plainly rather than force theology onto every occurrence. What follows tracks the roughly one-third of occurrences where hodos carries figurative or titular weight — a course of life, a body of teaching, or a name for a movement — and traces that weight back to its Old Testament source before following it into two places the New Testament pushes it further than the Old ever did: John 14:6 and the book of Acts.

John's Gospel. Chapters 13-14 sit inside the Upper Room Discourse, Jesus's farewell speech to the Twelve on the night of his arrest. Judas has just left to betray him (13:30); Jesus has just told Peter he will deny him three times before dawn (13:38). "Let not your hearts be troubled" (14:1) responds directly to that trouble, not to some general anxiety. Thomas's honest confusion — "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" (14:5, ESV) — is what draws out 14:6. The claim to be "the way" isn't offered in the abstract; it answers a specific, frightened question from a specific man in a specific room, hours before the cross.

Acts. Luke's second volume narrates the gospel's spread from Jerusalem to Rome, and "the Way" threads through nearly the whole of it: first in Saul's mouth as persecutor (9:2), last in Paul's own mouth as prisoner, defending himself before the Roman governor Felix (24:14, 22). In between, it names the movement at a synagogue argument in Ephesus (19:9) and a riot there over lost silver trade (19:23). Luke never explains the name or introduces it as new vocabulary — he uses it the way a writer uses a name everyone already knows. "Christian" (Χριστιανός, Christianos) appears exactly three times in the New Testament (Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16), always as somebody else's word for the movement, never as its own. Both threads are worth following in full before asking what either one means.

The Hebrew and Greek word: derek and hodos

דֶּרֶךְ (derek, H1870, TWOT root 453a) is one of the most common nouns in the Hebrew Bible — "way, road, journey," and, constantly, a course of life or conduct: a person's derek is how they live, not just where they walk. ὁδός (hodos, G3598) carries the identical double sense in Greek, and the Septuagint regularly renders derek with hodos — which is why a New Testament author reaching for "way" in a moral or theological sense isn't inventing a metaphor. He's using vocabulary the Hebrew Bible had already stretched the same direction for a thousand years, and that Greek-speaking Jews had already been reading that way in their own Bible.

Three uses recur often enough in the Old Testament to matter for everything that follows:

The way as a person's conduct. "What does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways" (Deuteronomy 10:12, ESV) — obedience is walking a path, an idiom so basic to the Old Testament that Deuteronomy uses it as shorthand for the whole of covenant loyalty.
Two ways, not one. "The LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish" (Psalm 1:6, ESV). Psalm 1 closes on a stark either/or that later Jewish and Christian literature returns to often (the Didache opens with the identical "two ways" framework), and that Jesus himself restates: "the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Matthew 7:14, ESV).
A way that can be lost and asked for again. "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, 'We will not walk in it'" (Jeremiah 6:16, ESV) — the way already exists; the sin is refusing to walk a path already known, not ignorance of where it is.

None of this is abstract philosophy. In Hebrew idiom, derek is what a life looks like from the outside — which is exactly the sense the New Testament inherits and exactly why a group of believers could later be identified, without further explanation, simply as people "of the Way."

"Prepare the way of the LORD": Isaiah's forerunner text

One Isaiah passage does more work in the New Testament's "way" vocabulary than any other single Old Testament verse.

✝️ Isaiah 40:3 (ESV)

3 A voice cries: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

Isaiah's own setting is Judah's coming return from Babylonian exile — the prophets elsewhere describe that return as a new exodus, God leading his people through the wilderness the way he once led their ancestors out of Egypt (compare Isaiah 11:16; Hosea 2:14-15).⁶ All four Gospels quote this verse and apply it, without exception, to John the Baptist:

Gospel	Reference (ESV)
Matthew	3:3 — "Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight"
Mark	1:2-3 — same quotation, prefaced by Malachi 3:1's messenger oracle
Luke	3:4-6 — extends the quotation through Isaiah 40:5, "all flesh shall see the salvation of God"
John	1:23 — put in John the Baptist's own mouth: "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness"

That's four independent authors, writing to four different audiences, all reaching for this one verse to identify the same man doing the same job. John doesn't announce a new religion; he clears a road for someone else to walk on it, which is exactly what a forerunner (Malachi's own word, quoted at Mark 1:2) does. Two more Isaiah texts extend the same picture:

✝️ Isaiah 35:8 (ESV)

8 And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.

A road that only the redeemed may walk, closed to the unclean — this is the same exclusivity principle that Jesus states in far more concentrated form at John 14:6, centuries later, applied now to a person rather than a highway. And Luke's Gospel puts the connection between forerunner and fulfillment in Zechariah's own mouth, prophesying over his infant son John:

✝️ Luke 1:76-79 (ESV)

76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, 77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, 78 because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Isaiah's "way of the LORD" was already, before Jesus ever spoke, a road prepared for God's own personal arrival — which is the loaded background any first-century Jewish hearer would bring to the moment John's Gospel and Jesus's own claim make explicit.

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life": Jesus as the Way

John 14:6 answers Thomas directly, but everything in it is compressed. The Greek repeats the definite article before each of the three predicate nouns — ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή — "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," each noun marked as definite in its own right rather than one shared article loosely covering all three. The grammar itself is making an exclusivity claim before the following sentence states one outright: not a way among options, but the way, full stop.

Three facets sit inside that one claim:

The way is a destination, not a set of directions. Thomas's question was "how can we know the way" (14:5) — he wants a route, the kind of information a map gives. Jesus answers with a person. The claim does the opposite of what a set of directions would do: it collapses the distance between knowing the way and knowing the destination. "If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him" (14:7, ESV) — and when Philip still asks to be shown the Father separately, Jesus's answer is blunt: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (14:9, ESV). The way and the arrival are the same thing, because both are the same person.

The way fulfills what the Old Testament's own barred access had only pictured. The ESV Study Bible's note on this verse traces the claim back through a set of Old Testament restrictions on approaching God directly — the tabernacle curtain that shut everyone but the high priest out of the Most Holy Place (Exodus 26:33; Leviticus 16), the rejection of unauthorized approach (Leviticus 10:2), the choice of Aaron alone to represent Israel in God's presence (Numbers 17:5).¹ Hebrews states the problem and its fulfillment in the same word. First the problem: "the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing" (Hebrews 9:8, ESV) — under the old covenant, the hodos itself doesn't yet exist for anyone but the high priest, once a year. Then the fulfillment, in the same vocabulary:

✝️ Hebrews 10:19-20 (ESV)

19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.

The curtain that barred entry becomes, in Hebrews' argument, the very thing Christ's own body tears through — the same access problem Isaiah 35:8's guarded highway pictured, now solved not by exclusion but by a person opening the road himself.

The exclusivity is personal, not merely doctrinal. First-century Judaism already had groups that claimed exclusive access to God — most pointedly the Qumran community, whose members believed they alone followed the true path and that other Jewish groups, including the temple establishment, were lost.² Jesus's claim goes further than theirs, and in a different direction. Qumran's exclusivity was a claim about correct teaching and correct practice — join the right community, keep the right calendar, follow the right interpretation of the Law. Jesus doesn't offer a stricter or truer version of that same kind of claim. "He does not teach a way to God, but rather is the way to God."² Peter states the same claim about Jesus's name in Acts 4:12 ("there is salvation in no one else"), and Matthew's Jesus states the same shape of exclusivity about the road itself, back in the Sermon on the Mount: "the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Matthew 7:14, ESV) — the same "two ways" pattern Psalm 1 already taught, now attached to a specific gate and a specific person on the other side of it.

Walking in "the way": the moral-life idiom across the epistles

Outside John 14 and Acts, most of the New Testament's figurative uses of hodos simply continue the Old Testament's "way of life" idiom rather than extending it into anything new. Reading them together shows how thoroughly the New Testament writers inherited derek's range rather than coining a new metaphor of their own:

A way that can be taught rightly or wrongly. Apollos "had been instructed in the way of the Lord" but knew only John's baptism; Priscilla and Aquila "took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately" (Acts 18:25-26, ESV) — the same idiom as Acts's "the Way," lower-case here and descriptive rather than a proper name, but clearly related vocabulary. A slave girl in Philippi cries that Paul and Silas "proclaim to you the way of salvation" (Acts 16:17, ESV).
A way that can go entirely missing. Paul indicts humanity in Romans by quoting Isaiah 59:7-8 almost verbatim: "in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known" (Romans 3:16-17, ESV) — the same Hebrew phrase, derek shalom, behind Isaiah 59:8's "way of peace" discussed further below. Paul's point isn't a wrong way chosen; it's that the way itself is unknown.
A way that false teachers corrupt or abandon. Peter warns that some "will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed" (2 Peter 2:2, ESV); that others, "forsaking the right way," have "followed the way of Balaam" (2:15, ESV); that it would be better never to have known "the way of righteousness" than to know it and turn back (2:21, ESV). That exact phrase — ὁδὸς δικαιοσύνης, "the way of righteousness" — is the same one Jesus uses of John the Baptist: "John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him" (Matthew 21:32, ESV). Peter's false teachers abandon the very way John walked in and the religious leaders refused to believe. Jude names another figure who left it: those who have gone "the way of Cain" (Jude 11, ESV).
A way that describes character, not just direction. James calls the double-minded man "unstable in all his ways" (James 1:8, ESV). Someone who "brings back a sinner from his wandering" (James 5:20, ESV) is, in the underlying Greek, bringing him back ἐκ πλάνης ὁδοῦ αὐτοῦ — literally "from the straying of his way." The ESV drops "way" from its English here even though the Greek word is the same hodos it keeps visible everywhere else in this study; the more literal ASV keeps it — "converteth a sinner from the error of his way" — a case where a second, more wooden translation preserves a word the primary one smooths over. Paul, describing his own example rather than a sinner's failure, uses the identical idiom the other direction: he sends Timothy "to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church" (1 Corinthians 4:17, ESV) — an apostle's manner of life offered as the pattern, not merely his doctrine. Hebrews, quoting Psalm 95 of the wilderness generation, says they "always go astray in their heart" and "have not known my ways" (Hebrews 3:10, ESV) — heart and way named together, as one thing.
God's own ways, set apart from human ones. Paul's doxology marvels at "how unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33, ESV) — a different register entirely, hodos used not of a path a person walks but of God's own inscrutable manner of acting, closer to Isaiah 55:8's "my ways are not your ways."
A "way" that outranks every other gift. After a long list of spiritual gifts, Paul closes with "I will show you a still more excellent way" (1 Corinthians 12:31, ESV) — introducing the love chapter that follows. The gifts are ranked; love is offered as something categorically different, the hodos every gift ought to be exercised inside of.

None of these texts are describing the movement's proper name. They are the ordinary moral-life idiom the Old Testament already supplied — proof that when Luke picks the same word to name the Jesus movement itself, he is drawing on vocabulary his readers would already have understood figuratively, not introducing a new sense from nowhere.

"Any who belonged to the Way": the name before "Christian"

Six times, always with the definite article — ἡ ὁδός, the Way — Acts uses this as a name for the movement, not a description of it:

Reference (ESV)	Context
Acts 9:2	Saul asks the high priest for authority to arrest "any belonging to the Way" in Damascus
Acts 19:9	Some in Ephesus's synagogue speak "evil of the Way," so Paul withdraws to teach separately
Acts 19:23	The silversmiths' riot over Artemis idols: "no little disturbance concerning the Way"
Acts 22:4	Paul's own testimony: "I persecuted this Way to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women"
Acts 24:14	Before Felix: "according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers"
Acts 24:22	Felix, "having a rather accurate knowledge of the Way," defers Paul's case

The name spans Paul's entire career inside the narrative — from persecutor before his conversion (9:2; his own later confession at 22:4) to prisoner defending himself in the same words at the end of it (24:14, 22). Luke never introduces the term or explains it; he uses it the way any writer uses a name the audience is assumed to already know.

Not an unprecedented choice of word. A Jewish sectarian movement calling itself "the Way" was not, in itself, a novelty in this period. The Qumran community — the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, roughly contemporary with the earliest church — used the identical self-designation for itself, on the conviction that it alone preached the true divine path.³ Both groups, independently, reached for the same word for the same reason: a movement convinced it holds the one road to God calling itself, simply, the Road. What is distinctive is not the vocabulary but what stands at the other end of it — for Qumran, a strict community rule; for the church, according to Isaiah 40:3's own trajectory through all four Gospels, the person that trajectory was clearing ground for in the first place.

Insiders' name against outsiders' name. Acts records both sides of the naming at once, and the contrast is deliberate. Paul's own word before Felix is "the Way" — and in the very same sentence he reports what his accusers call it instead: "according to the Way, which they call a sect" (24:14, ESV). Sect translates αἵρεσις (hairesis, G139) — the word Tertullus, the prosecutor, had already used moments earlier, "a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes" (24:5, ESV), and the same word the Jewish community leaders in Rome use of Paul years later: "with regard to this sect we know that everywhere it is spoken against" (28:22, ESV). Every occurrence of hairesis applied to the church in Acts comes from a hostile or outside speaker. "The Way" never does — it is always the movement's word for itself, or a narrator's or official's neutral report of what it calls itself.

"Christian" was somebody else's word first. The label that eventually displaced "the Way" in common usage appears only three times in the New Testament, and never once in a believer's own mouth describing their own group:

✝️ Acts 11:26 (ESV)

26 And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.

Luke's phrasing — "were first called" — is passive; someone else is doing the naming. The ESV Study Bible reads this as a label "applied by the unbelieving public in Antioch," marking the point where the disciples "were beginning to have an identity of their own apart from other Jews."⁴ The Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible is more specific about the word's shape: Χριστιανός follows the pattern of a political nickname, the way partisans of a named leader were tagged elsewhere in the empire — "Pompeiians" for followers of Pompey — and Antioch, in particular, had a local reputation for this kind of mocking label.⁵ The two other New Testament occurrences confirm the label came from outside, not within. King Agrippa, unconvinced by Paul's defense, asks with evident irony, "In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?" (Acts 26:28, ESV) — an outsider's word, used dismissively, of what Paul is trying to make him. And by the time Peter writes, the label has become a legal and social liability serious enough that he has to address it directly: "if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name" (1 Peter 4:16, ESV) — evidence the name was already being used against believers, in courts and in public shame, well before it was something they wore with pride.

Luke's own narration inside Acts never adopts the outsiders' word. He keeps calling the movement "the disciples," "believers," "brothers," or "the Way" — the name that, on the trajectory this study has traced from Isaiah 40:3 through John's Gospel, points back to the man who said, "I am the way."

A translation note: Isaiah's "Way" in capital letters

Both the ESV and the WEB render Isaiah 35:8 with a capitalized "Way" — "the Way of Holiness" (ESV), "it will be for those who walk in the Way" (WEB) — treating the phrase almost as a proper name. The underlying Hebrew doesn't demand that: דֶרֶךְ הַקֹּדֶשׁ (derek haqqodesh) is an ordinary construct phrase, "a way of holiness," grammatically no more a title than "the way of peace" at Isaiah 59:8. The capitalization is a translator's judgment call, almost certainly made with Acts's later usage in mind rather than anything the Hebrew text itself forces. It's a small thing, but worth flagging so the connection between Isaiah 35:8 and Acts's "the Way" gets stated as what it is — a real thematic resonance an English capital letter makes visually obvious — rather than mistaken for a linguistic fact the Hebrew itself asserts.

Then and now

What transcends the first century: the exclusivity claim itself. John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 aren't first-century cultural artifacts to be relativized away — they're stated as flatly true claims about who mediates access to God, and nothing later in the canon walks them back. What is tied to its own moment is the specific vocabulary — "the Way" as the movement's working name faded from use well before the New Testament canon closed, replaced by "Christian," "the church," and other terms that don't appear anywhere in this study's texts. Reviving first-century terminology isn't the point Acts is making by using it.

The principle underneath both threads of this study is the same one: a "way" is walked, not just affirmed. The Old Testament's own idiom already assumed this — derek names how someone actually lives, not what they claim to believe about how they should live — and Acts's choice of name for the earliest church assumes it too. Calling the movement "the Way" was a claim that following Jesus is a road under a believer's feet, not only a set of propositions in their head. That is exactly what "a still more excellent way" turns out to mean at 1 Corinthians 12:31: not a better doctrine about love, but love itself, practiced.

Discussion questions

Thomas asks "how can we know the way" expecting directions; Jesus answers with himself. Where in your own faith are you still looking for directions when what's actually on offer is a person to know?
The earliest believers were named "the Way" by themselves and "a sect" by their accusers, before either label was replaced by "Christian." What does it change to know the name you now wear wasn't the church's own first choice for itself?
Qumran and the earliest church both claimed exclusive access to God, but located that exclusivity in different places — a community's correct practice versus a person. Which is easier to quietly drift toward in your own walk, and why?
Jeremiah 6:16 pictures a "good way" that already exists and is simply refused: "we will not walk in it." Is there a way you already know to be right that you're currently declining to walk?
Paul calls love "a still more excellent way" after a whole chapter about spiritual gifts. What in your own life gets treated as more central than love, that this ranking would correct?

References & Recommended Reading

ESV Bible (Crossway) — primary translation quoted throughout, per this site's translation conventions. World English Bible (WEB), queried from this repo's own text database, used for Isaiah 40:1-5 in initial research and for the Isaiah 35:8 capitalization comparison. American Standard Version (ASV) consulted for the James 5:20 translation comparison — its more literal "the error of his way" keeps the Greek hodos visible where the ESV's "his wandering" drops it.
MACULA Greek Linguistic Datasets (SBLGNT) and MACULA Hebrew Linguistic Datasets (WLC), queried via this repo's references/build/bible-text.db — source of the full New Testament concordance for hodos (G3598) behind this study's scoping, and of every Strong's number, gloss, and Greek/Hebrew form cited above, including the hairesis (G139) contrast at Acts 24:5, 14 and 28:22.
Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT), ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke (Moody Publishers) — root 453a (derek), consulted via this repo's committed TWOT Strong's-number map.
ESV Study Bible (Crossway, 2016) — consulted last, as a check on conclusions already reached from the text. Confirmed the Acts 9:2 reading of "the Way" against Matthew 7:14 and John 14:6, the Leviticus/Numbers background to John 14:6's exclusivity claim, the outsider-applied reading of "Christians" at Acts 11:26, and the Isaiah 40:3/Malachi 3:1 background to Matthew 3:3.
NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible and NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener) — source of the Qumran self-designation parallel at Acts 9:2 and John 14:6, the "political nickname" reading of Χριστιανός at Acts 11:26, and the new-exodus background to Matthew 3:3's quotation of Isaiah 40:3.
NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible (Zondervan, 2018), gen. ed. D. A. Carson — independently confirmed the outsider origin of "Christian" at Acts 11:26 and noted Luke's own preference for "the Way," "disciples," and "believers" over that label throughout Acts.
Related study on this site: Jesus, Priest in the Order of Melchizedek — traces the same tabernacle-curtain access problem this study's Hebrews 10:19-20 section touches, in full.

ESV Study Bible, note on John 14:6. ↩
NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, note on John 14:6. ↩↩
NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, note on Acts 9:2. ↩
ESV Study Bible, note on Acts 11:26. ↩
NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, note on Acts 11:26. ↩
NKJV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, note on Matthew 3:3. ↩