Culture: This verse parallels the historical event recorded in Acts 11:25: “And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” In the Old World, the earliest term for Christ’s followers was “The Way.” When Paul is speaking to Felix, he states: “However, I admit that I worship the God of our fathers, as a follower of the Way, which they call a sect… ” (Acts 24:14, New International Version).
The shift from “the Way” to “Christians” signaled not only an internal/ external designation, but a recognition that a more formal structure had evolved. Richard A. Horsley, professor of religion at the University of Massachusetts, and Neil Asher Silberman, historian of the ancient Near East, note: “Just as the acolytes of the imperial cult were known as Augustiani, and just as the adherents of the various mystery religions were known by the name of the patron deities who were invoked in their secret, communal meals and ceremonies, the faithful followers of Jesus in the city—both Jews and Greeks—came to be known as Christianoi, or ‘Christians,’ to the people of Antioch.”
Just as this Old World shift in terminology formalized the outward perception that the Christian community had become a “church,” so this name for Alma’s people denotes the creation of a new entity: the “church of God,” or “the church of Christ.” In the Nephite theology, a more exact translation might be the “church of Yahweh” and “church of the Messiah,” since they understood God and Messiah to be the same being. (See “Excursus: The Nephite Understanding of God,” following 1 Nephi 11.)
“Church” is the English translation for the Greek ekklesia, but of course, Mormon would not have written ekklesia on the plates. How could there be a church in the Book of Mormon before there was a church in the New Testament? The Greek word means a group of citizens called out to assemble for political purposes, outside of the religious use of the term. It is used in the Septuagint interchangeably with “synagogue” to translate the Hebrew word for “assembly.”
Although the Hebrew qahal “assembly,” could be the basis for the translation to the English “church” in the Book of Mormon, any argument based on specific words in the Book of Mormon ignores the problems of translation. We do not know what word Mormon wrote. We know only that Joseph Smith translated it as “church.”
Although “church” in Alma’s account bears the meaning of a specific organization, religion was inextricably intertwined in all aspects of life in the ancient world. The concept of “belonging” to a religion was foreign to most of the ancient world. Religion provided their definition of reality. It was their science, their definition of the way the world worked. In smaller communities, everyone would have the same worldview or the same religion. Of this early form of religion, Daniel C. Peterson suggests “the possibility that early Nephite priesthood was mediated and given structure through family and clan organization, rather than through a church structure.”
What we see happening with Alma is the formalization of a particular type of belief that might be separate from the worldview of others in the community. This differing participation in worldview necessitated a new structure in which to mediate the subcommunity’s commonalities that were yet opposed to the surrounding beliefs of their own people. While all of Alma’s people had relocated to form a new community, they were aware of those left behind and the differences between their current beliefs and those of their former community. When this community is integrated into Zarahemlan society, it brings with it the ability to define a subset of a community by religion. That separability became important in the socially and religiously diverse Zarahemla. The church became a mediating function among the pressures for those diverse religious and social impulses.
This important distinction was probably not available in most Mesoamerican communities. King Benjamin’s speech instituting social reform in Zarahemla followed a period of social unrest and the defection of the dissenters to the Lamanites. In Benjamin’s case, there was no mechanism for establishing internal divisions that could remain separate, yet part of the community. Yet it is this concept of a separate entity that can exist within a larger community that is Alma’s religious innovation, one he will introduce into Zarahemla. In that setting, it allows for the continuation of a body of believers in a larger setting that does not always uniformly adhere to those beliefs, even though there may be a political tie to Zarahemla.