Christadelphians

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Members of a Christian religious group that denies the doctrine of the Trinity and teaches that Christ was a human being rather than God incarnate
2. Adherents of a Christian denomination founded in the 19th century that rejects conventional Trinitarian theology and views Christ as the Son of God but not God himself
3. Followers of a religious movement emphasizing biblical literalism and the humanity of Christ while rejecting mainstream Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the immortality of the soul

Etymology: Christadelphians takes its shape from the Greek "Christos" (Christ) and "adelphos" (brother), so the name means roughly "Christ's brothers." The movement was founded in the United States in 1848 by John Thomas, an English-born doctor who had emigrated and come to his own reading of the Bible after a near-death experience at sea in a storm. He gathered followers who called themselves "Brethren of Christ" and later took the name Christadelphians, a compound coined from those two Greek parts. The word is a modern coinage rather than an ancient one. The Greek roots were available for centuries, but no earlier group had combined them this way as a self-chosen name. The movement's emphasis on the brotherhood of believers, with its shared sense of belonging to Christ, is built into the name itself.