Have you ever heard of Jesus being called Jesus H. Christ? This is, in fact, not a little-known middle name like Howard, but a relic of the Greek alphabet and Christian symbolism.
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Dr Dan McClellan, Biblical scholar at the University of Birmingham and keen TikTokker, explains that the most widely accepted theory of the middle “H” initial is that it originated as a Christogram, a monogram formed of letters and symbols representing Jesus.
Christograms can be found on all kinds of artifacts, from artworks and coins to gravestones and even ancient tattoos.
In early Christian tradition, the name “Jesus” was written in Greek as ΙΗΣΟΥΣ (Iēsous). Its first three letters were used as an abbreviation and eventually stylized into a sacred monogram. When transliterated into Latin script, this looked like IHS. However, it was sometimes written as IHC because the symbols for S and C were easily confused.
A few centuries ago, when English adopted J as a distinct letter separate from I, people began writing the old IHC symbol as JHC. That gave the impression that Jesus had a middle initial, as in “Jesus H. Christ”, even though the “H” was never a name at all, just a misunderstanding of an ancient monogram.
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Check out Dr McClellan’s explanation in the video above.
An earlier version of this story was published in January 2024.
