Jesus H. Christ is a more obscure version of the name Jesus Christ brought to wider attention in Mark Twain’s autobiography during the 19th century. The American novelist was recalling his time as a printer’s apprentice when he decided to get his revenge on old mentor from the time. He had been tasked with printing pamphlets of the sermons of Reverend Alexander Campbell. Unfortunately, the printer had dropped some letters so he abbreviated Jesus Christ to JC.
He was chastised by the livid preacher who made him reset all the text so as not to “diminish” the Lord’s name.
Twain obliged by simply writing Jesus H. Christ instead of Jesus Christ in humorous retaliation.
The phrase had already become known in wider circles as a mild expletive, based on the common conception that the “H” was Jesus’s middle name.
But now one online theory has debunked the meaning of “H”, saying it does not mean the middle name of Jesus after all.
Website MentalFloss claims the “H” is a misreading of an early motif, known as a monogram, used to represent Jesus.
Monograms overlap more than one letters to create a unified symbol and were used in ancient times to denote a person’s name.
Christians often used the familiar Chi Rho monogram but a less familiar one was the IHC monogram, which you can see below (will have pic).
IHC used the first three letters of the Greek spelling for Jesus, Ἰησοῦς.
These looked similar to Latin letters and in more recent centuries, scholars who read the Greek text mistook the I for a “J” based on the Latin alphabet.
Taking ‘C’ to mean Christ, they then concluded “H” must be Jesus’s middle name.
Christ is often nowadays considered to be Jesus’s last name but MentalFloss explains that is wrong.
Christ is an epithet – a byline explaining a person’s characteristics – and means “anointed one”.
So the phrase “Jesus H. Christ” was completely inaccurate as an expletive.
This is believed to have happened some time in the early 19th century.
And that so happens to be the period during which Mark Twain was alive.
His use of the phrase will no doubt have added to the plausibility that Jesus did in fact have a middle name.
