Keep the Christ in Christmas

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They’re called nomina sacra—sacred names. The Earliest Christian scribes who copied the books of the Greek New Testament by hand so that they could be circulated to other churches had a relatively uniform set of abbreviations for divine names. For example-the word for “humanity” in the ancient Greek of the New Testament was anthropos. You can imagine writing that several times could become tedious so the scribes would write two capital letters—an alpha and a nu and then put a line over it. The word for God –Theos—would be abbreviated with a capital theta with a line above it. The nomina sacra for Jesus was Iota Eta and if it was in the nominative case (that is as the subject of the sentence) it would have a concluding sigma. It would look like IHS though many Christians think that means “In His Service.” Perhaps the most profound nomina sacra is the one used for cross, in Greek Stauro and in crucify stauroo. It looks like a smooth, curved capital “P” with a cross bar. It looks like a man on a cross. Of course with the persistent use of Christ, there was a nomina sacra for Christ. It was a chi with an line on top. A capital chi looks like an uppercase X. Nomina sacra were the forerunners of Christian symbols used to this day.

I mention that because this time of year we frequently see Christmas abbreviated as X-Mas. Many people assume that this is an attempt to remove “Christ” from the season. In reality, this particular abbreviation has a long standing tradition in Christian literature. Evenso, many Christians feel that the culture is trying to minimize the central of Jesus and maximize festivities, commercialism and marketing. People think that because the culture is trying to maximize festivities, commercialism and marketing. So everywhere, something of a tug of war that usually gets portrayed as a culture war is waged in this country over the appropriate expressions of religion. Instead of crafting scenarios where we are the victims, perhaps Christians should learn from early generations and see in simple letters and figures, representations of Christ.