ETYMOLOGY
101
In the spirit of Christmas, I have decided to look into the
origin of two words widely used around this time.
Messiah is derived from the Latin and
Greek Messias, which in turn
comes from the Aramaic meshiha and
the Hebrew mashiah, the latter of
which means “anointed” (of the Lord).
Christ comes from the Old English crist,
which in turn comes from the Latin Christus,
which is derived from the Greek khristos,
the latter of which means “the anointed.” This
in turn comes from the Greek verb khriein,
which means “to rub or anoint.” Christ and Messiah
are linked by their basis in Hebrew; the Greek khristos
is actually a translation of the Hebrew mashiah
(see above).
Interestingly, Christ was a proper title in Old English but
was not capitalized until the 17th century. Furthermore, it
was originally pronounced with a short “i,” as
in Christmas, until the 8th century.
Source: www.etymonline.com.
ETYMOLOGY
201
Speaking
of Jesus, why on earth do we make a distinction between A.D.
and B.C. when we speak of dates, and from whence does this
distinction come? There is an overwhelming amount of reference
material on this singular subject, but you only need to remember
a few important things:
A.D. is an abbreviation for the Latin
Anno Domini,
which means “in the Year of the Lord” (or more
completely, Anno Domini Nostri Jesu Christi,
which means “in the Year of our Lord Jesus Christ”).
A.D. is used to designate years following the alleged year
of the birth of Christ—1 A.D.—and is referred
to as the Christian Era. Academic circles, in an attempt to
be more…religiously neutral…have chosen to name
the Christian Era the Common Era, and thus abbreviate years
after the birth of Christ as C.E. (for Common Era); those
before the birth of Christ as B.C.E. (Before Common Era).
B.C. is a much more recent English abbreviation,
standing simply for “Before Christ.” The
old Latin abbreviation was A.C.N., for Ante Christum
Natum, or “Before the birth of Christ.”
It is common to write both A.D. and B.C. subsequent to a given
year: i.e., 2001 A.D. or 500 B.C. This is incorrect, however;
formal English usage places the A.D. before the year; i.e.,
A.D. 1998 (though the B.C. is still placed after the year).
This is because it makes no sense to say “1998 in the
Year of the Lord.”
One of these days I’ll likely do an extended article
on the history of the A.D. dating system; for now, however,
suffice it to say that people didn’t always agree on
what year it was, and in fact numerous systems for calculating
the year existed for hundreds of years after
the alleged birth of Christ. The decision to start the current
Christian Era at 1 B.C. was purely arbitrary, and involved
skipping over a Year 0. It is because
of a disagreement over whether or not there was a year 0 that
we celebrated the new millennium twice: once in 2000 and again
in 2001.
Source: www.wikipedia.org. |
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the
“X” in xmas
This commonly used abbreviation for Christmas
is not as modern as most people think, but dates back to,
well, a long time ago.
The entire New Testament was translated in Greek, and hence
had to be transliterated, or “mapped” from the
Greek 24-letter alphabet to the Roman one, which has 26 letters.
In the process, the Greek 
was transliterated as khristos,
or Christ. The first letter, chi (pronounced with a hard “ch”
and represented by the Roman letter “X”), is the
first letter of Christ’s name in Greek.
In ancient Christian art, both X and XR (chi-ro, the first
two letters of Christ’s name)
are used as abbreviations for Christ’s name. Around
the same time, both Xianity and
Xian were abbreviations for Christianty
and Christian, though they are hardly used at all today.
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