There's near endless mystery surrounding the 'H' in Jesus Christ's supposed full name, and one scientist has revealed what is likely the truth behind this mysterious moniker.
Christianity has many mysterious that continue to illuminate both the religious and non-believers alike, but new discoveries can often reveal unlikely revelations, like the understanding that Adam and Eve might just have existed at the same time.
Language, like science, often has unknown origins, and as time develops certain turns of phrase become entrenched in society to the point where nobody really questions it anymore.
That's certainly the case when people shout out 'Jesus H. Christ' like he's a naughty child that you're summoning through his full name - but what exactly does the 'H' stand for?
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Thankfully Dan McClellan, honary fellow at the University of Birmingham and scholar of all things religion and the Bible, might just have the 'truth' for us on TikTok, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Unfortunately, as always these things do have a bit of a disappointing answer, as the 'H' likely doesn't actually stand for anything and instead represents a misinterpretation of language formats over time, but the history behind it all certainly makes up for the lack of a reveal.
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McClellan reveals that it's been almost two centuries that people have been referring to Jesus Christ with a 'H' slapped in the middle, and it's likely sourced from the misunderstanding of what's called a 'christogram'.
Christograms are monograms or combinations of letters that are meant as abbreviations for Jesus Christ - and one of the most popular that's still used today is the 'X' in xmas, which represents a Latin transliteration of the Greek letter 'chi', meaning Jesus, or the cross.
How we get to 'H' is a long story though, and it begins with the Latin transliteration 'IHS', which represents the first three letters of Jesus' name in Greek: Iota, Eta, and Sigma.
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You can also write 'Sigma' with the 'lunate Sigma' which looks very close to a C, and alongside this the letter 'J' was developed in the 17th Century, allowing 'Jesus' to be pronounced in the way we do so now.
What this allowed as a consequence then was the shift from IHS to JHC, and many interpreted the latter as an initialism of Jesus' full name with the first and last letters obviously relating to Jesus and Christ.
It's only natural then that 'H' stuck around as a somewhat bizarre middle name that isn't a name at all, but with nearly 200 years of continued use it's rather hard to convince people that this wasn't actually meant to be the case in the first place.
Thankfully due to the work of scholars like McClellan you'll be able to whip this out as a fun fact or party trick next time someone shouts the supposed 'full' name, only don't blame us if you're accused of ruining the atmosphere.