I was recently asked
by a woman in my Baptist church, "What do those letters on the cross
mean?" At first I wasn't quite sure what she was referring to, until she
gestured to the brass cross that sits on our communion table. Sure enough,
cryptically engraved in the center of the cross were three mysterious letters:
IHS. Thankfully, I happened to know the answer to her question, mostly due to
Greek classes in seminary and a penchant for liturgical art. But I suspect that
a good many of my fellow evangelicals don't know, despite the fact that this
and other symbolic abbreviations regularly appear on crosses and in artwork,
even in their own churches. So here I offer this helpful guide for any weird
letterings you might find around your church. If nothing else, it'll give you a
few classic Christian options for your doodling while you're pretending to take
sermon notes.
IHS: These three letters
are an abbreviation of the name of Jesus. They may look like our English
letters "I," "H," and "S," but in fact they are
not. They are the Greek letters Iota, Eta, and Sigma. (Iota and Sigma are rough
equivalents to our "I" and "S," but Eta is rather like an
"E," not an "H"). These happen to be the first three
letters of the name of Jesus in Greek, Iesous (or, more properly, IHΣΟΥΣ
or Ιησους), which is what the symbol is meant to represent. There are
also a few false backronyms floating around about this one, but they are later
interpolations. Some medievals, who knew Latin but not Greek, thought it stood
for Iesus Hominum Salvator ("Jesus, Savior of Mankind"), and
some English backronyms include "In His Service" or "I Have
Suffered." But it's actually from the Greek, and because it's a Greek
abbreviation, you can find other variants around, too, such as IHC (because
there were two forms for sigmas in Greek, one of which looks like our
"s," the other like our "c"), JHS, or IHΣ. Any way you
write it, the meaning is the same: Jesus.
INRI: This is another one
that I've often seen on crosses, even in evangelical churches. This set of
letters is an acronym that comes to us from Latin. It's the first letters of
the words that make up the famous message posted above Christ on the cross:
"Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." In Latin, this is Iēsus Nazarēnus, Rēx Iūdaeōrum. So if you take the
first letter of each word, it's INRI. Occasionally, you might see the Greek
variant pop up, which would be INBI (the difference being that the word for
"king" is Rex in Latin but Basileus in Greek).
Chi-Rho
Monogram:
This symbol, which looks to us like a "P" stuck into the middle of an
"X," is in fact another Christogram, that is, an abbreviation of the
name of Jesus Christ. It signifies the first two letters of the name
"Christ" in Greek, Christos (or, more accurately, Χριστος).
As you can see, the first Greek letter is Chi (which looks like our
"X" and is written out in English by "Ch"), followed by Rho
(which looks like our "P" but is roughly equivalent to our
"R"). Thus, these two letters begin the name "Christ," and,
when written together, make a handsome little abbreviation for it.
IX
Monogram:
Similar to the Chi-Rho, this ancient symbol of the name of Jesus is also two
letters jammed together, though it looks more like the spokes of a wheel to us.
In fact, it's the Greek letter Iota (I) stuck into the letter Chi (X). Again,
these are, respectively, the first letters of the Greek names for Jesus and
Christ. A similar symbol is the IH monogram (the I bisecting the H), which stands for the first
two letters of "Jesus."
Ichthys/Ichthus: The Ichthys is a very familiar
symbol in evangelical Christianity (the profile of a fish drawn with two arcs
that cross at the tail). It's often affixed to car bumpers and sometimes even
devouring misbegotten Darwinian creations there. Occasionally, you'll even see
the Greek lettering inside that familiar outline of a fish: ΙΧΘΥΣ, or, in
lowercase, ιχθυς. These five letters constitute the noun
"fish" in Greek, and thus the pictorial symbol. But it has also,
since ancient times, been understood and used by Christians as an acrostic for
the name and title of Christ: "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior" (Ίησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ).
IC
XC:
Just when you think the early church couldn't think up another way to
abbreviate the name of Jesus, here's another one for you. This one you won't
often see in evangelical churches, but if you're ever looking at an Orthodox
icon, you'll likely see it there, often with the two parts on either side of
Jesus' head. Remembering that "C" is an alternate form for the Greek
letter sigma (equivalent to our "S"), you'll find that these are the
first and last letters of "Jesus," and the first and last letters of
"Christ": Ιησους
Χριστος. Occasionally,
you'll see this partnered with another Greek word, NIKA, giving a message that
reads: "Jesus Christ conquers."
AΩ (or Aω or αω): This is the symbol
for "Alpha and Omega," the first and last letters of the Greek
alphabet, and one of the biblical names for God (Rev. 1:8). Many Christians can
recognize the capitalized variant, but I include it in this list because the
lowercase omega, which looks like a curvy "W" to us, sometimes appears
in symbolic abbreviations, and may be harder for many English-speakers to
recognize.
So there you
go. And, as a bonus, I'll even let you in on the secret of why
"Jehovah" is not actually the best rendering for the name of God.
It's derived from the tetragrammaton, the Hebrew 4-letter name of God as
revealed to Moses: YHWH. Since the vowels for this word were never written down, or sometimes the wrong vowels were deliberately written in (Jewish scribes wanted to preserve its sanctity), experts have tried various
ways of reconstructing it. Many modern Bible scholars will render it as
"Yahweh." But old medieval Bible scholars tried their hand at it, too,
and since the "Y" sound in Latin is shown with the letter
"J," and the "W" sound interchangeable for "V,"
we ended up with JHVH. Jam some vowels in there, and you get
"Jehovah"--the Anglicized Latinized version of the Hebrew name for
God, and almost certainly not the way Moses heard it on the mountain.