What I was told (and I’m Jewish, so what do I know?) is that some Christians feel it sacrilegious to use the name of Christ in ordinary writing, particular when the paper written on might be destroyed. Thus, on the off chance that the piece of paper they’re writing the name on might not be kept forever, they substitute “X” for "Christ.
Certainly the Chi connection is also there.
This parallels Orthodox Jewish usage. The Orthodox (or at least the orthodox Orthodox) write “G-d” instead of “God” and the scriptures are full of substitutions, e.g., adonai (“the name”) or Yh (the first and last letters) instead of Yaweh.
I don’t believe that Christianity puts any concern about not writing the title “Christ” in the way that Judaism puts concern in not writing the Name of God.
The Bible tends to use several Hebrew words to refer to God, but the two most prominent are:
Elohim, a Hebrew plural word that usually is just translated “God” (but sometimes is used to mean “gods” of the pagans.)
The Tetragrammaton, the Four-Lettered NAME of God that starts with Y (or J), which is not pronounced.
To get around the “not pronounced” trick, the word that Alan cited is a combination from the word adon usually translated “Lord” and the ending ai. This is the circumvention used by Jews in prayer, to avoid taking the NAME in vain.
In normal conversation, a further circumvention is used to avoid using the word “Lord” even. There are two main approaches that are taken:
A variant on the word “Lord”, such as ado-shem (sort of a contraction to mean “Lord-Name”
It certainly isn’t standard Xtian practice to avoid writing “Christ” for that reason, but, of course, there’s nothing to prevent more-or-less Christians from being more-or-less superstitious.
The same thing. A “crossing”, of course, is a place where people believed that protection by Jesus would prevent them from being run over by cars, locomotives, etc.
(DISCLAIMER: It only seems like I stole this idea from Harry Turtledove’s The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump. Really.)
Actually, there is a tiny little warped truth buried in that. It appears that “cross” and related words meant “instrument of crucifixion” first, and only later came to signify “intersection”.
(No, I am not a Jehovah’s Witness. I know this is one of their points, but that doesn’t stop them from being right about it. Where they go wrong, of course, is that crucifixion was a very common punishment, and there are any number of sources outside the Bible describing how it worked; their claim that the Cross was not a cross is pure ignorance.)
FWIW, I stopped using “Xmas” years ago, after my 8th grade math teacher, who was also a Christian, pointed out that it made her uncomfortable to refer to Christ as “X”, because in algebra, “x” stands for “the unknown quantity”, and, she said, “To Christians, Christ is not ‘the unknown’. He is ‘known’.”
Your teacher might equally well have argued that, in algebra, X is the quantity that one is trying to find… and draw the parallel to the Christian trying to “find” Jesus in his heart.
Sounds pretty much balderdash to me. How about X-ray machines, does that teacher avoid having X-rays because that might imply rays of supernatural light from an angelic halo? How about Cross-word puzzles, are they sacrilegious?
Extremism always comes across as moderately amusing.
She was a Baptist, I think–they don’t believe in mysticism.
And actually, I thought it was kind of an interesting point. Dex, you’re just being facetious. Of course she would have understand what the “X” in X-ray stands for, and of course she wouldn’t have objected to crossword puzzles. She wasn’t an extremist, nor a fanatic. She was just uncomfortable with people saying “Xmas” instead of “Christmas”. Don’t make a federal case out of it, okay?
DDG, that’s why I like to use “x-mas”. It unsettles those poor christians who have no clue. Petty, I know, but every once in a while I have to be petty.
And CK’s point is that rationale for saying the “x” in x-mas is equivalent to the “x” in algebra is just as stupid as any example he listed. One person’s reasonable discomfort is another’s extremist.
I won’t even get into the whole “christ is known” thing. I think GD has probably covered it in some form or another.