Originally Posted by Sethomas

In the early Church when everyone spoke Greek, the name Jesus was abbreviated to its first three letters, IHS. When the West converted to Latin with Jerome, they kept IHS with a handful of other Greek idioms (ICHTHUS, Kyrie Eleison, blah blah) even though most people had no idea what they meant. So, the I and the S were transfigured into Iesus and Salvatore (I forget if that's the right spelling), but the H was kept as posterity for whatever reason. Around the Reformation, people started making fun of it as a middle initial, since nobody could figure out what else it could mean.



Edit: I forgot to mention that there's a geek joke I heard long ago, saying that it stands for "Haploid". The joke being that he was formed with only a mother, so he has only one set of genetic data within him and thus he's haploid, as aposed to diploid like all normal mammals.

Originally Posted by sadie

i've always wondered what the h the h stands for.