[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by ZonieDiver

What does the "H." stand for? No seriously, I've always wondered!

Huh? Stephen Colbert is a parody?
Well according to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_...Jesus_H_Christ

The answer is that although there is an h there, it's not really an h; nor is it the middle initial of Jesus Christ. This is a story full of twists.
The central character in the story is the Christogram. This is a short acronym, usually three letters long, signalling the name Jesus. Jesus probably spoke Aramaic, and his name was probably Yeshua. We can't be sure, because by the time anything was written down it was done quite a lot later and in Greek.
The Greek for the first three letters of His name were iota-eta-sigma. The Christogram that appeared on the tunics of priests of the Roman church was the Latin transliteration of the Greek one. At the time iota became I or J, eta became H and sigma became C or S. The actual letters in the Christogram could be IHC, IHS, JHC or JHS according to when and where.
This may seem strange to us, but remember that we are moving from language to language, and two of the letters here are still fluid even today. "Ja" in German or Nordic languages sounds like "Yah" to us; "sent" and "cent" sound identical. Eta becoming H has no real justification except that Greek eta and the Latin H have similar shapes.
So far so good; we can easily see that JHC is just a representation of the Greek letters which say "Yesh" (or maybe"Yes"), that Yesh is a diminutive of Yeshua, and that was Jesus's first name. Why then do members of Christian congregations say things like "Jesus H. Christ", not necessarily intending any disrespect and fully believing that this is what JHC is short for ?
We must remember that for a thousand years or more of the Christian church, the majority of the congregation knew nothing of Greek, understood only a little of the Latin they heard at Mass, and were totally illiterate. They saw the Christogram on the priests robe. They had been told "this is Jesus's name" and to those who could read a little it was obvious what J and C were, so of course the H was His middle initial.

. Well. If His name really is Yeshua, there are going to be a lot of really pissed off baseball players!

SERIOUSLY, THOUGH. For insightful answers to important questions http://www.everystudent.com/features...FQoeDQod7TthsQ