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Greek Roots · letter 22 of 24

Chi

The first letter of “Christ” — and the first digit of 666.

How the shape crossed the sea

No Phoenician parent

Greek added this letter itself, after the borrowed ones ran out. There is nothing here to draw, and no honest reconstruction to offer.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

Two strokes crossed. Greek's own — and the shape a great deal was later read into.

drawn on a broken line: this letter's origin is not settled

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

A k with a puff of breath after it — k-h, not the ch of “church” and not the ch of “chair.” Modern Greek has hardened it to the ch of Scottish “loch.”

Written ch (kh) in scholarly books.

Its number

600

it is letter 22 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

no meaning — a Greek invention

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

no Phoenician parent

Not recovered

Chi is the initial of Christos, and that has made it the most heavily used letter in Christian symbolism. It stands alone for Christ; laid across a rho it makes the chi-rho monogram; and it is why “Xmas” is not a modern act of irreverence but an old and perfectly reverent abbreviation — the X is a Greek letter, not a crossing-out.

It is also the largest digit in the most famous number in the Bible. In Greek numerals chi is 600, and Revelation 13:18 is written χξϛ: six hundred, sixty, six.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

Christ is a title, not a surname

Christos means “anointed,” and it translates the Hebrew mashiach. It is a job description — the one poured with oil and set apart to rule — which is why the Gospels can ask whether Jesus is the Christ as a genuine question.

The number, and how it is spelled

Revelation asks the reader to calculate, and then gives a number. In the manuscripts it is usually written as three letters: chi for 600, xi for 60, and stigma — the ghost of the lost letter digamma — for 6.

A minority of witnesses read 616 instead, including one of the oldest copies of this passage we have. Irenaeus knew about the variant around AD 180 and argued against it. The whole question, and the case for and against the usual modern solution, is laid out in the numbers section rather than hinted at here.

Words that begin here

Χριστός

Christos — Anointed, Christ

523 occurrences. A title before it was ever used like a name.

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χάρις

charis — grace, favour

A gift and the gladness of giving it — 153 occurrences.

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χαρά

chara — joy

Same root as grace. In Greek, gift and gladness are family.

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How readers have read this letter

✧Justin Martyr, Plato, and the X in the heavensa reading

Plato wrote that the maker of the universe split the world-soul and bent the two halves into the shape of a chi, one crossing the other. Justin Martyr, writing around AD 155, quotes it and makes a striking claim: Plato had read Moses, misunderstood the bronze serpent lifted on a pole, and produced a garbled memory of the cross.

It is one of the earliest Christian readings of this letter's shape, it is ancient, and it is an argument rather than a finding. Justin's claim that Plato borrowed from Moses was standard apologetic method in his century and is not accepted today.

Read this way by: Justin Martyr, First Apology 60; Plato, Timaeus 36b-c

◈Contested ground — where these readings are argued againstcontested

  • Justin Martyr, Plato, and the X in the heavens

    Plato is describing the two great circles of the heavens — the celestial equator and the ecliptic — crossing each other, which is an astronomical observation, not a symbol. Justin's identification of it with the cross is a reading laid on top of the text by a Christian apologist arguing that Greek philosophy had stolen from Scripture.