Christian name

• 1. Introduction

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  A Christian name is the personal name a person receives at baptism, and around the year 1200 the most common one in England was William. That detail is stranger than it sounds. William carries no obvious religious meaning, yet church writers had spent centuries urging parents to name children after saints. So how closely did families ever follow that advice? Did the custom of naming at baptism begin with the apostles themselves? Why did adult converts, from martyrs to kings, swap their birth names for new ones? And how did a phrase tied to a church ceremony end up meaning something close to a first name in everyday speech? The answers run from the New Testament to the registers of Elizabethan Oxford.

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• 2. Christen Thee

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  In pre-Reformation England, ordinary laypeople were taught a short formula for baptising in an emergency, beginning "I christen thee in the name of the Father." To christen, in that setting, simply meant to baptise. A Christian name therefore meant a baptismal name. Strictly, it was the name given to a person, usually a child, at the font, and not just any family forename.

  The word drifted early. In Elizabethan England, William Camden suggested that the term did not have to involve baptism at all. By his account, "Christian names were imposed for the distinction of persons, surnames for the difference of families." Today, in traditionally Christian countries, people use Christian name interchangeably with given name, first name and forename, and the phrase is still common in daily speech. Whether the baptismal naming custom reaches back to the apostles is a separate question, and scholars have tested it against the text of the New Testament.

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• 3. Saul and Paul

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  The Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verse 59, describes the Hebrew practice of naming a male child at his circumcision, on the eighth day after birth. Some writers have argued from this that naming the newly baptised began with the apostles. Their favourite example was the apostle of the Gentiles, called Saul before his conversion and Paul afterwards.

  Modern scholars reject that reading, and the evidence is in the order of the texts. Paul's baptism is recorded in Acts 9:18, yet the name Paul does not appear until Acts 13:9. Saul turns up several times in between. The name Cephas, or Peter, has a different cause and cannot be tied to baptism either.

  The wider record points the same way. Inscriptions in the Catacombs of Rome, and early Christian literature, show that Christians of the first three centuries bore names no different from their pagan neighbours. The letters of St. Paul mention converts keeping such names after conversion. Hermes, the name of a god, appears in Romans 16:14 among several purely pagan names. Epaphroditus appears in Philippians 4:18, and Phoebe the deaconess in Romans 16:1. The first clear link between baptism and a new name comes from the account of a martyr who died in AD 331.

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• 4. Spiritual Names

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  "By my paternal name," the martyr Balsamus is said to have declared in the Acts of St. Balsamus, "I am called Balsamus, but by the spiritual name which I received in baptism, I am known as Peter." He was no isolated case. Taking a new name was fairly common among Christians.

  Eusebius the historian added Pamphili to his name, in honour of the martyr Pamphilus, whom he especially venerated. Earlier still, St. Cyprian chose to be called Cyprianus Caecilius, out of gratitude to the Caecilius to whom he owed his conversion. Around 260, St. Dionysius of Alexandria offered a theory about the name John. He suspected that many people took the apostle's name out of love and admiration, "just as many of the children of the faithful are called Paul or Peter."

  There was also a practical reason. A catechumen, a person preparing for baptism, needed a distinctive form of address at the ceremony. When baptism followed soon after birth, the moment also gave the child's chosen name a public hearing. Church leaders soon began to say which names were fitting.

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• 5. Lamps and Canons

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  The thirtieth of the supposed Arabian Canons of Nicaea carries the heading "Of giving only names of Christians in baptism." The sermons of St. John Chrysostom lean the same way. He assumed in many places that naming a child should follow some idea of Christian edification, and he implied that earlier generations had done so.

  He also described the opposite habit with some exasperation. Parents who did not care to name a child after the saints, he said, would "light lamps and give them names and so name the child after the one which continues burning the longest." They then assumed the child would live a long time.

  Chrysostom praised the parents of Antioch for naming their children after the martyr Meletius. He urged his hearers not to take the first name that came to mind, and not to please fathers or grandfathers by repeating family names. Better, he said, to choose holy men known for virtue and for courage before God. Adults who converted produced some of the best-documented renamings, and one of them involved an empress.

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• 6. Renamed Converts

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  Socrates, the church historian, wrote of Athenais, who married the Emperor Theodosius the Younger. Before the marriage she was baptised, in AD 421, and received the name Eudoxia.

  A king followed the same path. According to Bede, Caedwalla travelled to Rome, where Pope Sergius baptised him and gave him the name Peter. He died soon afterwards and was buried in Rome. His epitaph began with the Latin words Hic depositus est Caedwalla qui est Petrus, which place both names side by side.

  A Danish leader in England took a similar step later. Guthrum had fought a long contest against King Alfred and was eventually defeated. He agreed to accept Christianity, was baptised in 878, and took the name Æthelstan. Ordinary parents were making choices of their own at the same time, and not all of them pleased the church.

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• 7. Advice Ignored

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  Lists of people cured at the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury include Ademar, Ailma, Ailward, Albreza, Alditha, Almaury, Ascelina, Avice and Aystorius. These names apparently have no religious associations at all. They are typical of what the medieval record shows. Various Fathers, spiritual writers and synodal decrees urged Christians to give children only the names of canonized saints or angels. At no point in the history of the Church were those injunctions strictly followed, in the early or the later Middle Ages.

  The official Rituale Romanum goes further, with a rubric telling the priest to see that the names of deities or godless pagans are not imposed in baptism. A pronouncement from Bourges in 1666 asked parents and godparents to give boys the names of male saints and girls those of women saints. It told them to avoid festival names such as Easter (Pâques), Christmas (Noël) and All Saints (Toussaint). Yet Toussaint has become a common French Christian name, and Noël has found popularity abroad. In present-day France, Marie is often added, as in Jean-Marie for boys and Marie-Josèphe for girls.

  Spain and Italy turned Marian festivals into girls' names. Spanish examples include Concepción, with the diminutive Concha, plus Asunción, Encarnación, Mercedes and Dolores. Italian ones include Assunta, Annunziata and Concetta. In both countries it has also been common to name a child after the saint on whose feast day the child was born.

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• 8. Counting the Names

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  In England in the 12th century, Mary was a rare Christian name for girls. Fashions shifted slowly. George, often given in honour of Saint George, the patron saint of England, was also uncommon in the 13th and 14th centuries. It grew in popularity after the Protestant Reformation.

  The registers of Oxford University between 1560 and 1621 give a precise count of what students were called. John led with 3826, followed by Thomas with 2777, William with 2546, Richard with 1691 and Robert with 1222. Edward had 957 entries, Henry 908, George 647 and Francis 447. James had 424, Nicholas 326 and Edmund 298.

  Names also changed within a single life. Two Englishmen of the 8th century show how it could happen more than once.

  Winfrith and Willibald, two Englishmen of the 8th century, each went to Rome on a separate occasion. The Pope gave each a new commission to preach, along with a new name. Winfrith became Boniface, and Willibald became Clement. Medieval examples show that any notable change of condition, especially a spiritual one, was often marked by a new name. Emma of Normandy took the name Ælfgifu when she married King Ethelred in 1002. A new monastic name on entering a religious order remains almost universal.

  Confirmation, in which a godfather again takes part, resembles baptism, and it has been customary to take a new name there too. The new name, however, is seldom used. Henry III, King of France, was a godson of the English Edward VI. He had been christened Edouard Alexandre in 1551, received the name Henri at confirmation, and reigned under that name.

  After the Reformation the practice continued in England. Sir Edward Coke wrote that a man might validly buy land by his confirmation name. He recalled Sir Francis Gawdye, late Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, whose baptismal name was Thomas and whose confirmation name was Francis.

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