[SnakeDoctor]

A pseudo-intellectual junk explanation for substituting “X” for “Christ”. Most people who use the term don’t know or care that Christ starts with X in Greek. We speak English here.

SnakeDoc

[donna]

The first two letters of the word Christ (cristoV, or as it would be written in older manuscripts, CRISTOS) are the Greek letters chi (c or C) and rho (r or R). These letters were used in the early church to create the chi-rho monogram (see Christian Symbols: Christmas Ornaments), a symbol that by the fourth century became part of the official battle standard of the emperor Constantine.

In 1436 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with moveable type. In the early days of printing typesetting was done by hand and was very tedious and expensive. As a result, abbreviations were common. In religious publications, the church began to use the abbreviation C for the word "Christ" to cut down on the cost of the books and pamphlets. From there, the abbreviation moved into general use in newspapers and other publications, and "Xmas" became an accepted way of printing "Christmas" (along with the abbreviations Xian and Xianity). Even Webster’s dictionary acknowledges that the abbreviation Xmas was in common use by the middle of the sixteenth century.
Source: http://www.cresourcei.org/symbols/xmasorigin.html

[sola_fide]

No, it’s not pseudo-intellectual junk. There are still people who read the NT in Greek and the Septuagint OT - which is the version Christ himself quotes on numerous occasions.