National Christian Day’s origin is untraced. The observance circulates through day-listing sites and social posts, and nothing on the public record documents who first designated March 12 or in what year. The date matches none of the traditional name days for the name, which fall in March, April, May, August, October and November depending on the country.
CHAPTER 01
A name before it was a spelling
The name is Latin before it is anything else. It comes from the medieval Latin Christianus, meaning a Christian, which Latin had taken from the Greek christianos.
English scribes were writing it down by the twelfth century. The oldest English instance in the Dictionary of Medieval Names is a Christianus entered in the Boldon Buke in 1183.
The ordinary English word took longer to look like that. Speakers had cristen in Old English and Cristen in Middle English, and the spelling Christian only arrived for the common noun in the 1520s. The adjective followed three decades later.
