Calvary

I love words and their history and origin and I like studying foreign languages. Because of this, I am really interested in Bible translation. I find it fascinating why some translations/scholars use one word and others don't.

One example that I just learned today is the word, "Calvary." What an important word because it is such an important place! How many hymns do we sing with "Calvary" in the words somewhere?

"Burderns are lifted at Calvary"
"Mercy there was great, and grace was free, pardon there was multipled to me...At Calvary"

How many churches use "Calvary" in their name? It seems really common, especially among Baptists.

I got a phone call from a brother involved in a Bible study asking me why Luke 23:33 in the KJV has the word, "Calvary" but the pew Bible at church (NIV) has "place called the Skull".

I did remember that Golgotha was Hebrew for skull (Matt 27:33, Mark 15:22, John 19:17), but it dawned on me that I wasn't really sure where "Calvary" came from. Even though I sing it often and it is a word with emotional effect, I don't know where it came from. So I started investigating.

Checking an interlinear (apologies to my greek professor), I found that the word in Greek translated "Calvary" in KJV's Luke 23:33 is the word for "skull", from which our English word "cranium" is derived.

Thanks to modern technology (Bible software: sometimes a blessing, sometimes a crutch), I found that the KJV is one of few that has the word, "Calvary" at all, and only in Luke 23:33.

But where did "Calvary" come from? Okay, then I checked a Bible Dictionary and figured it out. "Calvary" comes from the Latin word, "Calvaria," meaning skull.

So, when the Bible mentions "Golgotha" (Hebrew) or "Calvary" (Latin), it is simply transliterating the word for skull from another language. That still doesn't explain why the KJV scholars chose Calvary. And more confusingly, why they used the word, "skull" in the other gospels. I am sure that it is find-outable somewhere but this is where my searching stops, at least for now.

How interesting that this word taken from Latin has become so important and so often-used among Christians and it might be another example of a word like, "baptism" that wasn't in common usage but was more or less created by the KJV.