Katherine Is Not in the Bible — and Nobody Knows What It Means

Katherine is not in the Bible, and it does not mean “pure” — not originally, anyway. The truth is more interesting, and it involves a saint whose existence historians cannot confirm.

Let us take all of that honestly, dear friends, because a faith that needs tidier facts than it has is not a strong one.

What does the name Katherine mean?

Nobody knows.

The name comes from the Greek Aikaterine, and its origin is genuinely disputed. It may derive from an older Greek name built on hekateros, “each of the two.” It may be connected to the goddess Hecate. It may relate to aikia, a word meaning torture. It may be Coptic. Scholars have been arguing for a long time and have not settled it.

The familiar meaning — pure — came later, from Greek katharos. Early Christians heard the resemblance and adopted it, and the Latin spelling was changed from Katerina to Katharina so that the name would carry the better word.

The connection is almost certainly false. The re-spelling was deliberate.

Is Katherine in the Bible?

No — in no language and no spelling. Its saint belongs to the fourth century, three hundred years after the New Testament closed.

And here we come to the part that unsettles people, so let us say it plainly.

The saint who may not have existed

Catherine of Alexandria is one of the most loved saints of the Middle Ages. The story tells of a brilliant young woman who out-argued fifty philosophers, was condemned to a spiked wheel that broke at her touch, and was beheaded. Her wheel is still on church windows across Europe, and the firework is still named after her.

She is also not mentioned anywhere before the ninth century, and her historicity is doubted by historians. In 1969, when the Church revised its universal calendar, she was among the saints removed for lack of reliable evidence — alongside, famously, Valentine.

That is a hard sentence for anyone named after her, and we should not soften it.

What to do with a tradition we cannot verify

Here is what I would say, and I offer it as one Christian to another rather than as a settled ruling.

The uncertainty is about the biography, not about the faith. Whether or not a particular young woman argued with philosophers in Alexandria, women were killed in those persecutions — that is not in doubt — and the Church remembered them under a name it may have partly assembled.

Scripture itself is comfortable with what it does not know. Hebrews reaches the end of its long list of the faithful and simply gives up on names: others were tortured… they were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two… the world was not worthy of them. Unnamed, uncounted, and included anyway.

Catherine may be one of those. The veneration would still be pointing at something real.

The purity that was given, not found

And so back to the name, which turns out to be a small picture of the whole thing.

Christians took a word of doubtful and possibly dark origin, decided it should say pure, and changed its spelling to make that true. They did to a name precisely what they believed God had done to them.

Scripture’s purity works the same way round. It is not discovered by examination; it is asked for and made. Create in me a pure heart, O God — the verb for making the world out of nothing.

Nobody in the Bible ever establishes their purity. They receive it.

A blessing for Katherine

May she hold her history lightly and her faith firmly, which is the right way round.

May she be undivided — the real meaning of a pure heart, wanting one thing.

And may she be at peace with a name that was declared clean by people who could not prove it, since that is very nearly how grace works.

Related reading

• Karen Is Not in the Bible — and “Pure” Is Not Its Real Meaning
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names
• Stephanie Is Not in the Bible — but Stephen Is, and He Was First