About Names: Dr. Cleveland Evans on the name “Jude”

Happy Birthday to W. P. Inman, Albus Dumbledore and Pius XIII!

British actor Jude Law turns 52 today. Oscar-nominated for playing Confederate veteran W. P. Inman in “Cold Mountain” (2003), he was wizard Dumbledore in “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” (2018) and “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” (2022). He played Pius XIII in HBO’s “The Young Pope” (2016) and “The New Pope” (2020) and now stars as FBI agent Terry Husk in “The Order,” which opened Dec. 6.

Jude is from the Hebrew name Yehudah, which means praise. In Genesis, Leah, Jacob’s first wife, names her fourth son Judah while praising God. The tribe of Judah later gave its name to the southern Hebrew kingdom after it split from Israel.

In English Bibles, Judah is the Old Testament form. In the New Testament, Judas (the Greek form) names several men, including two apostles — Judas Iscariot, Jesus’s betrayer, and a Judas mentioned in the gospels of Luke and John. Traditionally, he’s considered the same as Matthew and Mark’s Thaddeus.

The New Testament’s next-to-last book is the Epistle of Jude. Jude was originally the French form of Judas. In most other languages, the epistle is called Judas. English translations probably used “Jude” to assure readers it wasn’t written by Iscariot.

Because of that, in English the “Thaddeus” apostle is usually called Saint Jude, even though he’s Judas in the Bible. Traditionally, St. Jude was martyred in Persia alongside fellow apostle Simon the Zealot.

Jude was rare as an English boy’s name. After the Reformation, Jude was used a bit more as parents searched the Bible for names. The 1851 British census found 92 Judes, while the 1850 U.S. census included 125. Jude was more common among Puritan descendants in the North. Only seven of 1850’s Judes were born in the South.

Catholics and Anglicans pray to St. Jude for “hopeless cases,” reasoning since Jude’s name is close to “Judas,” he is prayed to rarely and so is the “saint of last resort.”

Comedian Danny Thomas prayed to St. Jude when starting his career, promising to establish a hospital if he had success. When Thomas became a television star through “Make Room for Daddy” (then “The Danny Thomas Show” starting with the fourth season, 1953-1964), he immediately began raising money to build St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Today it’s one of the world’s most famous charities.

Although the hospital opened in 1962, Jude first became a top 1,000 baby name in the United States in 1954 just after Thomas began promoting his plan.

In 1969 Jude jumped 69% to rank 669th. The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” the No. 1 single of 1968, was responsible. Paul McCartney first titled the song “Hey Jules” after John Lennon’s son Julian.

Jude Law’s parents named him after both the song and Thomas Hardy’s famous novel “Jude the Obscure” (1895). Law’s career clearly revitalized Jude in the United States. Jude had fallen below the top 1,000 when Law’s first Oscar-nominated role as Dickie in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) made him famous.

The name has boomed in recent years, peaking at 151st in 2021 when 2,504 were born. It receded to 161st in 2023, perhaps because of competition from Judah, which ranked 176th that year. Jude and Judah are both helped by sounding like hugely popular Lucas, Luca and Luke.

With Law nearing grandfather age, Jude may fall further. However, it’ll be decades before the name Jude is again obscure.