How did "Calvary" become such a common term for "Golgotha"?

[Jake]

As far as I can tell, in many older English translations "Calvary" occurs one time, in Luke 23:33. It does not appear in the parallel passages of Matthew 27:33; Mark 15:22; John 19:17 in the KJV though it does in the Douay-Rheims. Newer versions do not tend to include the word "Calvary." It appears all four verses use the same word which means "skull" and apparently "Calvary" is from the Latin translation of skull.

All that said, I'm curious how "Calvary" become so synonymous with the place Jesus died in our hymnody, poetry, church names, and so on and not "Golgotha." Was it in use before English Bibles because of the Latin?

 

[Charles Johnson]

Well, I suppose the simple answer is that English speakers had to draw their vocabulary from what was available, and before the Reformation, the Latin bible was the only one widely used in England. The majority of our English terms for biblical and theological matters passed through Latin before arriving at English. Even words that began in Greek, like "Jesus" and "Mary" still passed through their Latin versions of "Iesus" and "Maria" before being Englished.