Jebus or Jeebus [jee-buh s] is a humorous substitute for Jesus, sometimes used to avoid blaspheming, other times to poke fun at believers, and most often just as a playful interjection.

Like so many cromulent words that have embiggened our language, Jeebus owes its popularity to The Simpsons. In an episode from 2000, Homer gets sent to be a Christian missionary. In his typically clueless way, Homer protests “I’m no missionary. I don’t even believe in Jeebus.” He immediately proceeds to plead for Jeebus to save him. 

Homer can’t take all the credit though. In the 1952 novel A Cry of Children, one character, trying to watch his language, uses Jeebus rather than Jesus so as not to take his god’s name in vain. 

Still, use of ‘Jeebus’ didn’t really take off until the 2000s after that Simpsons episode. In 2002, a writer on the review website Television Without Pity exasperatedly declaimed “Oh, Jeebus” in response to E.R. star Noah Wyle’s apparently disappointing facial hair. The punk band Random Heroes put out an album titled Bigger Than Jeebus in 2004. The exclamation “Sweet Jeebus!” even showed up in a vegan cookbook in 2005. That same year, a Christian writer even noted that the Jeebus fish, in the style of the ichthys, was showing up on car bumpers.