People ask me about the name. Sometimes politely, sometimes with an eyebrow raised, and once in a while with the suspicion that a man who writes under something other than the name on his driver’s license must be hiding something.
The honest answer is that I am. Just not what they think.
So let me explain what a pen name actually is, why writers and actors have used them for as long as there have been writers and actors, and then let me tell you exactly what Balthasar Basileia means — in Akkadian, in Hebrew, in Greek, in Latin, and in the only translation that finally matters.
What a Pen Name Actually Is
The French call it a nom de plume — a name of the pen. The Greeks gave us the harsher word: pseudonym, from pseudēs, false, and onoma, name. A false name.
I have never liked that translation. A pen name is not a lie any more than a wedding ring is a lie. It is a declaration. It tells you what a man belongs to.
Here is what a pen name is not. It is not anonymity — anonymity publishes with no name at all. It is not a legal name change; the contracts, the copyrights, the royalties, and the taxes all still attach to the man who was born with his given name, and the IRS has never once been fooled by a byline. It is not a disguise in the criminal sense, because most pen names are open secrets and always have been.
A pen name is a doorway. It is the name under which a particular kind of work walks out into the world. Some authors keep several. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa invented dozens of what he called heteronyms — not merely names but whole invented poets, each with his own biography, his own philosophy, his own handwriting, arguing with one another in print for years.
Which tells you something important right at the outset: the pen name is not primarily a way of hiding. It is a way of releasing.
Why Writers and Actors Use One
Because the given name does not fit the work. Samuel Langhorne Clemens spent his young manhood piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, where the leadsman would sound the depth and call it back to the pilothouse. Mark twain meant two fathoms — twelve feet — safe water, deep enough to run. He took the call for safe passage and put it on the covers of his books. No name he was born with could have carried that.
Because the world was not going to read a woman. Mary Ann Evans published Middlemarch as George Eliot, and the reviews took her seriously in a way they would not have if the truth had been printed on the spine. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë went into print as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — three brothers who did not exist. More than a century later, a publisher advised Joanne Rowling to use her initials so that boys would not put the book back on the shelf. The prejudice was real. The pen name went around it.
Because a man wants to know whether the work is any good. Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman partly to find out whether his sales were talent or fame. J.K. Rowling did the same thing again from the other side of the mountain, publishing crime fiction as Robert Galbraith — and the reviewers praised a debut novelist they had never heard of before the secret got out. That is a rare and valuable thing: proof that the writing stood on its own legs.
Because a name opens a door that another name closed.Theodor Geisel was caught drinking at Dartmouth and barred from working on the college humor magazine, so he kept writing for it under his middle name. He was still using it when he became Dr. Seuss.
Because speech can be dangerous. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published the Federalist Papers as Publius. A sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin, knowing his brother would never print him, submitted letters to the newspaper as a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood — and got published. Eric Arthur Blair became George Orwell, and in doing so spared his family the embarrassment of his poverty and gave the twentieth century one of its great warning voices.
Because a persona can become a prison. When C.S. Lewis lost his wife and wanted to write about grief without every sentence being read as a pronouncement from Lewis the Apologist, he published A Grief Observed as N.W. Clerk. The pen name gave him permission to be shattered in public. Søren Kierkegaard went further still, writing entire books under invented authors so that a position could be argued in its own voice without his signature underwriting it.
And in the theater, the same instinct. Marion Morrison became John Wayne. Archibald Leach became Cary Grant. Norma Jeane Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe. Ramón Estévez became Martin Sheen. Nobody accuses them of dishonesty. We understand instinctively that a performer takes a name the way a soldier takes a uniform.
The Bible Is Full of This
Before I tell you what my name means, understand that Scripture is not squeamish about renaming. It is one of God’s recurring habits.
“Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.”
— Genesis 17:5 (KJV)
“Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”
— Genesis 32:28 (KJV)
“Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.”
— John 1:42 (KJV)
Joses of Cyprus was renamed by the apostles and is known to us forever as Barnabas, “which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation” (Acts 4:36). Saul of Tarsus appears in Acts 13:9 as “Saul, (who also is called Paul,)” and never goes back. Naomi came home from Moab emptied out and said, “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me” (Ruth 1:20). Solomon was given a second name by the prophet — Jedidiah, beloved of the LORD (2 Samuel 12:25).
And sometimes the second name was imposed by an empire. Pharaoh took a Hebrew slave and “called Joseph’s name Zaphnath-paaneah” (Genesis 41:45). A Jewish girl named Hadassah went into a Persian palace and into the pages of history as Esther (Esther 2:7) — her true identity concealed until the hour it was needed to save a nation.
Which brings me to the first half of my name.
Balthasar: The Name They Gave the Exile
“Unto whom the prince of the eunuchs gave names: for he gave unto Daniel the name of Belteshazzar; and to Hananiah, of Shadrach; and to Mishael, of Meshach; and to Azariah, of Abednego.”
— Daniel 1:7 (KJV)
Four Hebrew boys were carried into Babylon and stripped of their names. Daniel means God is my judge. Hananiah means the LORD is gracious. Every one of their birth names carried the name of their God inside it, and Babylon scrubbed all four out and replaced them with the names of Babylonian gods. It was not an administrative convenience. It was conversion by paperwork.
The name they hung on Daniel was Belteshazzar. Nebuchadnezzar himself explains the source:
“But at the last Daniel came in before me, whose name was Belteshazzar, according to the name of my god, and in whom is the spirit of the holy gods…”
— Daniel 4:8 (KJV)
Now the translations, layer by layer:
- Akkadian — the name is generally traced to Balāṭsu-uṣur, meaning protect his life, with the god Bel understood or spoken: Bel, protect his life.
- Hebrew — it enters the text as בֵלטְשׁאַצַּר, Bêlṭəsha’ṣṣar, the foreign name preserved exactly as it was imposed.
- Greek — when the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, Belteshazzar came across as Baltasar (Βαλτασαρ).
- Latin — the Vulgate carried it as Baltassar, and from there it passed into the European languages as Balthasar, Balthazar, Baltasar.
So Balthasar is not a name I invented. It is simply what Daniel’s exile-name looks like after it has traveled through Greek and Latin and come out the other side.
A note on a common mix-up, because it matters. Belteshazzar the prophet is not Belshazzar the king. The king’s name, Bēl-šarra-uṣur, means Bel, protect the king — and he is the man who threw the feast in Daniel 5, drank from the vessels of the LORD’s house, and watched a hand write his sentence on the plaster wall. Two names one letter apart. One belonged to a man who kept his faith in a pagan court for seventy years. The other belonged to a man who lost a kingdom in a single night. The lesson is not subtle: a name does not save you.
There is a second stream feeding this name, too. Christian tradition, going back to writings of the sixth century, gave the wise men from the east the names Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. Scripture never names them — Matthew 2tells us only that they came from the east, followed a star, and fell down and worshipped. But the tradition stuck, and Balthasar came down to us as a seeker who traveled a long way in the dark on the strength of a light he did not fully understand.
And a third: Shakespeare loved the name. He used it four times, and most memorably in The Merchant of Venice, where Portia puts on a disguise, takes the name Balthazar, walks into a court where a woman would not be heard, and delivers the greatest speech about mercy in the English language. A borrowed name that lets the truth get spoken. That is not a bad description of this entire article.
Basileia: The Kingdom That Outlasts the Empire
Basileia (βασιλεία) is Greek. It is the feminine form built from basileus, king, and it appears more than a hundred and sixty times in the New Testament.
- Greek — kingdom, reign, rule, royal power, sovereignty, dominion. Not merely the territory a king holds, but his reigning — the active exercise of his authority.
- Latin — regnum.
- Hebrew and Aramaic — the corresponding idea is malkuth / malku, the word standing behind Daniel’s great confession that God’s “kingdom is an everlasting kingdom” (Daniel 4:3).
- English — the King James renders it almost everywhere as kingdom. It is also the root of the name Basil, and of the word basilica, which began life meaning a royal hall.
It is the word on the Lord’s lips more than almost any other:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.”
— Mark 1:15 (KJV)
“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
— Matthew 6:33 (KJV)
“My kingdom is not of this world…”
— John 18:36 (KJV)
“For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.”
— Romans 14:17 (KJV)
And it is the word Daniel — Belteshazzar — used while standing in the throne room of the most powerful empire on earth, telling that empire it had an expiration date:
“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.”
— Daniel 2:44 (KJV)
Put the Two Together
Read as a sentence, the name says roughly this: Protect his life — for the Kingdom.
Read as a testimony, it says something better. It is the name Babylon forced on a captive, welded to the Greek word for the reign of God. It is the world’s label for a man, and above it, the only authority that ever had the right to name him.
Because that is the whole story of Daniel in one breath. They took his name. They did not take his God. They fed him from the king’s table and he refused it. They taught him Chaldean and he still prayed toward Jerusalem three times a day with the windows open. They called him Belteshazzar for seventy years, and the book he left behind is called Daniel.
Every one of us is walking around with names the world assigned us. Your job title. Your credit score. Your diagnosis. Your worst season, which somebody still uses as your first name behind your back. Balthasar is what Babylon called me. Basileia is what I actually serve. I put them side by side on a book cover so I would never forget which one is temporary.
The Freedom a Pen Name Buys — From a Different Angle
Most articles on this subject will tell you a pen name gives you freedom by concealing you. True, but shallow. Here is the deeper version, and it is thoroughly biblical.
It gets the author out of the way of the message. The Lord commanded a strange kind of secrecy about our best work:
“But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.”
— Matthew 6:3–4 (KJV)
A byline is a small hunger. It wants to be recognized at church, quoted at dinner, congratulated in the comments. A pen name starves that hunger without starving the work. John the Baptist gave us the principle in six words: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
Scripture itself does this. The book of Hebrews is one of the most magnificent documents ever written, and no one on earth knows for certain who wrote it. It has been preached for two thousand years without a name on it, and it has lost nothing. Dozens of the Psalms carry no author. The apostle John, writing his own Gospel, would not put his name in it — he called himself only the disciple whom Jesus loved. Paul, forced to describe the greatest spiritual experience of his life, put it in the third person to keep himself out of it: “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago…” (2 Corinthians 12:2). Peter closed a letter with a coded location, sending greetings from “the church that is at Babylon” (1 Peter 5:13), writing carefully in a hostile empire. Even the angel of the LORD declined to identify himself: “Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?” (Judges 13:18).
It frees you from your own audience. This is the one almost nobody mentions. A writer who builds a following gradually becomes its employee. The readers who loved the last book have opinions about the next one. A pen name breaks that contract. It lets a man write the hard chapter, the unflattering testimony, the doctrine that will cost him invitations. It lets him tell the truth about his own failures without three hundred people who know him reading it as gossip.
It protects the people standing next to you. An honest memoir has other people in it. A separate name puts a little distance between your storytelling and your family, your clients, your business partners — people who never signed up to be characters.
And it lets the reader meet the work first. Not your face, not your zip code, not your surname, not your résumé, not whatever anybody has already decided about you. Just the words. In a culture that reads the author before it reads the sentence, that is a genuine mercy.
Understand clearly: this is not permission to be a coward or a liar. Scripture is emphatic that a name is a real possession and a real responsibility.
“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold.”
— Proverbs 22:1 (KJV)
“A good name is better than precious ointment…”
— Ecclesiastes 7:1 (KJV)
A pen name does not release you from accountability for a single word you publish under it. It simply decides which name carries the weight.
The Name You Do Not Get to Choose
Here is the part that keeps all of this in proportion.
Your parents chose your first name. You may choose a second one for the cover of a book. Neither is the last word. There is a naming still coming that none of us has any say in:
“And thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name.”
— Isaiah 62:2 (KJV)
“…and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”
— Revelation 2:17 (KJV)
A name known only to the man who receives it and the God who gives it. No platform, no byline, no branding. Just a name spoken by the One who said, “I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine” (Isaiah 43:1) — the same God who “telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 147:4).
And above every name any of us will ever carry stands one:
“Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…”
— Philippians 2:9–10 (KJV)
So Balthasar Basileia is a working name. It goes on covers. It answers emails. It will be forgotten, and that is fine, because the Lord told His disciples plainly where a man’s joy is supposed to be filed: “rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).
Babylon named the man. The Kingdom named the mission.
Now you know which one I intend to keep.
The Personal Website of Edgar "Mark" Sotomayor also known as BALTHASAR BASILEIA 