I looked up ninja (http://zillyninja.blogspot.ie/2011/02/origin-of-word-ninja.h...) and apparently it can mean "a person skilled in stealth" or "one who endures." while the ninja themselves were spies for the samurai but haven't been around for a long time (http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/explore/history/q4.html).
I guess that you'd have no problem if someone called their book 'how to become a javascript expert'. Expert comes from the latin word expertus ( past participle of experīrī to try, experience) (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/expert?s=t) and presumably someone had to import it to english and later on someone else used it in a new unorthodox way.
BTW I looked it up and the word evangelist comes from greek and means 'bearer of good tidings', so it isn't something that has to be tied solely to religion