Kazeland
Whether or not one will conclude that the divine name was included in the original New Testament writings really comes down to four fundamental questions:
1. Is the New Testament inspired by the same God who inspired the Old Testament?
2. Which is true: (a) God preserved his word while humans failed to in one important respect or (b) humans preserved God’s word but God failed to in one important respect?
4. Should our commitment be (a) to the manuscript copies that have been preserved, most of which are late and unquestionably reveal modifications and tampering, or (b) to the God who inspired the originals?
Anyone who answers “Yes” to 1, “a” to 2, “No” to 3, and “b” to 4, should join JWs in our commitment to the restoration of the divine name to the New Testament.
A Few Points about the Divine Name in the New Testament
1. From an historical/text-critical standpoint:
a. All pre-Christian LXX manuscripts that have been discovered have a form of the Divine Name used instead of a surrogate like “Lord.” It’s worth pointing out that it is the pre-Christian LXX documents that the New Testament writers would have quoted from, not the later Christian documents with the Divine Name removed.
b. Yet the Divine Name is not found in any Christian copy of the LXX. There is therefore no question that the Divine Name was replaced with surrogates by professed Christians when it comes to the LXX. This is not a “conspiracy theory”; it’s part of the historical record.
c. In light of #b, it is quite plausible to infer that had the Divine Name appeared in the original New Testament writings, then the post-Apostolic Christians may very well have removed it from those documents, just as they did with the LXX.
d. We know that the Divine Name was included in Christian writings, because the Jewish Encyclopedia online tells us that fanatics would destroy such writings and even sometimes cut out the Divine Names before destroying them, so sacred was the name to the Jews. The fact that they stipulated cutting out the Divine Name from Christian writings tells us that the Divine Name was included in such writings, otherwise there would be no point to the stipulation.
To quote the referenced encyclopedia under GILYONIM ( = Gospels):
“The ‘Gilyon[im]’ and the [Biblical] books of the Judæo-Christians [‘Minim’] are not saved [on the Sabbath] from fire; but one lets them burn together with the names of God written upon them.’ R. Jose the Galilean says: ‘On week-days the names of God are cut out and hidden while the rest is burned.’ R. Tarphon says: ‘I swear by the life of my children that if they fall into my hands I shall burn them together with the names of God upon them.’ R. Ishmael says: ‘If God has said, ‘My name that has been written in holiness [i.e., in the ‘jealousy roll’ mentioned in Num. v. 21 et seq.] shall be wiped out by water, in order to make peace between husband and wife,’ then all the more should the books of the Judæo-Christians, that cause enmity, jealousy, and contention between Israel and its heavenly Father. . . . As they are not saved from fire, so they are not saved when they are in danger of decaying, or when they have fallen into water, or when any other mishap has befallen them”
It’s worth noting that Rabbi Tarfon lived from 70 CE to 135 CE, which places him right in the middle of the window period during which the divine name would likely have been removed if it was in fact included in the original New Testament writings, as I believe it was. I find this more than a little suggestive, and it informs my own hypothesis about how the divine name came to be removed.
2. From a faith standpoint:
a. It is unlikely that God would emphasize the importance of his name to the extent that he does in the Hebrew Bible, and then turn around and decide, “Never mind, I’ve decided that my name just doesn’t matter after all.”
b. In light of #a, if the we grant that the Christian God does exist and that the Bible is his word, then it is probable that Jesus and the Apostles gave his name the honor it deserves, as can be clearly understood from the Hebrew Bible.
c. Jesus explicitly stated that he made God’s name known.
Kazeland
Your four “fundamental questions” are not a pathway to evidence; they are a set of loaded dilemmas that bypass the very data we must evaluate. Christian faith in inspiration has never meant that God miraculously preserved every grapheme of every biblical page from the first century onward, still less that we are free to rewrite texts when the manuscripts do not say what we expect. Providence works through ordinary means: authors wrote in real languages; scribes copied with real habits; communities read with real conventions. The task is therefore to ask what the New Testament authors actually wrote in Greek and how the earliest Christian copies represent those writings. On that question the evidence is embarrassingly unanimous: every extant Greek manuscript of the New Testament, from the earliest papyri to the great uncials, writes κύριος and θεός—almost always in the contracted, over-lined forms known as nomina sacra—and never prints the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. That uniform practice is mirrored across the earliest ancient versions (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian). If the apostles had penned יהוה in their Greek pages, you would need to explain why not one Greek witness, not one early version, and not one Church Father preserves, notices, or laments its removal anywhere, even as those same witnesses preserve thousands of far smaller variations. The burden of proof is not on those who translate the Greek that exists; it is on those who would insert a Hebrew form that does not.
ReplyDeleteYour appeal to the Septuagint does not change that point. It is true that several pre-Christian Greek copies of the Hebrew Bible preserve the divine name in Hebrew characters or transliterate it (e.g., ΙΑΩ). It is also true that other Jewish Greek witnesses render the name with κύριος. In other words, Jewish scribal practice before the church was diverse. But the New Testament’s usage is not in doubt: when the NT quotes “YHWH” verses, it quotes the form that already says κύριος, and it does so programmatically. “Prepare the way of the Lord” in Isaiah 40:3 becomes κύριος in Matthew 3:3 and is applied to Jesus. “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” in Joel 2:32 becomes κύριος in Romans 10:13 and anchors Paul’s argument that confessing “Jesus is Lord” is salvific. The enthronement language of Isaiah 45, where every knee bows to YHWH, becomes the universal acclamation of κύριος in Philippians 2 and is again directed to Jesus. First Peter 3:15 follows the Septuagint’s “sanctify the Lord” and places that reverence in relation to Christ. Hebrews 1:10–12 cites the Greek of Psalm 102 and applies it to the Son. In passage after passage, the apostolic writers move within a Greek scriptural economy in which κύριος is already the settled equivalent for the Name—precisely so that they can confess Jesus within the identity of Israel’s God. The suggestion that “they would have quoted only pre-Christian LXX documents that retained the Hebrew letters” is simply not borne out by how they actually quote.
The claim that “Christians removed the Name from the LXX, therefore they probably removed it from the NT” is an inference stacked on an assumption. First, even within the Greek Old Testament, the evidence shows development and variety, not a single moment of ecclesiastical erasure. Second, the New Testament is not the Septuagint. It is its own corpus, with its own manuscript tradition. The fact that Jewish or Christian hands transmitted the Greek Old Testament in multiple ways tells you nothing about what the apostles wrote in the first place when they composed the New Testament—especially when the New Testament’s own habit is so consistent and so early: κύριος and θεός written as sacred abbreviations from our earliest papyri onward. To posit a universal, post-apostolic purge that left no textual trace, no patristic complaint, no liturgical residue, and yet managed to replace every instance of the Tetragrammaton with the exact same Christian nomen sacrum across all locales and languages, strains credulity. It is an ad hoc rescue device, not a historical explanation.
DeleteYour quotation about gilyonim proves even less than you suppose. Rabbinic rulings about destroying heretical books while cutting out the divine names tell us that some texts used by Jewish-Christians contained God’s name in forms the rabbis deemed sacred and therefore unerasable. That is unsurprising, given that Jewish-Christian circles used Hebrew materials alongside Greek, and that rabbinic halakhah treats specific Hebrew divine epithets as unerasable. It does not tell you that the canonical Greek New Testament as written by the apostles contained יהוה. The passage says nothing about Greek letterforms; it says nothing about the apostolic autographs; it says nothing about the universal Christian practice of nomina sacra in the New Testament. To leap from “some heretical or Jewish-Christian writings in Hebrew had divine names that must be excised before burning” to “therefore the apostles wrote יהוה in Greek and the entire church later removed it” is not argument; it is imagination.
The attempt to pit “God” against “manuscripts” is a false spiritualization of a textual question. Of course our commitment is to the God who inspired the originals; precisely for that reason our loyalty must be to the form in which he actually delivered those originals to the church. Inspiration concerns what the apostles and evangelists wrote; preservation concerns the providentially rich, redundant stream of copies by which those writings have reached us. Faithfulness here is not a choice between God and evidence; it is the choice to honor God by receiving the evidence he has in fact preserved, rather than overriding it with reconstructions we find theologically satisfying. To disparage the manuscripts as “late” and “tampered” ignores two crucial facts. First, our earliest New Testament papyri begin within a century or two of composition—astoundingly early by ancient standards—and they already exhibit the same nomina sacra for κύριος and θεός that dominate the tradition. Second, those same manuscripts preserve scores of minor variants, showing that the tradition was not homogenized to the point of invisibility. If the Tetragrammaton had stood in the text, the very messiness of the transmission makes it likely that at least a few witnesses, versions, or patristic quotations would have preserved it somewhere. None do.
The theological points at the end of your note confuse two different senses of “name.” In Scripture, “name” is not primarily a phonetic key to be sounded; it is a revelation of identity, authority, and presence. When Jesus says, “I have made your name known,” he is not reporting that he taught Galileans how to vocalize a four-letter Hebrew sequence; he is saying that he revealed the Father—his character, will, and saving purpose—to those the Father gave him. That is why the Lord’s Prayer teaches, “Hallowed be your name,” not “Pronounce your name.” It is also why the New Testament’s most explosive “name” language is Christological: God “bestowed on him the name above every name,” which in the Isaianic context Paul is invoking is not the syllables “Jesus” but the acclamation κύριος, the very title by which the Greek Scriptures speak of YHWH, now confessed of the exalted Son “to the glory of God the Father.” To insist that reverence for the Name requires printing יהוה in the Greek New Testament is to mistake sign for substance. The apostles’ way of honoring the Name was to proclaim the Father through the Son in the Spirit and to preach salvation “in the name of the Lord,” which in their Greek Bibles reads κύριος.
DeleteNone of this denigrates the Old Testament’s use of the Tetragrammaton, nor does it forbid editors from printing “Yahweh” in the Hebrew Bible when they judge it pastorally wise. It simply recognizes that two corpora exist, in two languages, with two transmission histories. In the Hebrew Bible, the consonants יהוה are on the page and can be handled by transliteration, vocalization, or the long-standing LORD convention with careful notes. In the Greek New Testament, the Tetragrammaton is not on the page; κύριος and θεός are. To translate what is there is not to slight God, Judaism, or tradition. It is to refuse to correct the apostles. Inserting “Jehovah” throughout the New Testament is not fidelity to the Author; it is a conjectural retroversion against every early witness we possess. If your position were right, the earliest Christian readers—those closest to the apostles and steeped in their teaching—would have been the first to protest the loss. Instead, they doubled down on the very usage your theory rejects: they wrote κύριος and θεός with special reverence, they read those words in worship, and they used those “name” texts to preach Christ as Lord. That is the record the church has received, and that is the record a faithful translator must render.