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.
It is unfortunate that you have such a hatred towards the Divine Name. Anything to avoid using it.
DeleteCan you prove that the NT autographs have kurios or theos in the text. I wonder why modern Hebrew NT have the Name.
I really can't help you on your strongly held views on the Name used 6,828 times in the Hebrew text. BHS I can hardly dignify almost your mockery of a name that is used so frequently. And you somehow reason as others have that 'it is Gods Character when speaking the name. This almost makes me want to vomit. Have you even read the bible? "They are thinking of making my people forget my name by means of their dreams that they keep relating each one to the other..."Jer. 23.27
"At that time Moses and the sons of Isreal proceeded to sing this song to Jehovah and to say the following: "Let me sing to Jehovah, for he has become highly exalted. The horse and its rider he has pitched into the sea. My strength and my might is Jah, since he serves for my salvation. This is my God, and I shall laud him, my father's God, and I shall raise him on high. Jehovah is a manly person of war, Jehovah is his name." Exodus 15:1-3
By the way the Divine Name occurs 40 times in the book of Jeremiah.
See George Howard Tetragrammaton in New Testament.
The Tetragram Rolf Furuli
@dokimazo
ReplyDeleteYour opening line—“It is unfortunate that you have such a hatred towards the Divine Name”—is not an argument; it is a rhetorical attempt to put your interlocutor on moral trial so you can avoid the historical question. The question at issue is not whether God’s covenant name is holy (it is), nor whether the Hebrew Bible uses it frequently (it does), but whether the Greek NT text as transmitted—across all extant Greek witnesses—ever contained יהוה/יהו־ in Hebrew letters (or any equivalent) and then suffered a universal, perfectly executed purge that left no surviving trace in Greek manuscripts, early versions, or patristic quotation. Calling that question “hatred” does not move the evidence one millimeter.
“Can you prove that the NT autographs have kyrios or theos in the text?” You cannot “prove” the contents of lost autographs for any ancient work in the modern forensic sense. That is not how textual history works. What you can do—what historians and textual critics actually do—is infer the earliest recoverable text from the earliest and widest manuscript evidence, the early translations, and the earliest citations. On that standard, the situation is straightforward: the manuscript tradition we possess is unanimously a tradition of κύριος/θεός (very often written in the contracted sacred forms, the nomina sacra). There is no competing strand of evidence anywhere that preserves יהוה in the Greek NT. So the responsible burden of proof lies with the person asserting a conjectural, lost reading against the entire extant tradition. It is not scholarship to demand “proof of the autographs” and then treat the absence of autographs as permission to insert into the text what no witness contains; it is special pleading.
Your appeal to “modern Hebrew NTs” is a category mistake. A modern Hebrew NT is, by definition, a translation (often a missionary translation, sometimes a Jewish-oriented one, sometimes produced in confessional contexts), and translators routinely make stylistic or theological decisions in their target language that do not function as evidence about the source-language autograph. In fact, scholarship discussing this exact phenomenon notes that some Hebrew versions render NT κύριος in OT quotation contexts with the Tetragrammaton (יהוה) precisely as a translation choice shaped by how the OT is customarily presented in Hebrew, not because they have discovered a Greek archetype containing יהוה. If you want “modern Hebrew NTs” to count as evidence for what the apostles wrote in Greek, you would first need to show that these Hebrew editions derive from an ancient independent Hebrew textual tradition of the NT rather than being translations from the standard Greek/Latin base; that is not what they are, and it is why their editorial choice proves nothing about the Greek manuscripts.
The fact that יהוה occurs thousands of times in the Hebrew Bible is not in dispute and is not threatened by translating the Greek NT as Greek. But even here, your attempted proof by frequency is sloppy. You claim the Divine Name occurs “40 times in the book of Jeremiah.” Standard reference works have long listed Jeremiah as containing the Tetragrammaton hundreds of times, not dozens; one classic count gives Jeremiah 555 occurrences. That numerical correction does not, by itself, settle the NT question, but it does illustrate the larger point: intensity of feeling and confidence of assertion are not substitutes for careful handling of data.
Your Jeremiah 23:27 citation is likewise a non sequitur. The text condemns prophets whose deceit and idolatry cause God’s people to “forget” his name. In Jeremiah’s context, “forgetting” the Name is bound up with covenant infidelity and the substitution of Baal-worship for YHWH’s lordship, not with a later Greek scribal convention or with whether first-century Christian authors wrote Hebrew characters inside Greek compositions. Quoting Jeremiah to imply that anyone who refuses to print “Jehovah” in the Greek NT is participating in Jeremiah’s condemnation is simply an illegitimate jump in scope and context.
DeleteExodus 15:1–3 is beautiful and entirely irrelevant to the narrow textual question you are trying to force. Of course Exodus says “YHWH is his name,” and of course the Hebrew text uses יהוה. Nothing in the argument against inserting “Jehovah” into the Greek NT denies that; rather, it insists on honoring each corpus in its own language and transmission. You do not honor Exodus by rewriting Romans; you honor Exodus by representing Exodus faithfully, and you honor Romans by representing Romans faithfully.
Now to the two names you cite as if they were trump cards. George Howard is frequently invoked in Watchtower-adjacent argumentation for the conjecture that the NT writers originally preserved the Tetragrammaton in citations and that later scribes replaced it with κύριος/nomina sacra. But even sympathetic academic discussion describes this as an inference, not a discovery—an attempt to explain certain Septuagintal phenomena and then project them into the NT without manuscript support. The critical problem is unchanged: there is no Greek NT manuscript evidence of יהוה, and the earliest evidence we actually possess already reflects the Christian scribal practice of special contracted forms for sacred terms, including κύριος and θεός. Discussions of early Christian manuscripts underline how early and characteristic this practice is within the Christian copying tradition; it is not the footprint you would expect if scribes were systematically erasing יהוה from Greek pages in a way that somehow left no surviving counterexamples or transitional artifacts. A theory that requires a universal, perfectly successful excision—across all geographic streams, and early enough to eliminate every trace—while simultaneously leaving the normal, messy scatter of minor variants everywhere else is not “the historical explanation.” It is an ad hoc rescue maneuver.
As for Rolf Furuli, citing a confessional apologist—whatever his credentials in other domains—does not conjure manuscripts into existence. The question is not whether an author can assemble possibilities; it is whether any early textual artifact, versional evidence, or patristic citation supplies the reading you are inserting. On that point, Furuli (like the Watchtower’s broader line of argument) offers assertion and conjecture, not documentary proof.
DeleteFinally, your disgust at the claim that “name” in Scripture often signifies revealed identity, authority, and presence rather than a demanded phonetic performance is a theological reaction, not a refutation. You can dislike the point; you cannot erase how biblical language works. Jeremiah’s concern is covenant fidelity; Exodus’ concern is the God who saves; the NT’s concern is the Father revealed in the Son and confessed as Lord. If you want to argue that Christian reverence requires vocalizing a particular reconstruction of ancient Hebrew pronunciation, that is a different debate. It still would not entitle you to insert a Hebrew form into a Greek text when every extant Greek witness reads otherwise.
So the core issue remains exactly where it began. You have produced indignation, proof-texts from the Hebrew Bible, and two modern authors who propose hypotheses. You have not produced a single Greek NT manuscript, not a single early translation, and not a single patristic witness that actually contains the Tetragrammaton in the NT. Until you can, the historically disciplined position is to translate the text that exists, not the text your system requires.