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
I can only direct you to read The Tetragram in the Anchor Bible Dictionary by George Howard. It appears quite clear that NT authors when quoting a Hebrew text either quoted yehova which was clearly part of the Masoretic text or quoted the LXX in doing so quoting the oldest copies of the LXX either 2nd century BCE or Mid 1st century AD in doing so found iao or paleo Hebrew yhwh. They did not find kurios nor Adonai. This is what the MSS evidence supports. By the way you cannot prove that Kurios was present in extant biblical text. Your arguments fall short when it comes to MSS evidence. Again, your position shows extreme bias to a Name that occurs 6,828 times in the Biblia Hebraica.
DeleteCiting George Howard’s Anchor Bible Dictionary article does not change the nature of the evidence. Howard did not produce a Greek NT MS containing the Tetragrammaton. He did not produce an ancient version of the NT containing the Tetragrammaton. He did not produce a patristic quotation of a NT passage containing the Tetragrammaton. What he offered was a hypothesis: because some early Jewish Greek OT MSS preserved the divine name in Hebrew characters or in the form ΙΑΩ, it is “reasonable to believe,” by analogy, that NT authors may have preserved the Tetragrammaton in OT quotations. That is not MS evidence for the NT. It is an inference from OT Greek MS practice into a different corpus.
DeleteThis is not a small distinction; it is the whole issue. Howard’s own 1977 article shows the problem. He discusses Papyrus Fouad 266 and the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll as witnesses to Jewish Greek OT practice, noting that they preserve the Tetragrammaton where later Christian Septuagint codices have κύριος. He also says that 4Q LXX Leviticus has the divine name in the form ΙΑΩ rather than κύριος. Very well; that proves that some Jewish Greek copies of OT books did not write κύριος at those points. But when Howard turns to the NT, the language shifts from documentary evidence to conjectural reconstruction. He writes that, since the Tetragrammaton was still written in some Greek Bible copies used by early Christians, “it is reasonable to believe” that NT writers preserved it in Scripture quotations; he then says “we can imagine” how the NT text incorporated the Tetragrammaton into its OT citations. That is Howard’s theory, not a NT MS reading.
So when you say, “This is what the MSS evidence supports,” you are equivocating. The MS evidence supports the presence of the Tetragrammaton or ΙΑΩ in some early Jewish Greek OT witnesses. It does not support the presence of the Tetragrammaton in the NT. The Tetragrammaton is not found in any extant Greek NT MS. That is the relevant fact. Your argument tries to borrow evidence from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, or the Twelve Prophets and spend it as though it were evidence for Matthew, Luke, Romans, or Hebrews. It is not.
Nor does the Masoretic Text settle the matter. Of course the Hebrew Bible contains יהוה thousands of times. The number 6,828 in the Biblia Hebraica tradition is often cited, and no serious Christian argument denies the centrality of the divine name in the Hebrew Scriptures. But the issue is not whether יהוה occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The issue is whether the Greek NT, as written by the apostles and evangelists, contained יהוה in its own text. The frequency of the Tetragrammaton in the Hebrew Bible proves that the Hebrew Bible has the Tetragrammaton. It does not prove that Luke wrote Hebrew consonants into his Greek Gospel, or that Paul wrote יהוה into Romans, or that the author of Hebrews wrote Paleo-Hebrew letters into a Greek homily. You are proving what no one denies and then pretending it proves what is actually disputed.
Your statement that the NT authors, when quoting a Hebrew text, “either quoted yehova which was clearly part of the Masoretic text” is especially careless. First, “Yehova” is not “clearly part of the Masoretic text” in the sense you need. The consonants יהוה are in the Hebrew text; the later Masoretic vocalization reflects the Jewish reading tradition, not a first-century proof that Jesus or Paul pronounced or wrote “Yehova.” Second, the fully developed Masoretic textual apparatus is medieval, not a first-century MS sitting in front of Jesus in Nazareth or Paul in Corinth. You cannot appeal to the Masoretic Text as though it were a first-century autograph witness and then accuse others of lacking first-century NT MSS. That is not consistency; it is special pleading.
You also say that they “did not find kurios nor Adonai.” That claim is much too sweeping. Even if one grants Howard’s point that several early Jewish Greek biblical MSS preserved the divine name rather than κύριος in the written text, that does not prove what was read aloud, nor does it prove that κύριος was absent from Jewish interpretive usage. Larry Hurtado notes that Philo gives strong evidence that at least some Greek-speaking Jews used κύριος, and also θεός, as ways of designating the biblical God; he also notes evidence suggesting that Adonai was used as a Hebrew substitute in some contexts. More importantly, even if a particular Vorlage had יהוה, the NT question remains: what did the inspired NT author write? The answer from every surviving NT witness is κύριος or θεός, not יהוה.
DeleteYour phrase “you cannot prove that Kurios was present in extant biblical text” is confused. If by “biblical text” you mean every pre-Christian Greek OT MS, then no one is claiming that every such MS had κύριος. If by “NT text” you mean extant NT MSS, then κύριος is exactly what we can prove. The surviving NT textual tradition has κύριος and θεός. The Christian nomina sacra system, in which κύριος and θεός are written in contracted sacred forms, is among the earliest and most characteristic features of Christian MS culture. Hurtado’s work on nomina sacra emphasizes that the earliest and most consistently treated terms include God, Lord, Jesus, and Christ, and that these sacred abbreviations are already part of early Christian copying practice. That is real NT MS evidence. By contrast, your side has no NT MS evidence for יהוה.
The hidden move in your argument is this: you treat the OT Vorlage as though it automatically determines the NT wording. But that is false. NT authors do not always quote with mechanical exactness. They translate, abbreviate, conflate, interpret, and apply Scripture in light of Christ. Their inspired text is not reducible to the physical form of whatever scroll stood behind a quotation. If Luke writes πνεῦμα κυρίου ἐπ’ ἐμέ in Luke 4:18, then Luke’s Gospel says κύριος. If Paul writes πᾶς γὰρ ὃς ἂν ἐπικαλέσηται τὸ ὄνομα κυρίου σωθήσεται in Romans 10:13, then Romans says κύριος. If Philippians declares that every tongue shall confess ὅτι κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, then Philippians says κύριος. The fact that Isaiah, Joel, or another Hebrew source had יהוה in the original OT context does not authorize you to rewrite the apostolic Greek sentence.
This is precisely where the Watchtower argument becomes transparently theological, not textual. The NT’s use of κύριος is dangerous for Arian theology because it allows OT YHWH texts to be applied to Jesus with full theological force. David Capes’s work on Paul’s use of OT “Yahweh texts” focuses exactly on this phenomenon: Paul quotes or alludes to OT passages involving the divine name and applies some of them to God the Father and others to “the Lord Jesus.” Capes describes this as remarkable for Paul’s Christology. The Watchtower solution is to interrupt that apostolic logic by inserting “Jehovah” selectively into the NT, thereby preventing the reader from seeing how the apostolic writers identify Jesus with the Lord of Israel’s Scriptures. That is not textual restoration. It is anti-Trinitarian damage control.
And let us be clear about Howard. Howard’s thesis, if accepted, would have radical theological consequences; he himself recognized that it would imply a later textual change that blurred the distinction between God and Christ in Christian interpretation. In his article, he explicitly speculates that the removal of the Tetragrammaton from NT quotations created ambiguity between God and Christ. That is exactly why Jehovah’s Witnesses like the theory. It gives them a scholarly-sounding mechanism for saying: “The high Christology of the NT is partly the result of textual corruption.” But liking the theological payoff does not make the hypothesis true. A theory that requires the entire Christian MS tradition to have lost the divine name everywhere, without a single surviving NT counterexample, is not strong evidence. It is a fragile conjecture carrying an enormous doctrinal burden.
DeleteYour accusation of “extreme bias to a Name” is therefore backwards. The bias is not on the side that says, “Translate the extant Greek NT according to the extant Greek NT MSS.” The bias is on the side that says, “Because my theology requires ‘Jehovah’ here, I will insert it even though no Greek NT MS has it.” Catholic and Trinitarian Christians do not hate the divine name. We confess the God whose name was revealed to Moses. We read the Hebrew Bible as inspired Scripture. We acknowledge the sanctity of יהוה. But we also refuse to falsify the apostolic text. Reverence for the OT name does not give anyone permission to manufacture a NT reading.
The Catholic position is both textually and theologically coherent. In the Hebrew Bible, יהוה stands in the text and must be handled as part of the Hebrew canon. In the Greek NT, κύριος and θεός stand in the text and must be handled as part of the apostolic canon. The divine name is not erased by this; it is fulfilled and disclosed in the economy of revelation. The one God of Israel is made known in the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The Son is not a creature who merely speaks on behalf of God; he is the eternal Word, consubstantial with the Father. That is why the apostolic confession “Jesus is Lord” is so central. It is not a casual title. It is the Greek scriptural title through which the earliest Christians confessed the risen Jesus within the identity of Israel’s God.
So the challenge remains unanswered. Do not point again to a Greek OT MS of Leviticus or Deuteronomy. Do not point again to the Masoretic count of יהוה. Do not point again to Howard’s conjecture. Produce a Greek NT MS with the Tetragrammaton. Produce an ancient NT version with it. Produce a patristic quotation of a NT passage with it. Produce some actual NT textual witness. Until then, the disciplined conclusion is unavoidable: the NT text we possess says κύριος, the Church received κύριος, the Fathers preached κύριος, and the apostolic confession remains κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός — Jesus Christ is Lord.
You are indeed amazing. You would think that you are in possession of the autographs. I feel that you are not even reading George Howard. He was not trying to support a Greek NT manuscript they of course are way to young maybe 200 CE. But what he was proving that any quote from a Greek text from 1 BC or 1 Ad that of course Jesus would have quoted contained the tetragram either iao or paleo hebrew. If Jesus used the Hebrew text, for instance, from Isa. 61. when quoting
Deletein support of Luke 4 he would have used the divine name.
One thing is clear though, the Jewish Christian certainly had its battles. From Philo to Clement to Origin. Born of course in a highly steeped Greek Philosophy.
Blatantly said that God had no name. You would patently I'm sure say that they were wrong. Afterall, it does occur 6,828 times. I am here, of course, testing you on just how far you will go in denying the Name used more than any other name in the
Biblical Hebraica.
Just how far are you willing to go. You must believe that the modern translations have removed that name form there translations. An alarm should immediately sound off.
As for you flippantly saying that the LXX manuscripts have no bearing on the NT^ quotations I vehemently disagree. What were the writers of that corpus quoting if it was not Hebrew manuscripts there would be the divine name. If it were Lxx then you would find the divine name.
DeleteI like Howard in this regard. "We can now say with almost absolute certainty that the divine name was not rendered by kurios in the pre-Christian Greek Bible, as so often been thought. Usually, the Tetragram was written out in Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew letters or was transliterated into Greek letters." Howard, "The Tetragram and the New Testament," pg.65
G.D. Kilpatrick. on talking about the period between 70-135 C.E. said 3 important changes were made in this period. The change from scroll to Codex, the Tetragrammaton was replaced by Kyrios and abbreviations were introduced for divine names." See Etudes de Papyrologie Tome Neuviemke 1971 pp 221,222
To the average student of the scriptures the problem is self-evident. There was a blurring of Jehovah text and quotes in the NT and Jesus text.
It was an easy switch. Jehovah quickly became Jesus.
" Once the Tetragrammaton was removed and replaced by a surrogate 'Lord', scribes were unsure whether "Lord" meant God or Christ. As time went on, these two figures were brought into even closer unity until it was often impossible to distinguish between them".....George Howard, The name of God in the New Testament, BAR 4.1 (March 1978), 15
"We know that the Greek Bible text(the Septuagint) as far as it was written by Jews for Jews did not translate the Divine Name by kyrios, but the Tetragrammaton was written with Hebrew or Greek letters was retained in such MSS. It was the Christians who replaced the tetragrammaton by Kyrios, when the divine name was written in Hebrew letters was not understood anymore". (Dr. P. Kahle, "The Cairo Geniza, Oxford, 1959,p222
"Supposing a Christian scholar were engaged in translating the Greek testament into Hebrew, he would have to consider, each time the word Kurios occurred, whether there was anything in the context to indicate it's true Hebrew representative; and this is the difficulty which would arise in translating the N.T. into all languages if the title Jehovah had been allowed to stand in the O.T.
Old Testament Synonyms pg 43 Girdlestone
Dokimazo
@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.
Nor can you produce a single NT text from the 1st century that has kurios. You have on you the same problem We do not have the autographs. But one thing we do have. we have Greek text from the 1st and 2nd BCE and mid century that have the divine name either iao or paleo Hebrew. You have no Greek text from that period. (LXX)
Delete4Qlxx(Levb)
LXXPFOUAD266
lxxvts10b
LXXVTS10A
LXXIBJ12
LXXPOXYVII1007
There are many quotes in the NT from the OT, for example Luke
4:18. What did Jesus read, and how did Luke write down what he read?
What is certain is that the scroll of Isaiah contained the
tetragrammaton. It is further the case that all LXX (and LXX-like)
manuscripts from the 2nd century B.C.E. to the middle of the 1st
century C.E. have the tetragrammaton of IAW in verses where the name
occurs. So regardless of whether Jesus, Paul and others quoted from
a
Hebrew manuscript or from a Greek one, the name was in the Vorlage.
Did they quote it? The arguments against it from the first part of
the 20th century have crumbled one by one. There is even no evidence
that )ADONAY was used as a substitute for YHWH in the synagogues
and
elsewhere in the 1st century C.B.E. or in the days of Jesus. So
there
simply is no reason why Jesus and Paul should not quote correctly
when they used passages from the OT with the name.
Furuli.
@Dokimazo
ReplyDeleteYour reply still does not answer the central question. You keep pointing to pre-Christian Greek MSS of the OT that contain the divine name, and then you quietly smuggle that evidence into the NT as though the two corpora had the same textual history. They do not. A Greek Leviticus fragment from Qumran, a Greek Deuteronomy papyrus, or the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever may tell us something valuable about Jewish scribal practice in transmitting Greek versions of the Hebrew Scriptures before or around the time of Christ. They do not tell us what Luke, Paul, Matthew, John, Peter, James, Jude, or the author of Hebrews wrote when composing the NT in Greek. That is the category error on which your whole argument depends.
You say that I cannot produce a first-century NT MS with κύριος. Of course I cannot. Neither can you produce a first-century NT MS with יהוה, ΙΑΩ, ΠΙΠΙ, or anything else. We do not possess the autographs of the NT. But textual criticism does not work by saying, “Because the autograph is gone, I may insert whatever my theology requires.” It works by asking which reading is attested by the earliest, widest, and most coherent documentary evidence. On that question the evidence is not merely stronger for κύριος; it is completely one-sided. Every extant Greek NT MS tradition has κύριος or θεός, normally in the Christian sacred-abbreviation system known as the nomina sacra. Larry Hurtado notes that the earliest and most consistently treated nomina sacra are the Greek words for “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Christ,” and that these forms are already found in the earliest clear Christian MS evidence, reaching back into the second century. You do not have a rival NT textual stream. You have no Greek NT MS with the Tetragrammaton. You have no Syriac version with it. You have no Old Latin witness with it. You have no Coptic witness with it. You have no patristic quotation preserving it. You have a hypothesis.
Your appeal to 4Q LXX Leviticus, Papyrus Fouad 266, 8HevXIIgr, and similar witnesses proves much less than you think. I grant that some Jewish Greek MSS of the OT preserved the divine name in Hebrew letters or represented it as ΙΑΩ. 4Q120, for example, is a Greek Leviticus MS, usually dated to the first century B.C., and it is notable precisely because it renders the divine name as ΙΑΩ. Papyrus Fouad 266 is a Greek Deuteronomy MS from the first century B.C. that contains the Hebrew Tetragrammaton within the Greek text. 8HevXIIgr, the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever, is likewise famous for using the Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew script. Very well. That establishes that some Jewish scribes, in some Greek OT MSS, handled the divine name in this way. It does not establish that Christian apostles wrote Hebrew characters into Greek NT compositions.
The distinction is elementary. A Greek OT MS is a translation or textual witness of the Hebrew Bible. A NT writing is an apostolic composition. Luke is not a surviving synagogue scroll of Isaiah. Romans is not a copy of Leviticus. Philippians is not a reproduction of Deuteronomy. The fact that a Jewish Greek OT MS contains יהוה or ΙΑΩ does not create a presumption that Paul wrote יהוה in Romans, still less that later Christians successfully erased it from every NT copy, every ancient version, every lectionary tradition, and every patristic citation without leaving one surviving trace. That is not historical reasoning. That is theological ventriloquism disguised as MS argument.
Your quotation from Furuli simply repeats the same illicit inference: if the Vorlage of an OT quotation contained the divine name, then Jesus, Paul, or Luke must have reproduced it “correctly.” But “correctly” according to whom? According to first-century Christian apostolic usage, or according to a modern Watchtower-driven expectation? The NT authors do not quote the OT as mechanical photocopiers. They quote, translate, adapt, combine, abbreviate, and interpret Scripture Christologically. They often follow the Greek Scriptures; sometimes they reflect Hebrew; sometimes they produce forms that do not correspond exactly to either the later MT or the standard LXX tradition. The inspired text is not the hypothetical scroll behind the quotation; the inspired NT text is what the apostolic author actually wrote.
DeleteThat is fatal to your Luke 4:18 argument. You ask, “What did Jesus read, and how did Luke write down what he read?” Luke tells us how he wrote it down: πνεῦμα κυρίου ἐπ’ ἐμέ, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” The Greek text of Luke 4:18 has κύριος, not יהוה and not ΙΑΩ. You can speculate about whether the synagogue scroll Jesus handled was Hebrew, Greek, or accompanied by oral rendering. You can speculate about whether the written scroll contained יהוה. But Luke’s inspired narrative is not giving us a photograph of the scroll; it is giving us the Gospel’s Greek proclamation of the event. And in that proclamation, the word is κύριος. Your argument therefore amounts to saying that Luke’s actual Greek text must be corrected by your theory of what stood in the Vorlage. That is precisely backwards.
Nor is Luke 4 an isolated case. The whole NT works this way. Paul cites Joel 2:32 in Romans 10:13, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,” and the context is explicitly governed by the confession “Jesus is Lord” in Romans 10:9. Recent discussion of Romans 10:13 recognizes exactly the issue: Howard proposed a theory that the Tetragrammaton may have stood in NT OT citations, but the extant NT text and Paul’s argument in Romans 10 center on κύριος and the confession of Jesus as Lord. Philippians 2:10–11 takes the universal homage language of Isaiah 45:23—where the context concerns YHWH’s unique divine sovereignty—and applies it to Jesus, so that every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is κύριος. Hebrews 1:10–12 applies Psalm 102 language about the Creator Lord to the Son. First Peter 3:15 takes reverence language directed to the Lord and places it in relation to Christ. This is not accidental. The NT’s κύριος usage is not a scribal embarrassment; it is the vehicle of apostolic Christology.
This is why the Watchtower-style insertion of “Jehovah” into the NT is not a restoration of the text but a theological sabotage of the apostolic argument. When Paul says that salvation comes through confessing “Jesus is Lord,” and then cites “calling on the name of the Lord,” his argument depends on the identity-bearing force of κύριος. The Greek term carries the Septuagintal weight of the divine name and is then applied to Christ. That is precisely what the Arian and semi-Arian instinct cannot tolerate. So the text is made to say “Jehovah” in selected places, not because a MS says so, but because the Christological implication of κύριος is too dangerous. The result is not textual fidelity. It is doctrinal damage control.
The apostolic proclamation is not that the divine name has been forgotten, suppressed, or hated. It is that the God of Israel has revealed his own eternal life in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that the Son, without ceasing to be personally distinct from the Father, shares the one divine nature and receives the divine acclamation proper to YHWH. The “name above every name” in Philippians 2 is not a mere syllabic label. It is the manifestation of divine lordship in the incarnate, crucified, and exalted Christ. The Christian tradition therefore does not dishonor the Tetragrammaton by saying “Lord.” It follows the apostolic and liturgical logic by which the ineffable divine name is rendered through Adonai, Kyrios, Dominus, Lord.
DeleteYour claim that there is “no evidence” that Adonai was used as a substitute in the first century is also much too confident. But even if one granted it for the sake of argument, it would not rescue your case. The question before us is not whether every Jew in every setting avoided pronouncing the divine name in exactly the same way. The question is what the NT authors wrote in Greek and what the earliest Christian transmission preserves. There the evidence is plain: κύριος and θεός in Christian nomina sacra. The Christian scribal habit did not behave like a clumsy late medieval accident. It is one of the earliest distinctive features of Christian book culture. If a universal replacement of יהוה by κύριος had occurred, we would expect some textual scar tissue: a mixed MS, a transitional form, a patristic complaint, a sectarian accusation, a versional survival, a marginal note, a controversy. Instead, we find Christian MSS uniformly treating κύριος, θεός, Ἰησοῦς, and Χριστός with reverential abbreviation. That is exactly what one would expect if κύριος belonged to the apostolic text and early Christian worship from the beginning.
George Howard’s thesis is often invoked at this point, but it does not do the work you need it to do. Howard proposed that the Tetragrammaton may have stood in NT OT quotations and was later replaced. That is a conjecture. It is not a MS discovery. Even scholarly discussion of the issue presents Howard’s view as a theory built from early Greek OT evidence, not as the reading of any extant Greek NT witness. The gap between “some Jewish Greek OT MSS used the divine name” and “the apostles wrote the Tetragrammaton in the NT” is precisely the gap your argument never crosses. Furuli may pile up possibilities; he cannot produce the document.
The deeper problem is that your argument confuses Vorlage with authorial text. Suppose Jesus read from a Hebrew Isaiah scroll containing יהוה. Suppose Paul had before him a Greek text of Joel containing the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew characters. Suppose an early Jewish Greek copy of Deuteronomy did not use κύριος. None of that decides how Luke or Paul, writing Greek Christian Scripture, rendered the passage. Translation is not visual transcription. Citation is not always reproduction. Apostolic exegesis is not a synagogue archive. The NT authors write from within the revelation of Christ. They do not merely preserve OT letterforms; they unveil the referent of the OT promises. And the word by which they do this, again and again, is κύριος.
Here Thomism is especially useful because it keeps together what your argument tears apart: sign, reality, and divine revelation. A name is not a magical sound-token. A name signifies. The Tetragrammaton signifies the God who is, the One whose essence is existence itself, ipsum esse subsistens. In the old covenant this name was revealed truly, but under the pedagogy of promise and figure. In the new covenant the same God is revealed in the incarnate Word. The fullness of the divine self-disclosure is not achieved by printing Hebrew consonants inside Greek sentences; it is achieved by the Son making the Father known in the Holy Spirit. “Lord” is not a demotion of the divine name. In the NT it is the Greek confession by which the Church recognizes Jesus within the divine identity of Israel’s God.
DeleteThat is why your accusation of “hatred toward the Divine Name” is not merely unfair; it is theologically shallow. Catholic, Orthodox, and historic Protestant Christians do not hate the divine name. They worship the God whose name it is. They receive the Hebrew Bible as inspired Scripture. They recognize the sacredness of יהוה in the OT. But they also refuse to falsify the NT text by inserting a form that no NT MS contains. Reverence does not authorize invention. Piety does not excuse textual tampering. And zeal for one divine name becomes perverse when it is used to obscure the apostolic confession that Jesus is the Lord to whom YHWH texts are applied.
Your position also creates an absurd historical scenario. You must imagine that the earliest Christians, many of whom were Jews, received apostolic writings containing the Tetragrammaton, then very quickly and everywhere replaced it with κύριος or its contracted nomen sacrum, and did so so thoroughly that no copy anywhere survived with the original reading. You must imagine this happened across different regions, languages, communities, and textual streams. You must imagine that the same Church which preserved countless minor variants—word order changes, spelling differences, harmonizations, omissions, additions—somehow executed a perfectly successful deletion of the most sacred name in Scripture. You must imagine that no Father objected, no heretic accused the Church of this corruption, no Jewish critic exploited it, no liturgy retained the older form, and no ancient translation betrayed the earlier reading. That is not a sober reconstruction. It is a conspiracy theory with a scholarly footnote attached.
By contrast, the traditional Christian explanation is simple and historically adequate. Jewish Greek OT MSS showed diversity in how the divine name was represented. The apostles, writing Greek Christian Scripture, used κύριος and θεός. Early Christian scribes, receiving those texts as sacred, wrote κύριος and θεός in the reverential nomina sacra system, alongside Jesus and Christ. The Fathers inherited and preached this text. The liturgy prayed it. The Church confessed Jesus as κύριος, not as a creaturely agent bearing a lesser title, but as the eternal Son who shares the one divine nature with the Father and the Holy Spirit. This explanation accounts for the MSS, the versions, the patristic evidence, the liturgy, and the theology. Your explanation accounts for none of them without inventing an unattested purge.
So the burden remains exactly where it was. Produce one Greek NT MS with the Tetragrammaton. Produce one ancient version of the NT that preserves it. Produce one Father who quotes a NT passage with יהוה and complains that others removed it. Produce one credible trace of this alleged universal replacement. Until then, the honest textual position is to translate what the NT actually says: κύριος. And the honest theological position is to recognize why that matters: the apostles used the language of Israel’s Lord to proclaim the crucified and risen Jesus. That is not hatred of the divine name. It is the Gospel.