Name of God in the NT, the
Under the above heading appeared an article in the March 1978
issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. The article
was written by George Howard, Associate Professor of Religion and Hebrew
at the University of Georgia. His primary thesis is that the earliest Gospels,
although written in Greek, used the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. (This is the
technical term to describe the name "Yahweh", so called because in basic,
unvowelled Hebrew it consists of four consonants -- best translated into English
According to Howard, we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that
Jewish scribes often distinguished the Divine Name by writing YHWH in ancient
Hebrew script while the remainder of the verse was written in the more modern,
or Aramaic-type script. (This is somewhat equivalent to our italicization of key
words). Sometimes this differentiation was carried one step further, and four
dots were substituted for the sacred name, it being felt, apparently, that
"Yahweh" was so sacred that it should not even be written. We know also that
conservative Jews adopted quite early the practice of not pronouncing "Yahweh"
in Scripture reading or prayer, but saying "Adonai" instead. (As
Christadelphians we are generally familiar with a similar practice in our
devotions -- though for a much different reason: many of us regularly substitute
'spirit' for 'ghost' and 'ecclesia' for 'church' in our reading of the King
These traditional practices suggest that to Jews the personal
name of God was a special word which required special treatment, both in writing
The New Testament texts that have been available to modern
Biblical scholars use the Greek word "Kyrios" (Lord) and occasionally, "Theos"
(God) when quoting from the Old Testament in which YHWH appears. In this they
agree with the practice adopted in the only available complete texts of the
Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament made by Jews in
pre-Christian times. However, a few scattered textual fragments of the
Septuagint which have come to light during the last century have used not
"Kyrios", but the Tetragrammaton written in Hebrew in an otherwise Greek text.
This indicates that, at least in some instances, the ancient practice of a
differentiated Tetragrammaton was carried forward into the Greek texts of
These few fragments might have been dismissed as rare
exceptions, were it not for the discoveries in the 1950's of Old Testament
scrolls in the Judean desert that almost certainly date to the first Christian
century. In these Greek writings the name of God was written either in old-style
Hebrew, or transliterated with the Greek letters IAO, which would have been
pronounced "YAH". With this added evidence we may now say with near certainty
that it was a Jewish practice before, during and after New Testament times to
preserve "Yahweh" in Biblical texts. This presents a striking contrast with the
later Christian copies of the Septuagint and the standard New Testament
Howard postulates that the old Jewish custom of reserving
God's name in veiled symbols for the Tetragrammaton continued among the
predominantly Jewish church in the first century. A famous rabbinical passage
(Talmud Shabbat 13) from that period discusses the problem of destroying
heretical texts (very probably containing books of Jewish Christians). The
problem arises for the rabbinical writer because the heretical texts contain the
divine name, and their wholesale destruction would include the destruction of
that name also. This further suggests that the Jewish Christians did not
translate the Divine Name into Greek, since a corrupted translation of the name
would have posed no such problem to scrupulous Jews.
Further, the professor suggests that, as the wave of Gentile
converts began to overwhelm the Jewish element in the ecclesias, this special
treatment of God's name began to decline. Gentile scribes who lacked familiarity
with Hebrew writing could hardly be expected to preserve "Yahweh" (especially in
its coded forms of archaic script or dots). Perhaps this contributed to the
copyists' use of substitutes like "Kyrios" and "Theos" as new manuscripts were
created, and the Hebrew name gradually phased out in both the Septuagint and New
Testament by the end of the first century. It is not difficult to imagine the
next step, in which the understanding of the name as well was lost to a church
drifting rapidly towards apostasy.
The effect of this loss was no doubt serious for the
second-century church: even today we may experience certain difficulties in
Scriptural interpretation due to the imprecise translation of the divine name.
"The LORD said unto my Lord" (Mat 22:44; Mark 12:36; Luke
20:42) would be quite confusing were it not a direct citation from the Old
Testament. By contrast, the early church may have read, "Yahweh said to my Lord"
-- clear and simple.
"Prepare the way of..." (Mark 1:3) Whom? Yahweh (as in Isaiah
40:3 and Malachi 3:1) or Jesus (as Mark 1:1 indicates)? Or perhaps both, in the
sense that God manifested Himself through Christ? but who can definitely say? We
possess no copy of Mark that uses the Tetragrammaton, therefore "Kyrios" is
veiled in ambiguity.
"The one who boasts, let him boast in the Lord" (1Co 1:31).
Whom, God or Christ?
These examples are sufficient to suggest (if Howard's
hypothesis is true) that the removal of "Yahweh" from the New Testament and its
replacement with "Kyrios" blurred the original clear distinction between the
Lord God and the Lord Christ. "Kyrios" thenceforth was pressed into double duty
-- as a standard title of Jesus "the Lord" and also as the New Testament
equivalent of "Yahweh". In many passages it is nothing but guesswork as to which
one is meant. As time went on, those who had known Jesus in the flesh became
fewer and fewer in the ecclesias, and superstition and ignorance made a natural
resurgence. Thus these two figures, God and His Son, were brought into such
close proximity that it became next to impossible to distinguish them. Therefore
it may be that the removal of the Tetragrammaton from the New Testament
contributed significantly to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, and
the related obscuring of the doctrine of God-manifestation.
It is a fairly common Christadelphian practice in some
ecclesias to substitute the Hebrew names of God -- Yahweh, Elohim and so forth
-- for the extremely vague "Lord" and "God" of the Old Testament. This is useful
enough, provided that the true meanings of the original names are known, but it
may also contribute to the confusion of those not sufficiently grounded in the
Truth. For this reason this practice should be followed
In New Testament reading, however, the student who wishes to
know and use the appropriate Divine Name must realize (again, given the above
thesis) that uncertainties due to transcription exist. He must therefore examine
the context of each passage before making an educated guess as to whether
"Kyrios" means God or Jesus. And still he is faced with the unsettling
conclusion that the Scripture message in its original clarity is, to some
degree, hidden from him.