TETRAGRAMMATON IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
There is some evidence that the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, Yahweh, Appeared in some or all of the OT quotations in the NT when the NT documents were first penned. See also NAMES OF GOD IN THE OT; YAHWEH (DEITY) The evidence for this is twofold.
A. Jewish Scribal evidence
The extant pre-Christian copies of the Greek OT that included passages which the Hebrew incorporate the Divine Name also preserve the Hebrew Divine Name in the Greek text. These copies are
(1) P.Faud 266 ( =
Rahifs 848), 50 B.C.E., Containing the Tetragrammaton in Aramaic letters:
(2) a fragmentary scroll of the Twelve Prophets in Greek from Wadi Khabra (= W. Khabra
XII Kaige), 50 B.C.E.- 50 C.E. containing the Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew letters: and
(3) 4QLXX levb (= Rahifs 802) 1st century B.C.E. containing the Tetragrammaton written in Greek letters in the form of IAO.
The well known Jewish-Greek versions of the OT that emerged in the 2nd century C.E. , i.e., those of
Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus, continued the Jewish practice of writing the Hebrew Tetragrammaton into the Greek text. The evidence, therefore, suggest that the practice of of writing the Hebrew Divine Name into the text of the Greek OT that contained the Hebrew Divine Name, and (2) that the NT writers who quoted from the Greek OT had reason to preserve the Tetragrammaton in their quotations.
B. Christian Scribal Evidence
By the time of the earliest extent Christian copies of the LXX (2d or early 3d century C.E.), a clear break with the Jewish practice outlined above is to be observed. The Christian copies of the Greek OT employ the words Kurios (“Lord”) and Theos (“God”) as substitutes or surrogates for the Hebrew
Tetragrammaton. The evidence suggests that this had become the Practice of the Christian scribes perhaps as early as the beginning of the 2d century. Curiously, the surrogates for the Tetragrammaton have been abbreviated by the writing of the first and last letters only and are marked as abbreviated by a horizontal stroke above the word. Thus for example, the word for “Lord” is written KS and for God THS. These two so-called nomina sacra, later to be joined by thirteen other sacred words, appear also in the earliest copies of the NT, including its quotations from the Greek OT. The practice, therefore, in very early times was consistently followed throughout the Greek Bible.
A conjecture is the forms KS and THS were first created by non-Jewish Christian scribes who in their
coping of the LXX text found no traditional reason to preserve the Tetragrammaton. In all probability it was problematic for gentile scribes to write the Tetragrammaton since they did not know Hebrew. IF this is correct, the contracted surrogates KS and THS were perhaps considered analogous to the vowelless Hebrew Divine Name, and were certainly much easier to write.
Once the practice of writing the Tetragrammaton into copies of the Greek OT was abandoned and replaced by the practice of writing KS and THS, a similar development no doubt took place in regard to the quotations of the Greek OT found in the NT. There too the Tetragrammaton was replaced by the surrogates KS and THS. In the passing of time, the original significance of the surrogates was lost to the gentile Church. Other contracted words which had no connection with the Tetragrammaton were added to the list of nomina sacra, and eventually even KS and THS came to be used in passages where the Tetragrammaton had never stood.
It is possible that some confusion ensued from the abandonment of the Tetragrammaton in the N.T.,
although the significance of this confusion can only be conjectured. In all probability it became
difficult to know whether KS referred to the Lord God or the Lord Jesus Christ. That this issue played a role in the later Trinitarian debates, however, is unknown.
George Howard
No comments:
Post a Comment