George Howard's "The Tetragram and the New Testament"

Someone has posted George Howard's article "The Tetragram and the New Testament" in the Journal of Biblical Literature 96 (1977) pgs. 63-83, at http://www.areopage.net/howard.pdf

Here is some of what he covers in the article:

He refers to several evidences that the Divine Name appeared in the earliest Septuagint manuscripts. For instance in the Papyrus Fouad 266 dating to the first or second century B.C. which included part of the Septuagint we see that YHWH was not translated as kyrios. Instead the Tetragrammaton itself—in square Aramaic letters—was written into the Greek text.

Greek fragments of Aquila translation of the OT show the Hebrew Tetragrammaton in paleo-Hebrew script written into the otherwise Greek text.

The Ambrosian Library of Milan has a manuscript containing parts of the Psalter to Origen's Hexapla (lacking the Hebrew column). All the columns show the Tetragrammaton written in square Aramaic script, although the texts are otherwise written in Greek.

Fragments of Psalm 22 from Origen's Hexapla show the Tetragrammaton written into the Greek columns of Aquila, Symmachus, and the Septuagint in the strange form of PIPI was used to represent with Greek letters what the Tetragrammaton looked like in the Hebrew.

Fragments from early in the first century C.E. of a scroll of the Twelve Prophets in Greek writes the Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew in an\ otherwise Greek text.

At Qumran cave 4, a fragment (1 B.C.) of the Greek translation of Leviticus confirms that the divine name was preserved in the pre-Christian Septuagint. The Tetragrammaton is transliterated with the Greek letters IAO.

He then gives evidence that when later Christians translated the Tetragrammaton as either KYRIOS/KURIOS or THEOS/QEOS, they abbreviated these surrogates by writing only their first and last letters and by placing a line over them to denote a sacred name.

Howard says: "Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the Early church, it is reasonable to believe that the New Testament writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text.

Somehow around beginning of the second century the use of surrogates must have crowded out the Tetragram in both Testaments. In many passages where the persons of God and Christ were clearly distinguishable, the removal of the Tetragram must have created considerable ambiguity.

He argues that surrogates emerged shortly after the Apostolic age. And, since all extant manuscripts evidence is Post Apostolic. we should not expect to find the Divine name.

George Howard surmises, "This removal of the Tetragram, in our view, created a confusion in the minds of early Gentile Christians about the relationship between the 'Lord God' and the 'Lord Christ.'"