Names and titles of God in the New Testament

In quotations from the Old Testament, it represents both יהוה (Yahweh) and אדני (Adonai), the latter name having been used in Jewish worship to replace the former, the speaking of which was avoided even in the solemn reading of sacred texts.

[9] The word κύριος appears 717 times in the text of New Testament, and Darrell L. Bock says it is used in three different ways: First, it reflects the secular usages as the "lord" or "owner" of a vineyard (Matt.

[21] David Trobisch proposes a shorter interval, saying that a specific collection of Christian writings closely approximating the modern New Testament canon was edited and published before 180, probably by Polycarp (69–155).

[39] In response to a correspondent who said that Howard "cited the large number of variants involving theos and kurios as evidence for the originality of the divine name in the New Testament itself", Larry Hurtado replied: "Well, maybe so.

[13] Bart D. Ehrman, Helmut Koester, David C. Parker believe that it is not possible to establish the original text with absolute certainty, but do not posit a systematic revision as in the Howard hypothesis.

"There are good reasons to think that these abbreviations were not concerned with saving space but functioned as a textual way to show Christian reverence and devotion to Christ alongside of God".

[53] Philip Wesley Comfort places in the first century the origin of five nomina sacra: those indicating "Lord", "Jesus", "Christ", "God" and "Spirit", and considers ΚΣ (Κύριος) to have been the earliest.

[57] Hurtado's view is shared by Tomas Bokedal, who holds that the first nomen sacrum was that of Ἰησοῦς (initially in the suspended form ιη), soon followed by that of Χριστός and then by Κύριος and Θεός.

"[64]In his concluding observations, Howard, recognizing "the revolutionary nature" of his thesis that at one time the tetragrammaton was employed in the New Testament, said that, if true, it would require further explanation on various questions: If the Tetragram was used in the NT, how extensively was it used?

"[67] He says that Howard's article was influential with regard to certain "denominational interests", whom he identifies as those of the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose enthusiastic response perhaps somewhat obscured the clarity of the situation (incompatible with those sectarian positions) of "total absence of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton from all recovered early Christian Greek New Testament manuscripts and their texts".

"[69] In 1977, George Howard propounded in the scholarly Journal of Biblical Literature his theory that "towards the end of the first century" (when the most recent of the New Testament writings were still appearing) Christians had already begun to use nomina sacra in place of the Tetragrammaton.

Five fragmentary manuscripts containing parts of the Septuagint and having a bearing on the first century CE have been discovered: Albert Pietersma takes issue with Howard's claim that "we can now say with almost absolute certainty that the divine name, יהוה, was not rendered by κύριος in the pre-Christian Bible".

[80] He adds that this use was not universal among Jews, as shown by the later replacement of the original Septuaginta κύριος by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton; and he says that "the ΙΑΩ readings in the biblical manuscript 4QLXXLevb are a mystery still awaiting sound explanation.

[82] Mª Vª Spottorno y Díaz Caro writes that one cannot rule out the possibility that the expression "Lord" (κύριος in Greek, מרא in Aramaic) as the name of God was already in use among Jews at about the time when the Septuagint was created.

"[87] By 1980, he had modified his view to the extent of explicitly excluding the prophetic books, much of which, he said, "comes to hand with its earliest attainable stage showing leanings toward Κύριος ὁ θεός as an equivalent for אדני יהוה, in accordance with the Palestinian qěrē.

Also, as far back as it is possible to go, the Kyrios term is employed in these books for both יהוה and אדני, on the basis of the spoken Adonay that stood for either separately [...] This cannot have come about as exclusively the work of Christian scribes".

[89][90] Robert J. Wilkinson cites George Kilpatrick as expressly contradicting Howard in a review of his theory by suggesting that "the early Christian LXX documents were essentially private, less expensive, less elaborate, non-calligraphic copies – with, possibly, kurios for the Tetragrammaton".

"[96] Eugene Ulrich says that Pietersma's argument goes against the "early, even pre-Christian, MS evidence" for ΙΑΩ, and adds that "it is difficult to imagine a scribe introducing the not-to-be-pronounced divine name where the more reverent κύριος was already in the text", and declares possible the view that the original Old Greek text had ΙΑΩ, replaced later by the Tetragrammaton in either normal or archaic Hebrew letters or by κύριος,[97] the view expressed with regard to the Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch, but not of the writings of the prophets, by Skehan.

The subtleties of these diverse usages of OT texts meld with the complexities of NT Christology to constitute the essential building blocks of what would in time come to be called the doctrine of the Trinity.

[125] In his 2014 book The Earliest Non-Mystical Jewish Use of Ιαω,[106][126][127] Frank Shaw put forward, as he himself wrote, "a modification of George Howard's thesis that tetragrams were present in certain New Testament autographs", viz.

[128] Tentative agreement with the possibility ("may have had") that Shaw envisages is expressed by Pavlos D. Vasileiadis: "There is compelling evidence, both explicit and implicit, that some of the Greek Bible copies—like the ones read by Christians such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Tertullian, Jerome, and Ps-John Chrysostom—were employing the use of Ιαω for the Tetragram.

If this conclusion is valid, this would imply that for a few centuries Ιαω was prevailingly present within the Bible copies read by the dispersed Christian communities, side-by-side with Hebrew Tetragrammata and the increasingly dominant scribal device of nomina sacra.

In an astounding way, great specialists in textual criticism like Metzger and Ehrman do not directly address the thesis of Howard on the variants, which is readily described as "highly speculative."

"[133] D. Fontaine citing The Earliest Non-Mystical Jewish Use of Ιαω wrote about A. Pietersma that "[Frank] Shaw reports: "his arguments are quite often sprinkled with provisos such as 'presumably' (94, 96), 'evidently' (96), 'in our view', 'at times' and 'it would seem' (98).

In the case of a Christian amanuensis, nothing forbids thinking of an identical process: while hearing the qeré κύριος, "Lord", the scribe could have decided according to the context to write the tetragram or not.

Incidentally, this could account for the variants which Howard highlights… Furthermore, the hypothesis of a Hebrazing recension would not be an obstacle for this scenario: the Christian authors were quite able to turn to these types of "more exact" manuscripts, and we know that they existed at their time (cf.

The upshot is that since the notation of nomina sacra does not appear to have originated with authors of the autograph texts, their presence reflects "a conscious editorial decision made by a specific publisher".

[167][168] Before G. Howard's thesis Gerard Mussies (retired Senior Lecturer in the Hellenistic Background of the New Testament at University of Utrecht) postulated an original tetragram in form of tetrapuncta in Revelations 1:4, due, among other reasons, to this verse containing the words ὁ ὤν.

"[189] Jerome wrote that by 384 CE, some ignorant readers of the LXX assumed the tetragrammaton to be a Greek word, πιπι (pipi), suggesting its pronunciation had been forgotten, but affirming its existence at the end of the 4th century.

"[205] On the other side, Yair Furstenberg declares: "The rare term gilyonim stands for a particular group of heretical books, the Gospels (euangelion), and not fragments of parchments as some scholars have interpreted.