New Testament support for the name Yahweh?

by WhatSexRU 31 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  Rooster

  Good reading.. Thank you,,
• 

  james_woods

  Death to Pixies posts:

  I believe this, IMO, is one of those controversial issues that JWs will eventually be exonerated on.

  Then why didn't they wait Jehovah-fy to their so-called "Bible Translation" until they had "exoneration"? I.E. - clear incontravertable evidence. This is, after all, the Bible you are fooling around with - not Uncle Tom's Cabin.

  The answer is a simple one. They had a prejudice to "want" to do this - along with "house to house", "the word was a God", etc. This is the same mind-set that keeps insisting on use of the failed 1914 chronology and the 607 B.C.E. date in the face of overwhelming fact.

  I further challenge the idea that anybody really "translated" their NWT NT from the real Greek. They already had somebody else's interlinear, didn't they?
• 

  Death to the Pixies

  . Hello Moggy Lover,

  "Dated as having been written about 1000 BC it contains Lev 26:2-16 the present writer observed this manuscript on display at the University of Pennyslvania Museum in 1965where it was featured along with other Dead Sea Scroll materials. A statement appended to the fragment read: ' This fragment is now the oldest copy of the LXX.' This portion of Leviticus contains two verses in which the MT has the Divine Name in Tetragram form, in neither instance did YHWH appear. The copyist maintained his usage of the Greek throughout"

  As you can see, that last sentence is crucial, and I assume Countess implied that the copyist maintained the Greek usage of "Kurios" throughout.

  I had assumed Countess was your source, but I do not think he implies "kurios" instead of YHWH, if he did mean to imply that, he is incorrect, as the spaces where YHWH would have appeared were left blank. His quote seems ambiguous. But either way..

  Respectfully.
• 

  vitty

  For those of us non-scholar types, what is the LXX?

  Thankgoodness im not the only one LOL
• 

  WhatSexRU

  Thanks Narkissos. You understood me. This is incredible!
  
  
  What are your thoughts on the on “the Power” in Mark 14:62?
  
  
  Did “Jesus” say the divine name YHWH?
  
  
  Is this why he was guilty of blasphemy?
  
  
  Or was he guilty of blasphemy for some other reason?
  
  
  Do you see where I am going with this?
  
  
  Were the authors of the NT aware of the name YHWH and did they think it was blasphemy to say it?
  
  
  Or,
  
  
  Was “Jesus” guilty of blasphemy because he claimed to be “the anointed one” (or something similar)?
• 

  moggy lover

  Nakissos and Dttp: Mea culpa on both counts. Yep it was 100 BC, and Countess is ambiguous.
• 

  Narkissos

  WSRU

  You understood me. This is incredible!

  LOL. Never despair.

  What are your thoughts on the on “the Power” in Mark 14:62?

  It is usually understood as a Jewish euphemism (like "the Blessed One" in the previous verse or "heaven(s)" in Matthew) for God... it doesn't seem particularly unlikely to me.

  Btw, with its use of dunamis for the cry on the cross (and the omission of "why," making the question an affirmation: you have forsaken me) the Gospel of Peter actually obscures the allusion to Psalm 22.

  While I don't think any direct or conscious allusion to the Canaanite El is likely in the Christian writings, it has often been shown that all the line of thought which led to the Jewish conception of the "two powers in heaven," and much of early Christian christology, via the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man in both Daniel and 1 Enoch, can be construed as a(n unconscious) resurgence of the old El-Baal pattern.

  Did “Jesus” say the divine name YHWH?
  
  
  Is this why he was guilty of blasphemy?
  
  
  Or was he guilty of blasphemy for some other reason?
  
  
  Do you see where I am going with this?
  
  
  Were the authors of the NT aware of the name YHWH and did they think it was blasphemy to say it?
  
  
  Or,
  
  
  Was “Jesus” guilty of blasphemy because he claimed to be “the anointed one” (or something similar)?

  The Gospel plots are less than clear (and historically likely) indeed... if we stick to Mark, Jesus answers positively (egô eimi) to the question whether he is "the Christ-Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One," and that seems to be the cause. Otoh he does not formally identifies himself as the Son of Man (although the writer may consider this as implicit). The mere fact of claiming to be the Messiah would not have been regarded as blasphemy by later Judaism... but we're dealing with a text, not with history. If we want to reconstruct a possible history behind the text, the charge of blasphemy is only the tip of the iceberg: the whole Jewish trial is very problematic historically.
• 

  yaddayadda

  "Were the authors of the NT aware of the name YHWH"
  
  I would've thought it was axiomatic that they were at least 'aware' of the tetragrammaton given that it appears 7000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures!!
• 

  Narkissos

  I would've thought it was axiomatic that they were at least 'aware' of the tetragrammaton given that it appears 7000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures!!

  There were very few people that could read and understand Biblical Hebrew in 1st-century AD Palestine, not to mention the diaspora. Were NT writers among them? Which ones?

  That being said, I agree with you that most people acquainted with Judaism would likely have at least heard about a "secret/sacred name" of God, which was written and generally not to be pronounced.
• 

  jwfacts

  You may find the info at http://jwfacts.com/index_files/Jehovah.htm interesting.

  In particular the following info on YHWH in the Septuagint. It does appear that there were copies of the Septuagint that did contain the Tetragrammaton.

  In 1977 George Howard published a thesis showing that the Old Testament retained YHWH in certain versions of the Greek Septuagint. These manuscripts may have been ones that the Christian writers quoted from. He goes on to theorize that these Christian writers therefore may have used YHWH in the New Testament. His reasoning is promoted by the Watchtower Society as fact.

  Three critical points must be made;

  Howard’s work did not examine the use of YHWH in the New Testament, but the use of YHWH in the Old Testament.

  Howard then concludes with a theory about YHWH in the New Testament that the Watchtower chooses to say is fact.

  Howard’s work contradicts the Watchtower concept that YHWH was not removed from the Septuagint until the second century after Jesus.

  New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures – Reference Edition p.1564 1D The Divine Name in the Christian Greek Scriptures

  “Concerning the use of the Tetragrammaton in the Christian Greek Scriptures, George Howard of the University of Georgia wrote in Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 96, 1977, p. 63: “Recent discoveries in Egypt and the Judean Desert allow us to see first hand the use of God’s name in pre-Christian times. These discoveries are significant for N[ew] T[estament] studies in that they form a literary analogy with the earliest Christian documents and may explain how NT authors used the divine name. In the following pages we will set forth a theory that the divine name, ???? (and possibly abbreviations of it), was originally written in the NT quotations of and allusions to the O[ld] T[estament] and that in the course of time it was replaced mainly with the surrogate ? [abbreviation for Ky´ri·os, “Lord”]. This removal of the Tetragram[maton], in our view, created a confusion in the minds of early Gentile Christians about the relationship between the ‘Lord God’ and the ‘Lord Christ’ which is reflected in the MS tradition of the NT text itself.”

  We concur with the above, with this exception: We do not consider this view a “theory,” rather, a presentation of the facts of history as to the transmission of Bible manuscripts.”

  Howard’s concluding comments, not quoted by the Watchtower, are enlightening;

  “(2) Concluding Observations. The above examples are, of course, only exploratory in nature and are set forth here programatically. Nevertheless, the evidence is sufficiently strong to suggest that the thesis of this paper is quite possible. We have refrained from drawing too many conclusions due to the revolutionary nature of the thesis. Rather than state conclusions now in a positive manner it seems better only to raise some questions that suggest a need for further explanation.”

  In "Kyrios or Tetragram: a Renewed Quest for the Original LXX," in De Septuaginta. Studies in Honour of John William Wevers, Mississauga, Ontario, 1984, p. 85-101 A. Pietersma also presents that kurios was originally used in the Septuagint and later YHWH was re-introduced in some revisions under the influence of Palestinian Jews. A few Greek copies down to the middle ages still contain YHWH.

  The research of Howard, Pietersma and others show that YHWH was removed from the Septuagint meant for non Jews well prior to Christian times. The Christian writers were quoting from Septuagint versions that used Kurios in place of YHWH. However YHWH does appear in occasional versions of the Septuagint that were written for Jews. This proves that there was no second century Watchtower promoted conspiracy to remove YHWH from all versions of the Septuagint (and hence also the New Testament).