by gubberningbody 92 Replies latest watchtower bible
slimboyfat,
You MAY be right but you are basing on this on cconjectur and speculation and, personally, I don't wanna go down that slippery road of "they removed" things from the Bible, I mean, where do we stop to justify a doctrine we believe in?
Fact is, those that believe that YHWH was replaved by Lord believe that in regards to quotation from the OT in the NT, it doesn't justify random insertions of the term "Jehovah" in the NT.
the insertions shouldn't be random, I agree, they should be comprehensive and consistent, throughout
"THE LXX" (even limited to "THE LXX" of a certain period, regardless of places and communities) understood as (1) unique, (2) direct and (3) consistent source of "NT" quotations: triple oversimplification.
(If I can access any of your sources the one I would pick first is E. Tov, because I have learnt a lot from him in the past precisely about the same type of oversimpification in textual criticism, and I am quite confident to find a way more nuanced presentation.)
I'll focus (briefly) on the texts you mention as the central question to me is: where and how would that make sense?
The kurios (kurie, vocative) in Romans 10:16 (quotation of Isaiah 53:1 "LXX," part of the shared stock of Christian "OT prooftexts" as seen from its other quotation in John 12:38 and other references to neighbouring verses in this "Servant Song") is not quite as rhetorically important as the one in v. 13 (from Joel 2:32). Iow, it doesn't change much to the argument whether it is understood of "God" or "Christ". Incidentally though it does not "translate" an occurrence of the Tetragrammaton in the (proto-)MT (or in any known form of the Hebrew text afaik). The same happens for the quotation of Psalm 102(101 LXX):26ff in Hebrews 1:10ff, with explicit Christological reference.
The idea of kurios referring to God and then applied to Christ might seem to fare better in 14:11 (quotation blending Isaiah 49:10 -- or any similar oath formula -- with 45:23) in view of the immediate context (because it parallels theos within the quotation, and theos seems to be better attested than khristos in v. 10). But against that one might point to (1) the change of persons in the quotation (kurios 1st ps., theos 3rd.), allowing for a reading similar to Philippians 2 (bending the knees before the Son to the glory of the Father); (2) the Marcionite attestation of khristos in v. 10 (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:10), allowing the possibility that theos there is an "orthodox" correction; (3) the intermixing of references to "God" (v. 3,6, etc.) and "Christ" (v. 9, with the verb kurieuô as justification of the Christological occurrences of kurios in v. 8) in the whole (parenetic rather than doctrinal) section; (4) the use of the verb zaô ("live") in the quotation which doesn't belong to the main text (Isaiah 45:23) and may well point back to its occurrences in the Christological v. 7-9...
In 1 Corinthians 2:16 (Isaiah 40:13 LXX) the sense of kurios as it stands is ambiguous, as it belongs to a question (and originally a rhetorical one, calling for a negative answer: Who has known the mind of Lord? -> nobody); the Christological response to the quotation -- now we have the mind of Christ/Lord -- does not necessarily identify stricto sensu the kurios of the question as the khristos (P46 etc.) or the kurios (B etc.) of the answer; it may make better sense if there is both difference and identification (through the mind of the Lord Christ we know the mind of the Lord God). For this reason the use of "Jehovah" in the NWT here doesn't seem as destructive of meaning as it is in Romans 10:13 (to me). The text still works. But it works just as well with kurios as a known substitute for Yhwh.
Which leads me to another remark: the use of kurios quotations is not necessarily uniform in Pauline literature. As on a number of topics (e.g. the antithetical parallelism of Adam and Jesus, thoroughly reworked from 1 Corinthians 15 to Romans 5) there may have been an evolution of Pauline thought on this issue from 1 Corinthians to Romans or Philippians where the identification of kurios with Jesus seems to be more consistent if not totally exclusive (although this is certainly already under way in 1 Corinthians, cf. 8:6).
