Hostility to God's "name" (page 2)

carla

jehovah was made up by a Catholic monk by the name of Martini in the year 1270.

Odd how jw's say the bible is the word of God and we can rely on it but God was not able to keep His own name in it? strange. Awfully small God in that case. But the rest of the bible has not been tampered with? or has it? If God's name is so important don't you think He would make sure it was in the bible through history? If that has been tampered with and left out why should you believe any of the bible? How would it be possible to keep out one word of the bible in all the copies of scriptures in the world? not one ancient text was left untarnished? I don't think that is even mathematcally possible.

Re: the pronunciation- ever purposely pronounce a jw's name wrong each and every time you used their name? they get quite annoyed, and rightfully so. They may even ask you if you are purposely being obnoxious (which you are but ...) then ask them how they think God feels that they go around telling everybody they must pronounce His name in a certain manner because their very salvation is dependent on it. Their response? then they change the subject.

TheClarinetist

Hmmm.... In that case, maybe they should go back to "I Am That I Am"... On the other hand, it would be rather confusing to tell someone "I am one of I Am That I Am's witnesses".

PSacramento

God's name has endured forever, in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ.

If the JW's understood what the term "name" means, they woudl save themselves much confusion and headaches.

Trevor Scott

Carla, good points.

To make the point to JWs in the past, I would strip all the vowels out of the JW's name and replace them with vowels from another word and then ask the JW whether it was still his name.......

Finally-Free

To make the point to JWs in the past, I would strip all the vowels out of the JW's name and replace them with vowels from another word and then ask the JW whether it was still his name.......

YHWH = YAAAAAHWHOOOOO!!!

W

jonathan dough

It says that the word Jehovah was originally in the Hebrew Scriptures but was taken out. Is this true? How could I find facts on this?

Narkissos is right. Even Green's Literal Translation has the tetragramaton throughout. I'm not sure about the Aleppo Codex but I believe it is in there also. Are you certain your brochure says it was taken out of all OT Hebrew texts? Some of them, sure, but not all of them.

And could you explain by what you mean by: "Also, it says that the name Jesus does not accurately represent the original form of God's Son, yet people are completely okay using that name (Jesus)."

Narkissos

About the issue of transliteration / pronunciation, I noticed that in the French NWT revision sometime in the 90s they moved a number of Hebrew names from the usual French transliteration (which is found in most bibles and derives mostly from the Latin Vulgate) to a stricter one (which used to be applied only when no usual transliteration was widely known). This is striking in the titles of the Twelve Prophets, Joël -> Yoël, Abdias -> Obadia, Jonas -> Yona, Michée -> Mika, Sophonie -> Tsephania, Aggée -> Haggaï, Malachie -> Malaki. This must have pretty disturbed French-speaking JWs I suppose (I had left the decade before and was not there to... witness it), but the strangest thing to me is that seems to have been a purely French move since there was no similar change in the English NWT (other than that the French revision followed the English even more slavishly than before)... Whatever the case, I find it amusing that the (French) WT went out of its way to transliterate and pronounce Tsephania more "correctly" and did not bother to do the same thing with Yahweh...

PSacramento

Narkissos,

What of the view that YHWH has 4 vowels? doesn't that mean that it woudl have 4 syllabuls too? not sure how hebrew works.

Narkissos

Ifyhwh is to be regarded as a verbal form (from a 3-letter verbal root, hwh, with a preformant y- indicative of third person "imperfect"), in "normal" conjugation it would have only two syllables: Y?H:W?H (the Masoretic vowel pointing separating the middle consonants, which I indicated by ":", is a "quiescent" or mute shewa, phonetically nothing). Interestingly, the explicative/interpretive pun on the Tetragrammaton in Exodus 3:14ff ("I am / shall be") which uses a similar though distinct root, hyh, is written 'hyh and vocalised 'ehyeh (four letters, hyh + preformant ' = 1st person imperfect, two syllables); the 3rd person equivalent would be yihyeh, "he is / shall be".

If the first vowel is "a" (as indicated by almost all vocalic transliterations of the theonym or theophoric names, from Akkadian to Greek), this would suggest an "imperfect" hifil (yaqtil) rather than qal (yiqtol), with causative or at least transitive value (depending on the verb).

But of course the theonym Yhwh predates Biblical Hebrew so nothing of the above is absolutely conclusive about its original pronunciation.

glenster

The main thing the mainstream view of Jesus has contested is the JWs leaders'
reason for putting "Jehovah" in the NT though "YHWH" isn't in any of the NT
manuscripts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton_in_the_New_Testament

The JWs leaders main motivation is to use "Jehovah," which they teach is just
the Father, to replace "Lord" in dozens of verses to prevent the reader from
thinking "Lord" is Jesus, notably in verses that indicate Jesus was prayed to,
because prayer was one of the things people of 1st century Judaism only did for
the one God they believed in, so prayer for Jesus would indicate the mainstream
identification of him and not a god or angel.

The JWs leaders' case is a mess of several conflicting ideas that go against
the evidence:

It's bad for the JWs leaders' case for the identity of Jesus as Michael that
the early Christians after the NT had the basic mainstream view of Jesus, so the
JWs leaders quote mine and leave the false impression that a batch of those
early Christians had the JWs leaders' view of Jesus and that the basic main-
stream view appeared centuries after the NT was written ("Should You Believe in
the Trinity?").

(Due to this and the JWs leaders harsh shunning rules, one otherwise nice
bright member of the JWs argued with me that the writings of Tertullian I showed
him showed Tertullian taught the JWs leaders' view. I didn't know about the JWs
leaders' shunning rules at the time and just thought the guy popped a membrane.)

It's also bad for the JWs leaders' case of being the leaders of a literal
144,000 that there were a lot more Christians than that by the end of the 1st
century CE, so the JWs leaders claim that the (alleged) early JWs leaders-types
were quickly succeeded by apostates (except that they allegedly had the JWs
leaders' views about Jesus and the holy spirit).

The combination leaves the JWs leaders with the bad case that the earliest
Christians had all the JWs leaders' special stances (but they were strangely
unable to proselytize successfully) and disappeared quickly (without any evi-
dence they existed),

they were succeeded by Christians who were apostates (not of the literal
144,000) except that they had the JWs leaders' view of Jesus (a stance the JWs
leaders affect by quote mining),

those Christians replaced "YHWH"s with "Lord"s, notably in dozens of verses
which would leave the impression that Jesus was prayed to (against their own al-
legedly JWs leaders-type idea of the identity of Jesus--?!), in all the areas
the NT had spread to (without any evidence of complaint or reference to the re-
write by anyone of whatever view or area in the centuries of volumes of early
Christian writings),

and the mainstream view somehow appeared as a formidable force several centur-
ies later (without any evidence of debate over "Lord"s replacing NT "YHWH"s,
although you'd think it would have been one of the most important arguments the
Arians would have brought up against prayer for Jesus).

The JWs leaders allege that the motive of the new mainstream Christian view
of Jesus was philosophy (though actually the view that the Logos was created was
due to the old Platonic philosophy that spirit is good and flesh is evil, a view
mainstream Christians hadn't accepted).

What I have on it is on pp.6b to 10 at the next link.
http://gtw6437.tripod.com/id18.html

The main reasons the JWs leaders created hostility for JWs are on p.6, and
using "Jehovah" isn't even a blip on the radar among the reasons. (A semantic
debate? "Give me that library card." "Out of my cold dead hands." I don't
picture it.)

Hostility to God's "name"

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