the name Jehovah in the New Testament

by jahrule 0 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • jahrule
    jahrule

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    I am not writing this to argue. I agree that God is not a trinity, there is no immortal soul, God's name is jehovah, etc. But I see a fundamental error in your doctrine you need to address.

    Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the NT is very reliable in detail. There are 5,300 extant Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin vulgates, and 9,300 other versions. Thus, there are about 24,000 anuscripts of the NT in existence, none of which contain the name Jehovah. Yet, how could it have been removed from so many manuscripts?

    How did a group of men manage to remove Jehovah's name from all of the availablemanuscripts of the original Greek new testament? To do this they would have had to seize and change every single copy that was floating around throughout all of the known world, since the Watchtower admits that there is not a single copy of the Greek manuscripts that contain Jehovah's full name. These men would have had to go from door to door and confiscate every single copy of every single new testament book. How is it that Jehovah God faithfully protected his Old Testament word throughout thousands of years when men tried to destroy it, yet was powerless to protect the newtestament manuscripts from corruption for even a few hundred years? And if Jehovah was powerless to protect even his name, what else did these unscrupulous men remove? Once you admit that it is possible to tamper with all of the available manuscripts, the reliability of the new testament is shattered, is it not? In contrast, the faithfulness of Jehovah God to protect all of his sovereign word is evident. The faithfulness of the original Greek text can be verified by comparing copies produced at different times from different original copies and made by different copyists. In addition Jehovah God caused so many copies of his word to remain that any human error incorporated into the text is evident by comparing the copies.

    Were there no true Christians throughout history making an effort to preserve God's name? This raises the problem of the church fathers. Would not a heresy as big as the romoval of God's name be mentioned in the writings of the early church? Yet, Iraneus writing 50 years after the death of John quotes Scriptures which use Jehovah in the NWT, but he says "Lord" without qualification. Between 75 and 100 CE, Clement writes to the Corinthians using "Lord" instead of Jehovah. In fact, EVERY SINGLE early Christian writing uses "lord" in place of Jehovah when quoting the Gospels, and these writings date from just after the apostles in the very first to early second centuries! Isn't that LONG BEFORE the superstition towards the name developed? I thought that JWs taught that the name was only removed in the THIRD century, was I wrong?

    I guess the crust of my question is this: do we posess faithful copies of the NT? All Scripture is Inspired of God and Beneficial, WTB&TS 1990, p.319 quotes Sir Frederick Kenyon, saying, "The interval between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligeble, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed." IS that true? If so, doesn't it show that the original used the word lord and not YHWH?

    If the Kingdom Interliner is trustworthy, I mean, just look at how old those manuscripts are! 200 CE, 125 CE, and so on, these dates alone would push the apostasy back into the time of the apostles!

    The question still remains, if Jehovah God is Sovereign over his inspired word and faithfully protected its transmission to us today, why doesn't the Greek manuscripts contain God's name?

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