God's Personal Name
At Luke 4:18, according to the New World Translation, Jesus applied to himself a prophecy in Isaiah, saying: "Jehovah's spirit is upon me." (Isaiah 61:1) Many object to the use of the name Jehovah here. It is, however, just one of the more than 200 places where that name appears in the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures, the so-called New Testament. True, no early surviving Greek manuscript of the "New Testament" contains the personal name of God. But the name was included in the New World Translation for sound reasons, not merely on a whim. And others have followed a similar course. In the German language alone, at least 11 versions use "Jehovah" (or the transliteration of the Hebrew, "Yahweh") in the text of the "New Testament," while four translators add the name in parentheses after "Lord." More than 70 German translations use it in footnotes or commentaries.
In Israel, God's name was pronounced without inhibition for more than a thousand years. It is the name that appears most frequently in the Hebrew Scriptures ("Old Testament"), and there is no convincing proof that it was unknown to the general public or that its pronunciation had been forgotten in the first century of our Common Era, when Jewish Christians were inspired to write the books of the "New Testament."-Ruth 2:4.
Wolfgang Feneberg comments in the Jesuit magazine Entschluss/Offen (April 1985): "He [Jesus] did not withhold his father's name YHWH from us, but he entrusted us with it. It is otherwise inexplicable why the first petition of the Lord's Prayer should read: 'May your name be sanctified!'" Feneberg further notes that "in pre-Christian manuscripts for Greek-speaking Jews, God's name was not paraphrased with kýrios [Lord], but was written in the tetragram form [YHWH] in Hebrew or archaic Hebrew characters. . . . We find recollections of the name in the writings of the Church Fathers; but they are not interested in it. By translating this name kýrios (Lord), the Church Fathers were more interested in attributing the grandeur of the kýrios to Jesus Christ." The New World Translation restores the name to the text of the Bible wherever there is sound, scholarly reason to do so.-See Appendix 1D in the Reference Bible.
Some criticize the form "Jehovah" by which the New World Translation renders God's name. In Hebrew manuscripts, the name appears just as four consonants, YHWH, and many insist that the proper pronunciation is "Yahweh," not "Jehovah." Hence, they feel that using "Jehovah" is a mistake. But, in truth, scholars are by no means in agreement that the form "Yahweh" represents the original pronunciation. The fact is that while God preserved the spelling of his name "YHWH" over 6,000 times in the Bible, he did not preserve the pronunciation of it that Moses heard on Mount Sinai. (Exodus 20:2) Therefore, the pronunciation is not of the utmost importance at this time.
In Europe the form "Jehovah" has been widely recognized for centuries and is used in many Bibles, including Jewish translations. It appears countless times on buildings, on coins and other objects, and in printed works, as well as in many church hymns. So rather than trying to represent the original Hebrew pronunciation, the New World Translation in all its different languages uses the form of God's name that is popularly accepted. This is exactly what other Bible versions do with all the other names in the Bible.
Sorry, i don't have the interlinear. Maybe someone can scan the appropriate page.
