by paradisebeauty 27 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I read this blog post by a person I have no idea if she is still a jw or not, but it made me think and gain some new perspective on using the Divine Name.
Please read it if you can, it will change your view! And it totally devalidates the jw dogma that they are the only ones using God's name, no, they are actually orphans.
Does that person realize that nobody in the ancient world ever said "Jehovah"??? They keep talking about "Jehovah", a name that never, ever existed. It's not even a religious matter, but a grammatical one. It's impossible for "Jehovah" to appear in any ancient Hebrew and by extension, Greek.
So while "YHWH" may have appeared in certain verses, and should be restored to NT passages that are quoting OT passages that contain it, "Jehovah" is not the divine name by any stretch of the imagination.
When the WTBTS claims to have "restored the divine name" they are lying. "Jehovah" is a brand name that the WTBTS uses. It works too. Just ask a JW if they look forward to learning God's name in the future. The conversation will reveal a pea-sized consciousness.
Poor religions, they should study Sacred Geometry instead of worrying about made-up names for the source of life.
DD
paradisebeauty The Beroean Pickets site [Meliti] is fairly informative and thought-provoking -
Generally pretty good interchanges with people who are trying to put their minds into gear before they "blast-away" their opinions - and blast-away your own. Lots of tolerance among those giving interchanges there. Also the stuff that is archived provides a good source on a load of good topics -
After-all - who of us has The TRUTH ?? We search and grope don't we !
The site is run by a male witness [former elder - still in]
So while "YHWH" may have appeared in certain verses, and should be restored to NT passages that are quoting OT passages that contain it, "Jehovah" is not the divine name by any stretch of the imagination.
Why should the tetragrammaton be 'restored' to NT passages that are quoting it from the OT when there is not a single extant manuscript of the NT that supports this?
It would have been ludicrous to insert the Hebrew characters YHWH into early Christian NT scriptures written for a Greek speaking audience and congregation. The Greek speaking reader of non Hebrew background would have had no idea what he was reading or how to pronounce it. So it made perfect sense to replace it uniformly with something else.
At the best, and without any textual support at all, the NWT should only have the tetragrammaton noted as a footnote in those places in the NT where the divine name was contained in an OT scripture being quoted.
There are interminable debates about this going one way and then the other, it seems that scholarly opinion has reached a consensus that lacking proof to the contrary, i.e the discovery of a very early N.T manuscript containing the Tetragrammaton, or some name derived from those four letters, we must presume it was never in the N.T
Some do err on the side of it perhaps being used in quotes by N.T from the Septuagint, but one scholar I read pointed out the difference between the actual words quoted and the ones found in the Septuagint as suggesting the N.T writer was remembering the words rather than copying them from a Manuscript that he had to hand.
Which means you would have to assume he heard the words read at a Synagogue, and would the reader utter the Name as he read, and cause a riot ? I doubt it.
It all boils down to the JW religion making much of this usage for their own aggrandisement, with no real basis for doing so, and really it simply DOESN'T MATTER !
People also need to know that several gods in the Levant names we're spelled in Hebrew with only three letters similar to the tetrogramaton, YHD, ywh, yhu, yam etc. Also the oldest found writings of the tetrogramaton was also only three letters.
To this day experts are still fighting over who this God Jehovah really is. Did he start out as El, become Baal then get switched to another God by the Jews? Is he one of the sons of El? Its anyone's guess, so gods doing a piss poor job of making his name known.
