Tetragrammaton in the New Testament

The Tetragrammaton (Greek: τετραγραμματον, "four-letter word") is the quadriliteral, typically unvocalized, Hebrew designation יהוה identifying the God of Israel throughout the Hebrew Bible, composed of the Hebrew letters yodh he waw he, written Right-to-left in Hebrew, and transliterated YHWH or YHVH in English. It occurs 6,828 times in the Hebrew Masoretic Text critical editions of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.

The Tetragrammaton does not occur in any extant Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, but is found in some English and many Hebrew translations. Extant Greek New Testament manuscripts contain the Greek word Kyrios (Lord) in Old Testament quotes where the Hebrew has Yahweh.

New Testament manuscripts

Main article: New Testament manuscripts

None of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament contain the Tetragrammaton. Papyrus manuscripts of writings which were eventually canonized and today comprise the New Testament date as early as the 2nd century. One of the oldest extant New Testament manuscripts, Papyrus Chester Beatty II, i.e. $\mathfrak{P}$⁴⁶, is dated to ca. 200 AD and contains portions of nine of the Pauline Epistles. In this early manuscript, nomen sacrum contractions ΚϹ and ΘϹ occur where the Greek word kurios ("LORD" or "Lord") occurs. Similar nomina sacra contractions occur for IHCOYC ("Jesus") contracted to IC and XRICTOC ("Christ"), contracted to XC.

Tetragrammaton and the Greek Old Testament

Main article: Septuagint manuscripts

Older Jewish manuscripts of the Septuagint often had the letters YHWH or a space, within the Greek text. The majority of surviving copies have Kyrios, as do other Hellenistic Jewish texts such as Josephus, Philo, the Greek Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, and the Jewish inscriptions. The only exceptions are magical papyri, where the name was used for magical purposes.

Babylonian Talmud

A passage recorded in the Hebrew Tosefta, Shabbat 13:5, quoting Tarfon is sometimes cited to suggest that early Christian writings or copies contained the Tetragrammaton.

Shabbat 13:5

— A. The books of the Evangelists and the books of the minim they do not save from a fire [on the Sabbath]. They are allowed to burn up where they are, they and [even] the references to the Divine Name that are in them.

Laurence Schiffman views this as a discussion of whether to rescue section of the sifre minim (Hebrew language texts of Jewish-Christians) containing the tetragrammata from a house fire. Another interpretation suggests this is a reference to Torah and not the Gospels.

English versions of the New Testament

Most English Bibles, even those such as the Jerusalem Bible which has Yahweh in the Old Testament, do not use Yahweh in the New Testament, since the Greek New Testament manuscripts have already rendered YHWH in Old Testament quotes as Lord. The New Testament records the reading Lord (presumably Adonai) for YHWH even, for example, when Christ reads the Isaiah scroll at the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:17–19 reading Isaiah 61:1).

However a few English translations of the Bible, do incorporate the Tetragrammaton into the New Testament. For example, William Newcome has the name “Jehovah” a few times where it quotes from the Old Testament, such as Matt 22: 24. The first complete Bible printed in America by John Eliot (missionary) though not in English frequently uses "Jehovah" in the NT.

The New World Translation

The rendering Jehovah appears 7,210 times—including 237 times in the New Testament—in the New World Translation (NWT) published by Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and used by Jehovah's Witnesses. As of March 2011, the Watch Tower Society has published more than 165 million copies of the NWT in 91 languages. Jehovah's Witnesses propose that the authors of the New Testament writings retained the Tetragrammaton in their quotations of the Old Testament without substituting it with Kurios ("Lord").

Sacred Name Movement

Main article: Sacred Name Bibles

The Sacred Name Movement has produced various "Sacred Name Bibles". The Sacred Name Movement considers that using the Hebrew Tetragrammaton within an English Bible translation emphasizes the Semitic nature of the name.^{[citation needed]} In 1993, the Institute for Scripture Research (ISR) published The Scriptures, the first English translation to incorporate the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton instead of a generic title (e.g., The LORD) or a conjectural translation (e.g., Yahweh or Jehovah). The Besorah, which is a plagiarized version of the ISR's The Scriptures '98 (TS98), also incorporated the Tetragrammaton, uniquely using Paleo-Hebrew script rather than standard Hebrew script. More recently, the Restored Name King James Version (RNKJV), an anonymous, internet-based Sacred Name translation adapted from the King James Version (KJV), transliterates the Tetragrammaton as YHWH wherever it appears in the Old Testament.

Hebrew Versions of the New Testament

Main article: Bible translations into Hebrew

Over the centuries, various translators have inserted the Tetragrammaton into Hebrew versions of the New Testament. One of the earliest Rabbinical translations of Matthew is mixed in with the 1385 critical commentary of Shem-Tob. He includes the Tetragrammaton written out or abbreviated 19 times, while occasionally including the appellative HaShem (השם, meaning "The Name"). Most modern Hebrew Bible translations also use YHWH in quotations from the Hebrew Bible, however Israeli Christians do not necessarily pronounce the name.

Other views

Although none of the extant Greek New Testament manuscripts contain the Tetragrammaton, scholar George Howard, has suggested that the Tetragrammaton appeared in the original New Testament autographs. Howard claimed that the Tetragrammaton may have appeared originally in the New Testament and that "the removal of the Tetragrammaton from the New Testament and its replacement with the surrogates κυριος and θεος blurred the original distinction between the Lord God and the Lord Christ." In the Anchor Bible Dictionary, Howard states: "There is some evidence that the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, Yahweh, appeared in some or all of the OT quotations in the NT when the NT documents were first penned." Howard in a personal letter stated: "My theory about the Tetragrammaton is just that, a theory. Some of my colleagues disagree with me (for example, Albert Pietersma). Theories like mine are important to be set forth so that others can investigate their probability and implications. Until they are proven (and mine has not been proven) they should not be used as a surety for belief."

Along with Howard, David Trobisch and Rolf Furuli both have written on the how the Tetragrammaton may have been removed from the Greek MSS. In the book Archaeology and the New Testament, John McRay has also written of 'the possibility that the New Testament autographs may have retained the divine name in quotations from the Old Testament.' Robert Baker Girdlestone stated in 1871 that if the LXX had used "one Greek word for Jehovah and another for Adonai, such usage would doubtless have been retained in the discourses and arguments of the N.T. Thus our Lord in quoting the 110th Psalm,...might have said 'Jehovah said unto Adoni.' Since Girdlestone's time it has been shown that the LXX had the Tetragrammaton but was latter removed by Christians.

Though Albert Pietersma, along with most scholars, do not accept Howard's theory, Pietersma has stated concerning the Septuagint: "It might possibly still be debated whether perhaps the Palestinian copies with which the NT authors were familiar read some form of the tetragram."

Tatian's Diatesseron shows some variance in applying Kyrios to YHWH, but this may be because of dependence on the Peshitta. The consistency in rendering of YHWH as Kyrios in all NT references would be difficult to explain if there were not already either an established tradition to read Kyrios where YHWH appears in a Greek manuscript, or an established body of texts with Kyrios already in the Greek.

See also

• Papyrus Rylands 458
• Papyrus Fouad 266
• Names of God in Judaism
• Names of God in Christianity
• Assemblies of Yahweh

External links

• The divine name in the New Testament Le nom divin dans le Nouveau Testament
• Greek text – Complete Greek text of the Septuagint hyperlinked to Strong's concordance.
• Brenton's – The standard English translation of the Septuagint (hard copy has Greek in column)
• The New Testament and the Septuagint – Instances where the New Testament quotes the LXX against the Masoretic Hebrew
• The New Testament and the Hebrew OT – Instances where the New Testament agrees with the Masoretic Hebrew meaning
• Names in the Septuagint and Masoretic – A table of the older Greek names with the newer Masoretic renditions, in the Old Testament
• The Septuagint Online – Comprehensive site with scholarly discussion and extensive links to texts and translations
• Article for the thesis by Matteo Pierro in a Catholic Magazine: "Rivista Biblica", n. 2, April–June 1997, p. 183-186. Bologna, Italy
• Article against the thesis by Carmelo Savasta in a Catholic Magazine: "Rivista Biblica", n. 1, 1998, p. 89-92. Bologna, Italy
• God's Name and the "New Testament", an article by the official web-site of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
• The Tetragrammaton and the Christian Greek Scriptures, a downloadable book.