Names and titles of God in the New Testament

Jehovah in the NT 21406

A number of Bible translations have rendered Jehovah or Yahweh or YHWH or YHVH etc as the name of God in the New Testament. The best known of these is the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, published by Jehovah's Witnesses. Others that do so include:

1. The Sacred Name King James Version [1];

2. The Scriptures [2];

3. Moffat’s translation of the Bible in Tswana [the first complete Bible to be printed in Africa, in 1872];

4. The Chinese Union Version, Simplified [3]uses 耶和华 [the chinese equivalent of Jehovah] in Revelation 19.1;

5. The Chinese Union Version, Traditional [ibid.];

6. The Chinese Union Version, GB;

7. The Malagasy Bible, Protestant Version, uses Jehovah in the NT;

8. The Malagasy Bible, Catholic version, uses IAVEH at Matt 4.7 & 10;

9. The Restored Name King James Version [4] uses the Tetragrammaton itself in the text of the NT and uses YAH for the Hebrew parse of the Tetragrammaton rendered JAH by the KJ and ASV;

10. The Christian Greek Scriptures in 12 languages by Elias Hutter, 1599, uses the Tetragrammaton in the Hebrew translation of the NT;

11. The Hebraic Roots Version (NT only)[5] uses YHWH.

These are some of the versions that include the Tetragrammaton in its Hebrew or other translated, transliterated or otherwise rendered form. It is worthwhile to note that almost every existing English translation of the NT [save for the RS] contains at least one 'Hallelujah' in Rev. 19; Hallelujah is literally translated as 'Praise Ye Jah' - where Jah is an abbreviated or short name for Jehovah. It must be noted that the practice of using Jehovah, or Yahweh, or Yehowah in the NT is by no means mainstream or accepted by most scholars today. In fact, most modern language bibles in Engish, recent translations included, do not include the Tetragrammaton in the OT itself, much less being inclined to make the leap to using it in the NT. Exceptions to this include the New Jerusalem Bible [more than 5800 occurences of Yahweh] and the Holman Christian Standard Bible [6] [70 occurences].

The New Testament is one of the best attested of all ancient writings with over 5,000 Greek extant manuscripts of the New Testament. The Tetragrammaton does not appear in any known original-language manuscripts of the New Testament, despite the discovery of papyrus fragments of the New Testament dating back to the middle of the second century. One of the most ancient fragments, the papyrus codex designated Chester Beatty Papyrus No. 2 [P46] is dated prior to 200 A.D. and contains 9 of the apostle Paul's letters. Of all 5,000 manuscripts, none contains either the Hebrew (YHWH) or Greek (Iabe) transliterations of the divine name. This fact is interesting since various papyrii of the Septuagint [Greek] translation of the OT contain the Tetragrammaton; the Fouad #266, from Deuteronomy 18 through Deuteronomy 32, contains the tetragrammaton in more than 40 places. This fragmentary copy of the Tetragrammaton has been dated to 150 BCE. Hence it, or versions similar to it, reasonably would have been available to Paul and the other authors of the OT.

From New Testament Abstracts, March 1977, p. 306: "In pre-Christian Greek [manuscripts] of the OT, the divine name was not rendered by 'kyrios' as has often been thought. Usually the Tetragram was written out in Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew letters. . . . At a later time, surrogates such as 'theos' [God] and 'kyrios' replaced the Tetragram . . . There is good reason to believe that a similar pattern evolved in the NT, i.e. the divine name was originally written in the NT quotations of and allusions to the OT, but in the course of time it was replaced by surrogates".

Also, in the Jesuit magazine Entschluss/Offen (April 1985), Wolfgang Feneberg comments: "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!'" He further notes "in pre-Christian manuscripts for Greek-speaking Jews, God's name was not paraphrased with kýrios [Lord], but was written in the tetragram form in Hebrew or archaic Hebrew characters. . . . We find recollections of the name in the writings of the Church Fathers".

Dr. P.Kahle says: "We now know that the Greek Bible text [the Septuagint] as far as it was written by Jews for Jews did not translate the Divine name by kyrios, but the Tetragrammaton written with Hebrew or Greek letters was retained in such MSS [manuscripts]. It was the Christians who replaced the Tetragrammaton by kyrios, when the divine name written in Hebrew letters was not understood any more". - The Cairo Geniza, Oxford, 1959, p. 222.

Further confirmation comes from The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, it states: "Recently discovered texts doubt the idea that the translators of the LXX have rendered the Tetragrammaton JHWH with KYRIOS. The most ancient mss (manuscripts) of the LXX today available have the Tetragrammaton written in Hebrew letters in the Greek text. This was custom preserved by the later Hebrew translator of the Old Testament in the first centuries (after Christ)". Vol.2, pag.512

The reconciling of the above with the fact that every existing copy of the Septuagint dated to earlier than the 2nd Century CE uses the Tetragrammaton, rather than Kyrios, requires making various assumptions, among which is that there was a replacing of YHWH with Kyrios sometime thereafter. Origen included the Tetragrammaton in his Hexapla in the 3rd Century AD; Jerome, in his prologue to Samuel and Kings in the 4th Century AD, stated: "And we find the name of God, the Tetragrammaton, in certain Greek volumes even to this day expressed in ancient letters."

Most scholars traditionally have held that YHWH does not appear in the New Testament because it was no longer in use by the first century AD; however that view ignores recent scholarship, and is being pushed by various new translations, most of which are not mainline and are made available on the Internet first [7]. The idea that the use of the Tetragrammaton had ceased following the Babylonian invasion, over 500 years prior to Jesus, is shown to be false by the occurences of the Divine name [as found in the American Standard Version, 1901] [8] in the post-exilic books of Ezra ( 37 times), Nehemiah (17 times), 1 & 2 Chronicles (559 times), Haggai (35 times) and Malachi (47 times). Ezra and Chronicles are traditionally attributed to Ezra himself, writing in the post- exilic period and living some 450 or so years before the time of Jesus. Some have attempted to retro-fit to this period a wholesale replacing of the Tetragrammaton with Kyrios or Adonai but the facts regarding the bible books written by Ezra, Nehemiah, Malachi and Haggai during this period do not support this. Additionally, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the Tetragrammaton, showing that the Tetragrammaton was still in use around their time, about 200 BC to 68 CE [9]. Another source of information about the use of the Tetragrammaon in the NT can be found in the writings of Gerhard Gertoux [10] & [11]

Jesus quoted numerous times from the Old Testament, including his replies to the Tempter. It is noteworthy that each of those quotations to the Devil [as found in Matthew] contain the Tetragrammaton in the Hebrew text Jesus cites. As for whether or not he considered it proper to use God's name, we have his words at John 5.43 "I have come in My Father's name, yet you don't accept Me." [HCSB] & John 10.25 "The works that I do in My Father's name testify about Me." [ibid.] and John 17.6 "I have revealed Your name to the men You gave Me from the world." [ibid.], and the best known quote from the Lord's prayer [Matt 6.9] "Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy." [Jerusalem Bible]