Thomas E. Gaston,
“Why does Hebrews 1:10–12 cite Psalm 102:25–27?,”
Neotestamentica, vol. 58 (2024), nr. 2, p. 294.
“Why does Hebrews 1:10–12 cite Psalm 102:25–27?,”
Neotestamentica, vol. 58 (2024), nr. 2, p. 294.
Ενώ αρχικά υπήρχε η άποψη ότι η αντικατάσταση του Τετραγράμματου με τον όρο κύριος αποτελούσε χαρακτηριστικό της μετάφρασης των Εβδομήκοντα, πιο πρόσφατη ακαδημαϊκή έρευνα υποδεικνύει ότι η Παλαιά Ελληνική περιείχε είτε μια ελληνική μορφή του Τετραγράμματου είτε τα τέσσερα εβραϊκά γράμματα. Αυτή η αντικατάσταση έγινε από Χριστιανούς γραφείς τον δεύτερο αιώνα (Vasileiadis και Gordon 2021· αν και βλέπε Rösel 2007 για την αντίθετη άποψη.) Είναι ακόμη πιθανό η Καινή Διαθήκη να χρησιμοποιούσε αρχικά το Τετραγράμματο, και το οποίο πιο μεταγενέστερα αντικαταστάθηκε με το κύριος καθώς άλλαξαν οι απόψεις για τη χρήση του θείου ονόματος, αν και δεν υπάρχουν σωζόμενα αντίγραφα με αυτό το χαρακτηριστικό (Howard 1977, 77· Vasileiadis και Gordon 2021, 106). Ακόμα κι αν υποθέσουμε ότι ο συγγραφέας [ενν. της Προς Εβραίους επιστολής] γνώριζε μόνο την μετάφραση των Εβδομήκοντα σε κάποια έκδοση που χρησιμοποιούσε το κύριος, αντί για το Τετραγράμματο, δεν υπάρχει κανένας λόγος να πιστεύουμε ότι είχε σύγχυση όσον αφορά σε ποιον αναφέρεται το κύριος στην Παλαιά Διαθήκη.
Reference to:
Pavlos D Vasileiadis & Nehemia Gordon,
“Transmission of the Tetragrammaton
in Judeo-Greek and Christian Sources”
(«Η Μεταβίβαση του Τετραγράμματου
στις Ιουδαιο-Ελληνικές και Χριστιανικές Πηγές»),
Flavia Buzzetta (ed.), Accademia Cahier,
Nr. 12 (June 2021), pp. 85–126.
3 comments:
What your quotation strings together are, at best, cautious hypotheses about the Greek OT and, at worst, a conjecture about the NT that has no manuscript support and runs against everything we actually have in hand. Gaston’s paragraph is not a demonstration; it summarizes positions on offer and explicitly flags the crucial one as “even possible … though there are no surviving copies with this feature.” That is the point on which textual criticism turns. We do not rewrite a text to incorporate a reading for which there is not a single witness, especially when thousands of witnesses unanimously go the other way.
Start with the easy part. That some pre-Christian Jewish copies of the Greek Scriptures retained the Tetragrammaton—in Hebrew characters or via a transliteration such as ΙΑΩ—is not in serious dispute. We have a small set of such LXX fragments. We also have many other Jewish and virtually all Christian LXX manuscripts that read κύριος, and in Christian hands those words very quickly enter the distinctive scribal practice of nomina sacra. That history is interesting for understanding the Septuagint; it does not license retrofitting the NT. The NT is its own corpus, with its own manuscript tradition. In that tradition the evidence is monotonously consistent: the earliest papyri and the great codices write κύριος and θεός—usually in the contracted sacred forms ΚΣ and ΘΣ—with no trace of יהוה anywhere, whether in quotations or in narrative. The burden of proof is on anyone who wishes to say, “the apostles originally wrote the Hebrew characters here,” when no papyrus, no parchment, no lectionary, no Father’s citation, and no ancient version ever shows them.
That is why the specific Howard proposal you cite has never moved the goalposts. It was framed by its author as a theory, offered to explain how a replacement might have happened. But theories that contradict the entire manuscript tradition without a single positive witness do not become the base text. If Christian scribes across the Mediterranean really undertook a programmatic replacement in the second century, you would expect to see seams: mixed texts, marginal protests, regional hold-outs, patristic complaints, or at least a few stubborn copies that slipped through. What we actually see—already in the earliest substantial papyri of Paul and John—is κύριος and θεός treated as sacral vocabulary, abbreviated and overscored. That is a sign of early, settled usage, not of a late, universal purge.
Even the preliminary claim in your excerpt—“consistency throughout the NT of using κύριος to stand for the divine name in OT quotations and using κύριος for Jesus elsewhere”—doesn’t survive contact with the NT itself. Mark opens by citing Isa 40:3, a YHWH text (“prepare the way of the LORD”), to introduce Jesus’ advent. Paul quotes Joel 2:32 in Rom 10:13 (“everyone who calls on the name of the Lord”) in a paragraph that has just defined confessing “Jesus as Lord” and goes on to speak about calling on him; the LXX gives him κύριος where the Hebrew has יהוה, and Paul lets the Greek do its Christological work. Heb 1:10–12 cites Ps 102:25–27, a passage addressed to YHWH as Creator, precisely in a catena that argues the Son’s superiority; brackets do not make the problem go away. 1 Peter 3:15 adapts Isa 8:13 (“sanctify the LORD”) in a line that many translations rightly render “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” John 12:41 reflects on Isaiah’s temple vision of YHWH’s glory and says Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke of him,” in context referring to Jesus. Jude 5, in a highly weighty reading, even says “Jesus saved a people out of Egypt.” These are not sporadic slips; they are programmatic. Early Christians took the Greek scriptural term κύριος—the very word that names Israel’s God in their Greek Bible—and dared to confess Jesus with it. The idea that the NT keeps a clean wall between “κύριος for YHWH in quotations” and “κύριος for Jesus elsewhere” is not a description of the evidence; it is an attempt to insulate a theology from the evidence.
Appealing to Vasileiadis and Gordon doesn’t mend the hole. Their study collects cases in which Jewish and some Christian Greek witnesses to the OT transmit the Tetragrammaton in various ways. That is valuable for the LXX dossier. It does not conjure up a single NT manuscript with יהוה. Indeed, your own excerpt concedes there are “no surviving copies with this feature,” which is an extraordinary admission if the claim is meant to be anything more than a thought experiment.
The way “tradition” is deployed here also misdirects the reader. Jewish reverence that avoided pronouncing the Name did shape synagogue lection, and Christian reverence that abbreviated divine words did shape scribal habits. Those are part of the story, but the decisive fact for translation is not the ancestry of a custom; it is the text that custom actually produced. If the NT authors, writing in Greek and quoting a Greek Bible that typically had κύριος in YHWH-verses, chose to write κύριος and to preach Jesus as κύριος, then a faithful English translation will write “Lord” there. That is not capitulation to “tradition” over against God; it is fidelity to the documents that the church and academy alike have used for two millennia because they are the ones we possess. You do not honor the Name by printing forms the apostles did not write.
Finally, the logic that treats “a name” as automatically superior to “a title” assumes precisely what the Greek sources will not grant you. In the Greek scriptural economy, κύριος is not a casual honorific that demotes God to a generic “sir.” It is the settled lexical equivalent by which Greek-speaking Jews referred to the God of Israel and by which Christians confessed Jesus without ceasing to worship Israel’s God. That is why the earliest Christian scribes elevate κύριος into a nomen sacrum, and it is why the NT’s most audacious claims about Jesus are made by putting him on the receiving end of YHWH-texts in Greek. The historical record is not embarrassed by that move; it is built on it. A reconstruction that requires us to posit a lost Tetragrammaton-layer underneath every one of those places does not explain the data; it explains it away.
Dear Reader, thank you for taking the time to provide these thoughtful comments. Many of the points you make have already been discussed and answered elsewhere.
Some notes of interest:
1. The recent decades' scholarship is attempting more intensively to locate the Semitic substratum of the New Testament. This helps us to avoid confusing the identities of God the Father and Jesus the Son.
2. Jesus is not Jehovah. Jehovah is the Father, Jesus is the Son. God's name has never been lost for the readers who are familiar with the OT theology, but also are sensitive to the Semitic nuances of the NT texts.
3. Jesus is not Jehovah himself. If this is clear, all the verses that refer to his unity with the Father are clear enough that no identity purge is meant.
4. κύριος was a fine means to be used by Hellenistic Jews and goyim alike. IAO or IEOUA or similar Greek name forms for YHWH were terms that might have confused non-Jews who weren't acquainted with the OT background. So, it has served a fine purpose, but it did not alter the actual identities of the Father and the Son.
5. Almost all the Greek and Latin church fathers and authors who had at least some knowledge of Hebrew were able to distinguish who is YHWH and who is Jesus behind the Greek κύριος. For instance, see: https://e-homoreligiosus.blogspot.com/2020/10/eusebius-discerning-lords-in.html
6. The earliest Syriac translations of the NT share the Semitic mentality within the text; they almost unanimously made a clear distinction between YHWH and Jesus by using different forms of the term "Lord".
7. Remaining firmly attached to dogmatic prerequisites for the Trinity makes all this discussion futile. Furthermore, the trinitarian theology was a primary reason for the rise of the Islamic emphasis on monotheism, the antisemitic Christian stance because of the Jewish deicide (because Jesus was considered to be God), etc. OT and NT share the same understanding of God; NT sheds light on Jesus's unique roles.
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