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.
24 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.
Your gracious acknowledgment of my comments is appreciated, yet it sidesteps the core evidentiary issues at hand, particularly the absence of any manuscript warrant for inserting the Tetragrammaton into the NT text. While you invoke recent scholarship on the Semitic substratum of the NT as a means to disentangle the identities of the Father and the Son, this approach risks retrojecting a theological distinction that the Greek text itself does not enforce; indeed, the NT authors, writing in a Hellenistic milieu steeped in Septuagintal language, deliberately employ κύριος in ways that blur such lines, applying YHWH-texts from the LXX directly to Jesus, as in Romans 10:13 or Hebrews 1:10-12, not to confuse but to reveal a shared divine prerogative within Israel's monotheism. Insisting that Jesus is not YHWH—framing only the Father as YHWH alone and the Son as seperate in a subordinationist sense—overlooks how early Christian exegesis, rooted in the same OT theology you reference, interpreted the Son's lordship as participatory in the Father's essence, a unity that transcends mere functional roles and aligns with the NT's high Christology, where sensitivity to Semitic nuances actually underscores passages like John 8:58 or Philippians 2:6-11 as echoes of divine self-revelation.
Your repetition that Jesus is not YHWH himself, and that unity verses imply no identity purge, presumes a strict separation that the textual data resists; the NT does not present a purge but an inclusion, where the Son is confessed as κύριος in contexts that evoke YHWH's authority, without necessitating a lost Hebrew layer to maintain clarity. Regarding κύριος as a pragmatic choice for Hellenistic Jews and Gentiles, avoiding potentially confusing forms like IAO or IEOUA, this concedes the point that the Greek Scriptures, including the NT, adapted divine nomenclature for accessibility, yet it underestimates how κύριος itself became a theologically loaded term, not merely a neutral stand-in but a bridge that preserved YHWH's covenantal weight while extending it to Jesus, as seen in the nomina sacra tradition that treats ΚΣ as sacred from the earliest papyri onward. The church fathers you mention, such as Eusebius, did indeed distinguish *roles* within the Godhead through careful exegesis, but their Trinitarian framework—evident in Eusebius's own affirmations of the Son's co-eternality with the Father—allowed for such discernment without denying the Son's full divinity; citing a blog post on Eusebius discerning "lords" actually highlights how patristic theology navigated these texts to affirm unity in essence amid distinction in persons, not to enforce a “Jehovah”-Jesus binary foreign to the Greek manuscripts.
As for the earliest Syriac translations employing different forms of "Lord" to distinguish YHWH and Jesus, this reflects a later translational choice in a Semitic idiom, not an original NT feature; the Peshitta and Old Syriac versions, while valuable for their cultural proximity, postdate the Greek autographs and introduce clarifications absent in the uniform κύριος of the Greek witnesses, underscoring adaptation rather than recovery of a suppressed Tetragrammaton. Finally, your dismissal of Trinitarian theology as a dogmatic prerequisite rendering discussion futile, while blaming it for historical ills like Islam's monotheistic emphasis or Christian antisemitism tied to deicide charges, misattributes causality; Trinitarian doctrine arose from scriptural exegesis affirming one God in three persons, countering both unitarian reductions and polytheistic misconceptions, and the tragic antisemitic strands in Christian history stem from socio-political distortions, not the doctrine itself, which in its patristic roots emphasized continuity with Jewish monotheism. The OT and NT do share the same understanding of God, but the NT illuminates the Son's unique roles as incarnate revelation of that God, inviting a reading where κύριος unites rather than divides, faithful to the manuscripts we have rather than a *hypothetical* Semitic original we do not.
Dear Friend,
Thank you very much for your kind and insightful comments. I am reading your thoughts carefully, and I hope to fully discuss the issues you raised in a future article.
Dear anonymous reader, allow me, please, to add my own contribution to the discussion.
With regard to the Septuagint, the passages that contain the Tetragrammaton are not merely a few among many that have survived; rather, more precisely, they constitute all the surviving evidence up to the second century CE. Put differently, there is no extant witness of the Septuagint prior to the second century CE that does not contain, in some form, the name of God as it appears in the original Hebrew texts. If I am not mistaken, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 656 (late second century CE) probably represents the earliest positive testimony we possess for the use of Kyrios in the place of the Tetragrammaton. This is precisely why it is now widely accepted that the Septuagint underwent a systematic removal of the divine name during the course of the second century, although there are certain cases in which the Tetragrammaton survives in later centuries as well. Those who argue the contrary, such as Albert Pietersma, do so not on the basis of the extant manuscript evidence, but primarily on some kinds of indirect evidence.
It would be entirely erroneous to claim that the extant manuscripts of the New Testament provide no evidence whatsoever of the Tetragrammaton. For Jewish and Hebrew-speaking Christians, the doxology “hallelujah” clearly contained the abbreviated form of the Tetragrammaton, as Origen explicitly testifies. It should also be noted, judging from the liturgical tradition, that the use of “hallelujah” does not seem to be confined to the reading of the Psalms and the Book of Revelation but probably constituted a broader liturgical practice. As for the Jewish Christian author of Revelation, he was evidently aware of what he was writing—and more than that: in Revelation 14:1 he appears to regard the Divine Name as a constituent element of Christian identity. Moreover, we ought to state the obvious: the Church of the first century had not yet adopted a Platonizing, apophatic theology of Divine Anonymity, such as that found in Philo or in many Christian intellectuals of the second century and thereafter. Consequently, there were no internal reasons for opposing the use of the Divine Name. To the best of my knowledge, we likewise possess no evidence of a rabbinic-type, legalistic avoidance of the Tetragrammaton; early Christian mentality stands in clear contrast to such formalism. What we do encounter, however—especially after the Jewish-Roman wars—is a pronounced effort to distance Christianity from the Jewish communities, a development that was facilitated once the majority of Christians were Gentiles. Therefore, assembling the evidence of the New Testament, one finds that the first century Christians (or at least many of them) were familiar with, respected, and even invoked the Divine Name. Of course, a translator may feel entitled to strictly stick to the available manuscript evidence; but it would be undue to regard an alternative choice—such as that frequently made in Hebrew versions of the New Testament—as a distortion of the authors’ original intentions and theology. On the contrary, I would argue that if one is convinced that the autographs of the New Testament did not contain the Tetragrammaton in its whole form or a transliteration of it, as ΙΑΩ, this should not be viewed as a spontaneous development; rather, one ought to seek out underlying strategic motivations. At this point, it would perhaps be superfluous to recall that those who are ardent advocates of the faithful rendering of the term Kyrios in modern translations of the New Testament usually do exactly the opposite when it comes to the rendering of the Tetragrammaton in the Old Testament.
(SECOND PART)
Your comments gave me the impression that you mean the following: that the authors of the New Testament deliberately employed a semantically loaded term such as Lord (Kyrios) in order to blur the boundaries between Jehovah and Christ. This hypothesis, however, is consistent neither with the linguistic evidence, nor with the broader internal structure of the New Testament nor with the historical context. From a linguistic point of view, in the New Testament it is primarily the Father who is referred to as God, whereas Christ is called God only two or three times; by contrast, the most common title of the Son is Christ (anointed or appointed one), not God or any other term. The usual verbal formula is “God and Jesus” or “God and Christ,” not “Father and Son.” These data indicate that the Father and the Son are treated as Gods of different categories. The reasonable linguistic conclusion, grounded in statistical analysis, aligns both with the explicit theological confessions of the earliest Christians and with the broader structure of the New Testament. More specifically, the first century Christians present themselves as adherents of the fundamental Jewish article of faith, the Shema, and they regard Jesus as the Son of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, rather than as a constituent part of that God. Nowhere do they claim that the God of Abraham became human or that He is tripersonal. Jesus is consistently portrayed as the one sent by this God and as someone who regards the God of Abraham as his own God as well. In fact, as you surely know, if one did not have the Gospel of John, the Epistle to the Philippians, and the Epistle to the Colossians, he might not even realize that Jesus pre-existed in heaven—let alone conclude that he is the Creator of all things. As for the Epistle to the Hebrews, the very fact that its author labors, through a wealth of arguments, to demonstrate to his Christian audience that Jesus is (or, more precisely, if we recall the original wording, has become) superior to the angels, to human high priests, and to Moses—having acquired, through his human suffering, the qualifications necessary to save humanity—clearly shows that He was by no means regarded as the Almighty God.
The absence of treatises, apologetic efforts, or controversies directed toward a Jewish audience—or within the church itself—on matters of theology demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that the apostolic Christian church shared the same theology as its zealous Jewish opponents. It would be utterly inconceivable for accusations of polytheism not to have arisen on the part of the Jews, and correspondingly for refutations not to have been mounted by the Christians, had the latter been advancing a Trinitarian theology. Likewise, it would be inconceivable for Christian shepherds not to have sought to equip their flocks with arguments regarding such scandalous doctrinal innovations. By contrast, controversies of this kind emerge in the fourth century, when the Trinitarian doctrine is indeed in the process of being formulated. If we set aside the Modalists, who identified the Father and the Son by means of arguments reminiscent of later Trinitarian reasoning, there is—prior to Athanasius (or perhaps Gregory Thaumaturgus)—no Christian theologian who presents a genuinely Trinitarian doctrine. Consequently, Trinitarian readings of the text of the New Testament and statements as this "participatory in the Father's essence" are profoundly anachronistic. I strongly believe that many New Testament scholars should adopt the paradigm of their colleagues in Patristics, who seldom (or even never) suggest that a complete trinitarian doctrine was formulated and established prior to the late fourth century CE.
If I may join this dialogue, I believe there is a middle path that honours the manuscript 'silence' mentioned by Commenter I (Anonymous) while providing a logical framework for the historical evidence raised by Commenter II (Βασίλειος).
The debate over whether the Tetragrammaton was 'removed' or 'never there' often overlooks the primary linguistic vehicle of the New Testament: the name of Jesus itself. Τhe name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yehoshua/Jesus) literally translates to 'YHWH is Salvation.' When Philippians 2:9-11 states that God bestowed upon the Son 'the name that is above every name,' it is not a mysterious new title, but the Father’s own name (YHWH) embedded within the identity of the human Jesus.
This resolves the hierarchy problem. The Father (the Giver) grants the Son (the Authorized Bearer) the use of His Name and authority. This is the Jewish principle of Agency (Shaliach): 'A man’s agent is as the man himself.' This explains why early Christians could apply YHWH-texts to Jesus without violating monotheism—they weren't saying Jesus is YHWH the Father, but that Jesus is the Authorised Presence of YHWH on earth.
Commenter I's demand for 'seams' is actually met in the ΠIΠI (Pipi) phenomenon and the early Syriac/Coptic distinctions. These are the 'graphic fossils' of a transition from a Hebrew-centric agency model to a Greek-standardised essence model. The reason the 'polytheism' debates don't appear until the 3rd or 4th century is that as long as the YHWH/Agent distinction was clear, monotheism was intact. It was only when KYPIOC became a 'black box' term that the identities blurred, necessitating the complex (and often anachronistic) Trinitarian formulas we see later.
We must conclude that Jesus is 'a god' (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:8-9) in a secondary, representational sense—the 'radiance' of the source, but not the Source itself. To 'restore' the Tetragrammaton to the NT is not to 'rewrite' history, but to acknowledge the Semitic subtext that the Greek KYPIOC eventually obscured to the point of invisibility.
I would like to add a further dimension to this discussion by looking at the matter through the lens of Translation Science, specifically the methodology known as Backtranslation (BT). This is not a theological "theory," but a rigorous, evidence-based linguistic practice used in highly regulated fields like Medicine, Law, and Pharmaceuticals to ensure that the "sense and semantics" of an original message have not been corrupted during the translation process.
What is Backtranslation?
In the professional world, when a document is translated from a Source Language (A) to a Target Language (B), a second, independent linguist—who has never seen the original document—is tasked with translating the text back into Language A.
By comparing this "Backtranslation" to the original source, we can identify "semantic collisions" or "black box" terms—words that technically exist in the target language but fail to accurately represent the specific concepts of the source. If a translation fails the Backtranslation test, it is considered scientifically invalid because it lacks equivalence.
The "Kyrios" Black Box
When we apply this scientific rigor to the New Testament, the Greek term κύριος (Kyrios) immediately fails the equivalence test.
In the Hellenistic world of the first century, the Semitic "Source Language" of the authors and speakers contained a crucial distinction between:
The Tetragrammaton (YHWH): The unique, proper name of the Creator.
Adon/Adonai: A title of lordship, mastery, or delegated authority.
The Greek language lacks a direct equivalent for a "proper name" that also functions as a "title of deity." By translating both YHWH and Adon into the single Greek word Kyrios, the 2nd-century scribes created a semantic black box. They collapsed a primary identity (the Father) and a secondary authorised title (the Son) into a single, ambiguous term.
Restoring the "Original Sense"
From a linguistic standpoint, it is a "perfect storm" of semantic loss. If we were to backtranslate the New Testament into the Hebrew or Aramaic thoughts of its authors, a linguist would be forced to restore the Tetragrammaton in several key contexts to maintain the logic of the text:
OT Quotations: When Jesus reads from the Isaiah scroll in Luke 4, the physical document he is reading contains יהוה. To suggest he replaced it with a generic title is to suggest a violation of both the text he held and the Semitic "source" reality.
The "Agency" Factor: Backtranslation clarifies the Shaliach (Agency) model. In the name Yehoshua (YHWH is Salvation), the "Name above every name" is preserved as the Father’s name, delegated to the Son.
If we treat the New Testament as a "translation" of a Semitic message for a Greek audience, then the "standardised" Greek text we have today is essentially a low-fidelity copy. The absence of the Tetragrammaton in current Greek manuscripts is not proof of its original absence, but proof of a "translation shift" that eventually prioritised Gentile theology over Semitic accuracy.
As Commenter II noted, the "PIPI" fossils and the Peshitta's distinctions are exactly what we would expect to find: remnants of the original "Source" peeking through a later "Target" standardisation. Restoring the Name in translation is not an act of revisionism; it is an act of linguistic restoration based on the scientific principle of equivalence.
@Βασίλειος
You have articulated your case with admirable confidence, but the core of your reply rests on a sequence of assertions that do not actually follow from the evidence you invoke. You repeatedly move from (i) some early Jewish/Greek practices regarding the divine name in Greek OT witnesses to (ii) a sweeping reconstruction of what the NT autographs “must have” contained, and then to (iii) a large theological conclusion about what the earliest Christians “could not have believed.” Each step is more ambitious than your evidence can bear. And because your argument depends on treating conjectural reconstructions as if they were textual data, it ends up reversing the proper order of method: instead of letting the MSS we possess discipline our theories, you ask theories to overrule the MSS we possess.
1. You write that the passages containing the Tetragrammaton in the LXX “constitute all the surviving evidence up to the second century CE,” and that there is “no extant witness of the LXX prior to the second century CE that does not contain, in some form, the name of God.” That statement does not merely “lean” on thin evidence; it overstates what the fragmentary corpus can responsibly support. Yes, there are important Greek-Leviticus and other fragments (especially from the Judean desert milieu) in which the divine name appears either in Hebrew characters or in a Greek transliteration (famously ΙΑΩ in some witnesses). That fact is real and significant. But the inference you draw—therefore the pre-Christian LXX uniformly preserved the Tetragrammaton, and therefore “Kyrios” is late and secondary—does not follow. The Judean desert evidence reflects particular scribal habits in particular communities, and it is methodologically reckless to universalize it as “all surviving evidence” in a way that implies it represents the entire spectrum of Jewish Greek biblical practice. Even more importantly, your “systematic second-century removal” narrative requires more than the mere existence of some fragments with יהוה. It requires positive evidence of a coordinated, near-universal program of replacement that succeeded so completely that it left no “seams” anywhere in Christian transmission: no mixed texts, no marginal protests, no localized holdouts, no patristic lament about the loss of the Name from the apostles’ writings, no ancient version preserving it, no lectionary tradition showing it, no explicit textual memory of such a purge. Your proposal asks us to believe in a historical operation of extraordinary scope and uniform success—while producing no direct evidence for it. Your appeal to P. Oxyrhynchus 656 as “probably the earliest positive testimony” for Kyrios replacing the Tetragrammaton does not rescue the claim, because even if one grants your identification and dating, (a) a single papyrus cannot establish a universal trajectory, and (b) the presence of Kyrios somewhere at a certain date does not entail that Kyrios began only at that date. It simply provides a terminus ante quem for that particular witness. Your entire argument hinges on turning a sparse set of surviving fragments into a global narrative of uniformity, and then treating that narrative as “widely accepted.” But “widely accepted” is doing far too much work here. By contrast, scholars who resist your “late systematic removal” thesis do not do so because they are naïvely ignoring MSS. They do so because they recognize the actual shape of the evidence: a mosaic of Jewish Greek practices, with multiple reverential strategies coexisting (Hebrew letters embedded in Greek, Greek transliterations like ΙΑΩ, and Kyrios as a functional Greek equivalent). It is precisely because the evidence is patchy that you do not have the right to turn one slice of it into a universal rule.
If you want a responsible way to frame what the LXX evidence really shows, it is this: some Greek-scriptural traditions retained the Tetragrammaton graphically, while many Greek-scriptural contexts used Kyrios as the conventional reverential equivalent, and Christian copying practices overwhelmingly standardize the Kyrios tradition and then mark it via nomina sacra. That is a historically intelligible development without invoking an implausible second-century “purge.” A solid introduction to the complexities here (and to the danger of overconfident reconstructions from fragmentary data) can be found in Emanuel Tov’s work on textual plurality and the history of the biblical text (e.g., Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible), and in the broader LXX scholarship associated with Albert Pietersma and colleagues (e.g., the methodological stance behind A New English Translation of the Septuagint).
2. You next claim that it is “entirely erroneous” to say the NT provides “no evidence whatsoever” of the Tetragrammaton, because “hallelujah” contains an abbreviated form of the divine name, and Origen testifies to this. But notice what you have actually done: you have moved the goalposts from “the NT contains the Tetragrammaton” to “the NT contains a Hebrew liturgical expression that includes Yah as a component.” Those are not the same claim. “Hallelujah” (Greek ἀλληλουϊά) is a Greek transliteration of Hebrew hallelu-yah (“praise Yah”). It certainly preserves the Yah element phonetically. But it is not the Tetragrammaton יהוה, nor is it a Greek transcription of the four-letter Name in full, nor is it Hebrew characters embedded into the Greek text. It is a doxological loanword—exactly the sort of Semitic liturgical artifact you would expect in a Greek-speaking religious movement rooted in Jewish Scripture and prayer. Origen’s observation about its meaning is therefore unsurprising and proves something far more modest than you want: it proves that educated Christians knew that -yah points to the God of Israel. None of this gives you license to say: “therefore the NT MSS contain evidence of the Tetragrammaton.” At most, it shows that the NT preserves a liturgical acclamation that contains a shortened theophoric element—something perfectly compatible with the mainstream position that the NT text itself writes Kyrios and Theos rather than יהוה.
3. You cite Revelation 14:1—“his Father’s name written on their foreheads”—and you infer that the divine Name is a “constituent element of Christian identity.” But the question is not whether “name” language is important. Of course it is. The question is whether this verse provides textual warrant to print JEHOVAH/YHWH in the Greek NT. It does not. John writes “the name of his Father” (τὸ ὄνομα … τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ), not יהוה, not ΙΑΩ, not a Hebrew tetragram. The verse functions within apocalyptic symbolism of sealing/marking (with obvious antecedents in Ezekiel and Second Temple imagery), and nothing in the Greek wording forces your conclusion that the author is visually encoding the Tetragrammaton into the text. You are trying to extract orthography from symbolism. That move is not exegesis; it is insinuation. And even if one granted—purely for argument’s sake—that John imaginatively includes the divine Name in his symbolism, that still would not authorize rewriting the Greek text into “Jehovah.” You would still have exactly the same methodological problem: you are inserting a form that is not in the MSS.
4. You claim that the first-century church had not yet adopted “a Platonizing, apophatic theology of Divine Anonymity,” and therefore there were “no internal reasons for opposing the use of the Divine Name.” You then contrast early Christianity with “rabbinic-type, legalistic avoidance.” This is a classic false dilemma. You are assuming that if early Christians did not share later philosophical apophaticism or rabbinic legalism, they therefore must have been committed to writing יהוה in their Greek documents. But the actual driver for Kyrios in early Christian texts is neither Platonism nor rabbinic casuistry. It is much simpler and much more historically grounded: Early Christians inherited Greek scriptural language shaped by the Septuagintal milieu, in which κύριος functioned as the standard reverential designation for Israel’s God in Greek discourse. That explanation does not require anonymity, fear, legalism, or “internal opposition.” It requires only the obvious fact that a Jewish-rooted movement writing in Greek would use the Greek religious lexicon already functioning in Jewish Greek Scripture and prayer. Indeed, this is precisely why the earliest Christian scribes treat κύριος as sacred via nomina sacra: not because they were embarrassed by God’s identity, but because they regarded the referent as holy. Your attempt to frame Kyrios as a later philosophical suppression of divine self-disclosure collapses when confronted with the earliest Christian MS culture itself. The rise of nomina sacra is not a gesture toward anonymity; it is a gesture toward reverence. Larry Hurtado’s work remains foundational on this point, particularly The Earliest Christian Artifacts (2006), where he situates nomina sacra within early Christian devotional and scribal practice.
5. You propose that after the Jewish–Roman wars there was a “pronounced effort to distance Christianity from the Jewish communities,” and you imply this facilitated suppression of the Name. But this is exactly the kind of narrative that sounds plausible sociologically while failing text-critically. Even if one grants that some Christian groups increasingly differentiated themselves from synagogue life (a complex historical process), it does not follow that they removed יהוה from the apostolic writings. That inference is far too specific, too textually consequential, and too archaeologically invisible to be asserted without direct evidence. Once again, your hypothesis requires a remarkable historical feat with no material footprint. If you want to argue motivations, you must produce witnesses. Not vague sociological tendencies, but textual phenomena: divergent readings, transitional forms, scribal confessions, polemical patristic discussions about the loss of the Name from apostolic books, or at least MS anomalies consistent with an ongoing replacement. You have provided none. Instead, you have supplied a story that functions rhetorically as a substitute for evidence.
6. You say it would be “undue” to call Hebrew NT renderings a distortion of the authors’ intentions and theology. But you are conflating two very different things: a translation philosophy that chooses to represent Kyrios with a Hebrew divine name for Hebrew readership, and the claim that the Greek autographs themselves contained the Tetragrammaton. A Hebrew translation may indeed choose to render Kyrios in OT quotations by יהוה for reasons of readability and intertextual clarity within Hebrew idiom. That is a legitimate translation strategy for that target language. But it is not a text-critical argument about what Paul, Mark, or the author of Hebrews wrote in Greek. You cannot use downstream target-language decisions as retroactive evidence for upstream source-language orthography. This is why your rhetorical jab—“those who render Kyrios faithfully in the NT do the opposite in the OT”—misses the point. In the OT, translators are working from Hebrew יהוה; in the NT, from Greek κύριος. Treating different source languages differently is not hypocrisy. It is fidelity.
7. You write that my position seems to imply that NT authors used “Lord” to blur boundaries between “Jehovah and Christ,” and you insist this hypothesis is inconsistent with linguistics, NT structure, and historical context. But you have misunderstood the claim. The point is not that the NT authors were trying to “blur” for the sake of confusion. The point is that they used the Septuagintal divine term κύριος in ways that place Jesus within the divine identity of Israel’s God, precisely while maintaining personal distinction between Father and Son. That is not a blur; it is an inclusion-with-distinction. It is an exegetical and confessional move, not a linguistic accident. The distinction matters because you keep assuming that if Jesus is included in YHWH-text patterns, then the text must either be confused or must hide a Hebrew layer to “fix” it. But the earliest Christians were not confused. They were doing something bold and coherent: they were reading Israel’s Scriptures in Greek and confessing Jesus as Kyrios in continuity with that scriptural Kyrios. Richard Bauckham’s argument is particularly relevant here: early Christians did not “add a second god” to Jewish monotheism; they reconfigured monotheism around the inclusion of Jesus in the “divine identity” (not merely divine functions). See Bauckham, God Crucified (1998) and Jesus and the God of Israel (2008). You do not have to accept every element of his thesis to see that it is the sort of historically serious alternative your “different categories of gods” conclusion fails to engage.
8. You argue that linguistically “it is primarily the Father who is referred to as God,” while Christ is called God only “two or three times,” and therefore Father and Son are treated as “Gods of different categories.” This is a textbook example of a true observation driving a false inference. Yes, “God” (θεός) most frequently refers to the Father in the NT. But frequency does not equal metaphysical rank. In a monotheistic discourse where “God” often functions as shorthand for “the Father” (especially in prayer, blessing, and formulaic constructions), you should expect exactly this distribution even if the Son shares the divine nature. Your conclusion also ignores two further linguistic realities that you yourself partially acknowledge: First, the dominant Christological predicate in the earliest Christian proclamation is not “Jesus is God” in bare lexical form; it is “Jesus is Lord” (κύριος). But you treat “Lord” as a lesser “title,” when in the Septuagintal environment it is precisely the term that bears the divine referent in Greek Scripture. In other words, you are counting θεός while discounting κύριος, even though κύριος is the loaded term in Greek scriptural monotheism. Second, you treat “Christ” as if it were evidence of creaturely category, when it is simply messianic identification. “Christ” answers the question “which figure fulfills Israel’s hope?” not “what is his ontology?” The NT can therefore preserve a consistent pattern—Father as “God,” Son as “Lord”—without implying “two gods of different categories.” Indeed, one of the most revealing passages for your statistical claim is 1 Corinthians 8:6, where Paul reformulates the Shema pattern in a way that includes Jesus in the unique divine confession: “one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ.” The text does not read like a demotion. It reads like a christological reshaping of monotheistic speech. This point is widely recognized in modern scholarship precisely because it fits the linguistic evidence rather than fighting it. Again, Bauckham is important here, as is the broader “early high Christology” debate (e.g., Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 2003).
9. You claim that early Christians adhered to the Shema and regarded Jesus as “the Son of the God of Abraham” rather than “a constituent part of that God,” and you say they “nowhere” claim God became human or is “tripersonal.” But you are smuggling in a demand for fourth-century technical language as the condition for first-century belief. f course the first-century texts do not speak in Nicene metaphysical terms. The question is not whether Paul uses the word homoousios. The question is whether the texts attribute to Christ the unique prerogatives, honors, and scriptural identifications of Israel’s God within a monotheistic framework. And on that question your own concessions about κύριος and the Shema are precisely where the decisive evidence lives. To say “they did not use later terminology, therefore they could not have held the realities later terminology clarifies” is the fallacy. Doctrinal development is not invention ex nihilo; it is clarification under pressure of controversy. Nicaea did not create the raw data; it fought over how the raw data must be read in order to preserve monotheism while confessing Christ’s true status.
10. You write that without John, Philippians, and Colossians one might not realize Jesus preexisted in heaven, “let alone conclude that he is the Creator of all things.” But even inside the corpus you concede, your conclusion is unstable. You appeal to Hebrews as if it proves the opposite of high Christology, because it argues that Jesus “has become” superior through suffering. Yet Hebrews opens by locating the Son on the divine side of the Creator–creature divide: through the Son God “made the ages,” the Son is the “radiance of [God’s] glory” and the “exact imprint” of God’s being, and he “upholds all things.” That is not creature-language in any ordinary Second Temple Jewish sense; it is divine-language. When Hebrews then speaks of the Son’s humiliation, suffering, and exaltation, it is narrating incarnational economy: what the Son takes on and achieves as the incarnate mediator. Exaltation language is not an ontological demotion; it is redemptive-history language. You are reading “became” as “was not.” But the text itself refuses that simplification by beginning with the Son’s pretemporal and cosmic functions. Even within your framework, you cannot coherently claim “Hebrews shows he is not Almighty God” while simultaneously ignoring that Hebrews places him at the origin of creation and describes him with categories that exceed angelic or human status.
11. You claim that the absence of treatises and controversies directed toward Jews on these matters proves “beyond any reasonable doubt” that apostolic Christianity shared the same theology as its Jewish opponents, and that Jews would have accused Christians of polytheism otherwise. This is not a sound inference. First, the NT itself is full of controversy, correction, and boundary-marking. The letters exist because disputes existed. The fact that the apostolic church did not produce later-style metaphysical treatises does not mean there were no scandalous claims. It means the discourse was conducted in the genres and pressures of the time: proclamation, catechesis, apologetic explanation embedded in letters, and Scripture argumentation. Second, the claim that Jewish opponents would inevitably have framed the dispute as “polytheism” presupposes that polemics always take the form you expect. But Jewish objections to Jesus in the first century are repeatedly framed in categories like blasphemy, improper exaltation, violation of God’s uniqueness, and messianic illegitimacy—exactly the kinds of charges you see reflected in the canonical narratives and controversies. You cannot demand the modern label “polytheism” as a necessary token of early Jewish reaction and then claim its absence proves your case. Third, the idea that controversies “emerge in the fourth century” as if nothing substantive existed before then is historically indefensible. Second- and third-century Christian writers are already wrestling with precisely the Father–Son relation, the status of the Logos, and the demands of monotheism. You acknowledge Modalists, but your attempt to portray them as exceptional ironically concedes the key point: people were already arguing about how Father and Son relate well before Nicaea.
12. You write that prior to Athanasius (or perhaps Gregory Thaumaturgus) there is “no Christian theologian who presents a genuinely Trinitarian doctrine,” and therefore Trinitarian readings are “profoundly anachronistic.” This claim only works if you redefine “Trinitarian doctrine” to mean “Nicene precision in fourth-century vocabulary.” But if that is your definition, then you have proven a triviality: of course later precision is later. What you have not proven is that the pre-Nicene church lacked a triadic grammar of God, or lacked the conceptual resources that later receive formal articulation. Already in the second and third centuries, you find explicit triadic patterns and sustained reflection on Father, Son, and Spirit. Tertullian famously uses the Latin Trinitas and argues against modalism in Adversus Praxean. Origen distinguishes persons while maintaining the Son’s eternal derivation and divine status (however one evaluates his subordinationist tendencies). Hippolytus attacks modalist confusions in Contra Noetum. Novatian’s De Trinitate (mid–third century) is explicit. None of these are Nicene in final form; but they demonstrate that your claim of “no Trinitarian theologian” before Athanasius is false as a matter of patristic fact. Even more to the point: the baptismal and benedictional triadic forms embedded in the New Testament’s own life (e.g., Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14) already force the church to articulate how the one God relates to Father, Son, and Spirit. You can call that “not yet fully formulated,” but you cannot call it absent. A responsible historical judgment therefore sounds like this: the fourth century does not invent the Trinity; it formalizes contested claims already embedded in Scripture and worship. That is why patristic scholarship itself speaks of doctrinal development rather than doctrinal creation.
13). You end by implying that even if the autographs lacked the Tetragrammaton, that absence would not be “spontaneous” but should be explained by “strategic motivations.” But this is exactly where your argument ceases to be historical and becomes ideological. A “strategic motivation” theory that leaves no trace in MSS, no trace in patristic citation habits, no trace in early versions, and no trace in explicit ancient memory functions as a permission structure to rewrite the text. It tells you that whenever the MSS do not say what you want, you may posit a hidden layer that would have said it, and then translate that hidden layer. That is not translation; it is reconstruction driven by theology. And you cannot plausibly call that “faithfulness to authorial intentions.” You are not recovering intentions; you are substituting your own.
To sum up, if I compress your argument to its essentials, it is this: because some early Greek OT witnesses preserve the Tetragrammaton, and because early Christians used Yah-language in liturgy, and because later Christianity experiences theological development and increasing Gentile dominance, therefore the NT must have originally contained the divine name more directly, and therefore rendering “Jehovah” in the NT is not distortion but restoration, and therefore Trinitarian readings are anachronistic. But every “therefore” in that chain is overconfident.
The LXX evidence proves diversity, not uniformity. “Hallelujah” proves transliteration of a Hebrew doxology, not the presence of יהוה in NT MSS. Revelation 14:1 proves symbolic “name” theology, not tetragram orthography. Sociological narratives about postwar separation prove nothing about first-century Greek autograph spelling. Statistical patterns of θεός/κύριος prove nothing about “different categories of gods” unless you beg the question against the way κύριος functions in Greek Scripture. And the claim that Trinitarian doctrine is absent before Athanasius is not only conceptually confused; it is historically incorrect.
So the real question is not whether God’s name matters. It does. The real question is whether you honor God’s revelation by submitting to the text we actually have—or by overriding it with a reconstruction that conveniently removes the New Testament’s uncomfortable Christological force.
If you are committed to the principle that translators must not insert what the MSS do not contain, then you cannot responsibly print “Jehovah” across the Greek NT as though it were a textual datum. You may, in a study context, annotate OT quotations and explain where יהוה stands in the Hebrew source. You may discuss the history of reading practices and reverential substitutions. But you may not convert conjecture into text and then call that “faithful translation.”
That is the methodological line your argument repeatedly crosses. And that is why, despite its learned tone, your position remains—at bottom—not a textual argument, but a theological preference masquerading as textual criticism.
@Hieronymus
You present your proposal as a “middle path” between MS evidence and what you take to be a plausible Semitic logic behind the text. But once your claims are examined at the level of actual language, actual documentary practice, and actual early Christian usage, the “middle path” turns out not to be a bridge at all. It is a sequence of ingenious reconstructions that depend on precisely the move you say you want to avoid: treating the Greek NT as though it were a low-fidelity translation product whose semantic gaps authorize modern translators to correct the text by importing a divine name that the extant witnesses never transmit. That is not a mediating solution. It is a methodological escalation—from “no MS has YHWH” to “therefore we may restore YHWH wherever a Semitic model would prefer it.”
Your first move is to claim that the “primary linguistic vehicle” of the debate is the name of Jesus itself, because יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yĕhôšûaʿ / Yehoshua) can be glossed as “YHWH is salvation,” and therefore Philippians 2:9–11, where God gives Jesus “the name above every name,” is really the Father giving the Son the Father’s own name “embedded” in Jesus’ human identity. This is rhetorically clever, but it collapses several distinct levels of analysis that cannot be collapsed without distortion. In Hebrew onomastics, it is true that many names contain a theophoric element (Yeho-/Yo-), just as many English names contain “God” language (“Theodore” meaning “gift of God,” “Elijah” containing El). But a theophoric element is not the same thing as the divine name itself functioning as a personal proper name in discourse. To say that the name “Yehoshua” means “YHWH saves” is not to say that the bearer thereby possesses the Tetragrammaton as his own name. In ordinary Semitic usage, the name of Joshua does not thereby become a substitution for speaking or writing יהוה. It is a confession about God, not an instance of God’s covenant name being “embedded” and then transferred.
More importantly, the NT itself is not operating with the Hebrew form יְהוֹשֻׁעַ as its lexical surface. Philippians is written in Greek. Paul writes Ἰησοῦς, not יְהוֹשֻׁעַ. And when Paul speaks of “the name above every name,” he does not immediately say, “therefore his name is YHWH.” He immediately says, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is κύριος.” The climactic confession in Philippians 2 is not “Jesus is YHWH” as a spelling and not “Jesus bears the four Hebrew letters,” but the public, universal acclamation of Jesus’ lordship as κύριος, in deliberate resonance with Isaiah’s monotheistic proclamation (especially Isaiah 45, where universal homage belongs to YHWH). If you want to claim that Paul’s logic is “YHWH is embedded in Jesus’ name,” you must explain why Paul himself makes the payoff “Jesus is κύριος,” not “Jesus is YHWH,” and why he frames the whole act as God’s exaltation of Jesus rather than as a mere unpacking of a name’s Hebrew etymology. Etymologies do not enthrone; exaltation does.
This leads to your second move: the agency framework (shaliach), summarized as “a man’s agent is as the man himself,” which you treat as the key that unlocks everything. You argue that early Christians could apply YHWH-texts to Jesus because they were not identifying him with YHWH the Father, but presenting him as the authorized bearer of YHWH’s presence on earth. Yet even if one grants the general category of agency as a real Second Temple Jewish phenomenon, you are using it as an all-purpose solvent that dissolves the very features of the NT that make the question sharp. Agency explains how a representative can speak and act for another. It does not explain why NT writers place Jesus on the receiving end of divine prerogatives in ways that exceed ordinary deputization—divine worship language, divine creative identity, universal eschatological homage, and the application of YHWH’s own scriptural self-predications in a way that is not merely functional but theological. It is one thing to say, “a king’s envoy speaks with the king’s authority.” It is another to say, “every knee in heaven and on earth bows before the envoy in the exact liturgical pattern Scripture reserves for the God of Israel.” At that point, “agency” is not an explanation; it is a label you apply to avoid the conclusion that the text itself presses.
Your agency model also fails to do the work you claim it does in protecting monotheism. You speak as though early Christians needed a conceptual firewall—“YHWH/Father on one side, agent/Son on the other”—and only later lost it when κύριος became a “black box.” But that picture does not match the history or the textual behavior. Greek-speaking Jews were already using κύριος as the standard way to render the divine name in Scripture, and they did so while remaining rigorous monotheists. The “collapse” of YHWH and adonai into κύριος in Greek did not force Judaism into a crisis of monotheism, and it did not suddenly produce “blurred identities” that required metaphysical repair. If κύριος were inherently a semantic catastrophe, Greek-speaking synagogue life would have been the first casualty. Instead, κύριος functioned precisely as a stable and sacred referent for Israel’s God. That stability is the very precondition of why the Christian confession “Jesus is κύριος” is explosive: it works precisely because κύριος already carries the scriptural weight you say it obscured.
That is why your “Kyrios black box” claim is linguistically and historically misframed. You say Greek “lacks a direct equivalent for a proper name that also functions as a title of deity,” so scribes collapsed YHWH and Adon into one ambiguous term. But you are treating “equivalence” as if it means “one source form must map to one target form in all contexts,” which is not how languages work and not how translation works—especially when sacred discourse is involved. Languages routinely represent a single referent through multiple designators, and a single lexical item can become a rigid, quasi-proper designator by convention. That is exactly what happened with κύριος in Greek Jewish Scripture: it became, by repeated, stabilized use, the reverential way to pick out the God of Israel in public reading. It is not a generic “sir.” In its scriptural register, it is the divine referent’s handle. And once you grant that, your complaint that κύριος “fails equivalence” is no longer an observation about Greek semantics but a demand that Greek should have behaved like Hebrew. Yet the entire phenomenon you are trying to explain is that Scripture DID cross languages, and in crossing languages the divine referent remained identifiable even while the signifier changed. That is not semantic loss. It is ordinary interlingual mapping under sacred convention.
You then try to turn “seams” into an argument for your reconstruction by invoking the ΠΙΠΙ phenomenon and early Syriac/Coptic distinctions as “graphic fossils” of transition. But here again your categories are doing substitute work for evidence. The so-called “PIPI” (or related paleo-Hebrew tetragram insertions in Greek OT fragments) belongs to the textual history of the Greek OT, not to the Greek NT MS tradition. At most it shows that some Jewish scribes, in certain periods and locales, preferred to preserve the Tetragrammaton graphically inside Greek texts of the Pentateuch or Prophets. That is genuinely interesting. It does not show that NT autographs ever contained יהוה. It does not show that Christian scribes replaced it in the NT. And it certainly does not provide the kind of transitional instability you would expect if a universal purge had occurred. If the earliest Christian communities inherited NT documents that sometimes had the Tetragrammaton and sometimes had κύριος, you would expect exactly the kinds of artifacts textual critics look for: mixed readings, marginal alternatives, regional divergences, patristic complaints, and uneven standardization. Instead, what we find in the NT tradition is precisely what you yourself are trying to explain away: an early and pervasive scribal sacralization of κύριος and θεός in the nomina sacra system. The MSS do not behave like texts mid-transition. They behave like texts whose divine vocabulary was already settled.
Your appeal to Syriac and Coptic “distinctions” suffers from the same defect. Later versions sometimes introduce clarifications that the Greek does not encode, because translators and communities have interpretive or liturgical reasons to do so. That fact does not prove that the Greek originally had the same distinctions but lost them. It proves that translation is an interpretive act and that later communities sometimes aim to disambiguate what earlier texts leave rhetorically charged. If anything, this undermines your case, because it confirms that the impulse to “restore” a perceived Semitic clarity can arise precisely in the act of translation, without having any MS basis in the source. And that is exactly what the New World Translation’s insertion of “Jehovah” in the NT is: not recovery, but later disambiguation driven by a theology that cannot tolerate the Greek text’s intertextual pressure.
You also argue that the reason “polytheism debates” do not appear until the third or fourth century is that the YHWH/Agent distinction kept things clear, and only when κύριος became opaque did trinitarian metaphysics become necessary. This is not a careful reading of early polemics; it is a narrative constructed to make later doctrinal development look like damage control. In fact, pagan critics and observers were discussing Christian devotion to Jesus very early, and Christian apologists were explaining it very early. They did not wait until Nicene metaphysics to notice that Christians honored Christ in ways outsiders found remarkable. The idea that “the identities were clear” until a late semantic collapse does not match the documentary footprint of early Christian worship, confession, and apologetic defense. You are attempting to compress a long, complex development into a single cause—κύριος-as-black-box—because you need a mechanism to explain why the NT can sound “too high” for your preferred Christology.
That becomes explicit when you conclude that “we must” say Jesus is “a god” in a secondary representational sense, citing John 1:1 and Hebrews 1:8–9. Here your argument stops being about MSS or translation science and becomes a straightforward attempt to force the text into a subordinationist metaphysic. The problem is that the passages you cite are precisely the ones where the grammar and rhetoric resist your conclusion. John 1:1 does not present the Word as one more deity alongside God; it presents the Word as sharing the divine identity while being personally distinct from “God” in the immediately preceding clause (“the Word was with God”). In other words, the text already gives you distinction without downgrading essence. Your “secondary god” reading is not demanded by the Greek; it is imported to avoid the qualitative force of θεός in that predicate position. Likewise Hebrews 1:8–9 is not a harmless metaphor about radiance. It is part of an argument about the Son’s superiority over angels and participation in divine rule, and it is framed in a way that makes a merely representational, creaturely reading increasingly strained the longer one reads the catena. If your thesis requires that such texts mean “not the Source itself,” you must do more than assert it; you must show it from the wording and its scriptural logic. Your own solution does not do that. It simply declares necessity—“we must conclude”—because your system needs that conclusion.
At this point you introduce what you call “Translation Science” and the regulated practice of backtranslation (BT), claiming that κύριος fails the equivalence test and that therefore the Greek NT is “essentially a low-fidelity copy” of a Semitic source message. This is where your approach most clearly confuses disciplines. Backtranslation is a quality-control technique used to check whether a translation has preserved intended meaning between living languages in a controlled communicative environment, typically where the existence of a stable source document is not in question. Textual criticism is not that. Historical philology is not that. The NT is not a modern compliance document with an extant signed original sitting in a file drawer. Your appeal to BT smuggles in precisely what you do not possess: an accessible Semitic “original document” against which a backtranslation can be measured. You cannot backtranslate responsibly when you have no source text and no agreed evidence that the Greek is itself a translation rather than an original composition.
And that last point matters decisively. You repeatedly treat the NT as a translation from a Semitic source language into Greek, such that Greek terms like κύριος are “black boxes” that need correction by reconstructive restoration. But the NT documents are, as documents, Greek compositions written to Greek-reading communities in the eastern Mediterranean. Yes, the movement’s origins are Jewish and Semitic; yes, Aramaic and Hebrew lie behind some traditions; yes, the NT is saturated with Semitic idiom and scriptural thought. None of that licenses the claim that the Greek NT, as a corpus, is a translation product whose semantics are categorically suspect. You are taking “Semitic conceptual background” (which is real) and inflating it into “Semitic source text” (which you have not established). That inflation is what allows you to treat the entire MS tradition as a later “standardization” that displaced the “original sense.” But that is precisely backwards methodologically. The MSS are not the enemy of the sense; they are the only access you have to the authored sense.
Your “Luke 4” example illustrates the problem. You say that when Jesus reads Isaiah, the physical scroll contains יהוה, and to suggest he replaced it with a generic title would violate the Semitic reality. But Luke 4 is not a stenographic report of an Aramaic synagogue reading; it is a Greek narrative composed by an author who is intentionally aligning Jesus’ proclamation with the Greek scriptural register used by his audience. Luke’s Scripture quotations overwhelmingly track Greek forms, and the key issue in Luke 4 is not whether Jesus pronounced יהוה out loud but what the Isaianic message means as fulfilled in him. Even if you insist that the Hebrew scroll contained יהוה in the underlying Isaiah passage, it does not follow that Luke must therefore reproduce יהוה in his Greek narrative. That is the very mistake your argument keeps making: moving illegitimately from “the Hebrew text had YHWH” to “therefore the Greek NT should display YHWH.” Greek-speaking Jewish Scripture use had already developed patterns for handling the Name in Greek. Luke is writing inside that world, not violating it.
Notice, too, what your own argument concedes against itself. You blame “2nd-century scribes” for collapsing distinctions, yet you also admit that Greek lacks an equivalent and that “accessibility” required adaptation. If that is true, then you have already granted the principal point: the Greek scriptural economy made deliberate, intelligible choices in representing Israel’s God for Greek readers. Once you grant that, your call to “restore” is no longer a demand for fidelity to what was written; it becomes a demand that translators override the Greek textual strategy for theological reasons. In other words, it becomes exactly what you accuse others of doing.
Finally, your claim that restoring the Tetragrammaton is not revisionism but “linguistic restoration based on scientific equivalence” misstates what restoration would entail. Restoration in textual work is not the act of making a text say what we think it should have said in another language world; it is the act of recovering what it did say by evidence of transmission. The only way to justify inserting יהוה into the Greek NT is to produce Greek NT evidence for it: MSS, early citations, ancient versions that preserve it in a way traceable to Greek exemplars, or demonstrable textual instability pointing to such a feature. What you have offered instead are analogies (agency), etymologies (Yehoshua), and modern QA procedures (backtranslation) deployed as if they were textual witnesses. They are not. They cannot do the job you assign them.
And here is the deeper irony: the very phenomenon you are trying to explain—the NT’s willingness to apply YHWH-scripture to Jesus—does not require a hidden Semitic layer where the Tetragrammaton was explicitly present. It is explained far more simply by the world we can actually document. Greek-speaking Jews already had a scriptural habit of rendering יהוה with κύριος. Early Christians inherited that Bible, wrote in its language, and made the astonishing move of confessing Jesus with the same κύριος that named Israel’s God in their Scriptures. That is not semantic degradation; it is the conceptual architecture of early Christian monotheism under pressure of the Christ event. Your proposal does not clarify this architecture; it replaces it with a reconstruction designed to keep Jesus safely on the creaturely side of the divide, while allowing you to speak as if YHWH-texts apply to him “through agency.” But the NT’s usage of κύριος is not content with that safety. It is precisely built to make the reader confront a Lordship claim that cannot be reduced to mere delegated authority without flattening the rhetoric and evacuating the intertextual force.
So if you truly want to “honour MS silence,” you cannot treat that silence as an invitation to fill the page with a reconstructed Name. You must let the Greek speak as Greek. You must allow κύριος to mean what it meant in Greek Scripture, not what you wish it had meant to preserve a neat Father/Son hierarchy. And you must not confuse modern translation QA techniques with the historical discipline of establishing what an ancient text actually says. The middle path you propose only looks moderate because it repeatedly uses the language of caution—“subtext,” “fossils,” “equivalence”—while authorizing the most radical move on the table: printing a form in the NT that no NT MS transmits, in order to secure a theology that the Greek text, in its received and earliest accessible form, persistently strains against.
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