Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!sun-barr!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: boris@tornado.Berkeley.EDU (Boris Chen) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Name of God (was Re: gulf crisis, spiritual help for peace) Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 90 06:57:34 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: ucb Lines: 72 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article boris@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Boris Chen) writes: >[One of the problems is that we don't know what the name actually is. >There are conjectures, some of which may be probable, but it's not >clear whether using a conjectural name is better than using "Lord". I don't understand what you are saying by this. Are you saying that we don't know the original pronunciation of the divine name? >There's also a question of what time period you want to take as >authoritative. By the time the NT was written, it's pretty clear that >Lord was used, not the name. That is true of the Greek translation in >use at the time, and the NT itself uses Lord for God, not a name. For >the sake of accuracy in historical study, it is certainly good to >understand that there was an actual name there, but if we started >using it in prayers, public reading, etc., we would be reverting to a >tradition that seems not to have been followed by Jesus or the >Apostles. --clh] Interestingly, texts that have survived from the time of Jesus and the apostles contain the divine name and not 'Lord.' For example, in the Septuagint Version (of which fragments have been found, and survive to our day) the divine name appears in them. "Recent textual discoveries cast doubt on the idea that the compilers of the LXX [Septuagint] translated the tetragrammaton YHWH by kyrios. The oldest LXX MSS (fragments) now available to us have the tetragrammaton written in Hebrew characters in the Greek text. This custom was retained by later Jewish translators of the OT in the first centuries A.D." (the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol. 2, page 512) Later copies of the Septuagint though were altered to have 'Lord' replace the divine name. As for the NT, there is no real reason not to believe that the writers of the NT used the divine name when quoting Hebrew verses. Most likely, the reason that in texts such as the Vulgate replace the tetragrammaton with the word, 'Lord,' is the for the same reason that the same was done with the Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures. "We know for a fact that Greek-speaking Jews continued to write YHVH [sorry I can't replicate the Hebrew] within their Greek Scriptures. Moreover, it is most unlikely that early conservative Greek-speaking Jewish Christians varied from this practice. Although in secondary references to God they probably used the words [God] and [Lord], it would have been extremely unusual for them to have dismissed the Tetragram from the biblical text itself. . . Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bibles which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the NT writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text. . . But when it was removed from the Greek OT, it was also removed from the quotations of the OT in the NT. Thus somewhere around the beginning of the second century the use of surrogates must have crowded out the Tetragran in both Testaments." (Journal of Biblical Literature, by George Howard, Vol 96, No.1, March 1977, pp.76, 77) The importance of God's name to Christ and his followers is clearly evident in scripture. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus said to God, "Hallowed be your name" (Matt. 6:9, NIV) And in John 17:26, Jesus in prayer told God how he made God's name known. It is doubtful that Jesus would follow the unscriptural Jewish superstition or tradition of that time to view God's name as unspeakable.(see also John 17:6) In Acts, we see Symeon related how "God for the first time turned his attention to the nations to take out of them a people for his name."(Acts 15:14) In view of the times, Christians have a commission from Jesus to make disciples of people of all nations. When teaching these people, how would it be possible to identify the true God as different from the false gods of the nations? Only by using His personal name. /----------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Boris Chen || Berkeley, CA || boris@ocf.berkeley.edu | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Those knowing your name will trust in you, for you will certainly not| |leave those looking for you, O Jehovah." (Ps. 9:10) | \----------------------------------------------------------------------/ [Actually, what I was saying is that we don't know the name itself, since we don't know the vowels. --clh]