A quick recap. This is a chance to bust some myths. In certain religious circles, a story has been put round that editing the personal name of God (that name is "Yahweh" in case you didn't know) - editing that name out of the Bible is a wicked thing to do. And people who say it's wicked also tend to think that any religion that uses any Bible with God's name edited out is a bad bad religion. This proposition that it's wicked is pretty easy to test. The obvious way to do it is to ask this question: does the Bible itself already edit out the name of God anywhere in its own pages? That's possible to check because the Bible itself quotes the Bible. That is to say, earlier parts of the Bible get quoted in later parts of the Bible. So if an earlier part of the Bible featured God's name, and it gets quoted in a later part of the Bible, we can track that and see if the name gets edited out or not. If we find the name does get edited out, then we know that the Bible doesn't see that as a wicked thing to do at all.
In part one, we saw Chronicles being a biblical authority for the substitution of the divine name by another word. One can go to even older authorities, such as the psalms. One arrives at the same result. The harmless substitutions that one finds there will not have gone unnoticed among well-informed Jewish people in the ancient world who regarded the divine name as very holy. If they didn’t say it out loud, the reason isn’t that it was unimportant to them, but rather that it was especially holy to them.
These tools are used innovatively in the New Testament to reveal things about Jesus. So, after setting the scene in so many ways, including the Old Testament and the gospels, we come to more of the New Testament writings for what they reveal.
In mainstream Bibles, substitutes for the divine name Yahweh are used. And there are some pretty noble-looking substitutes, such as "LORD" (which you often see instead of Yahweh). Obviously, this does result in Bibles in bookshops that say "LORD" a lot, but rarely have the name "Yahweh" anywhere on the page. (Not all Bibles, but many. Choice is out there.)
We have seen in previous posts that there was a respectful pattern of substitutes anyway. Here are some from Matthew's gospel. On the right, you can see the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) say Yahweh. On the left, you can see that Matthew's Gospel changes it into "the Lord". And in the middle, you can see that some versions of the Septuagint (the LXX) also say "the Lord." All of these are correct. It shows the time-honoured tradition of changing "Yahweh" to "the Lord":
Source: adapted from https://www.kalvesmaki.com/LXX/NTChart.htm
The influence of the Septuagint
What influenced the New Testament writers here? The Greek translation of the Old Testament is an influence. This is what we call the Septuagint (or the LXX). In part 1, we saw that there were various ways of conveying the divine name in different versions of the Septuagint. The versions that are an obvious influence on the New Testament are the ones that say "Lord."
So, there is the interesting question of what versions of the Septuagint would have been handled by the writers of the New Testament who quoted from it. What copies were in their hands? This would be in the second half of the first century. We can ignore the ‘oldest’ manuscripts for the purpose of this question, as the oldest ones won’t be the ones handled by the writers of the New Testament. They weren’t in a museum of oldest copies. It is highly likely that more recently made copies would be their working copies.
We can be reasonably confident that by the middle of the first century AD, copies of the Septuagint with κυριος (Kurios) existed, right when they needed to be for the New Testament writers working with them.
The New Testament authors didn’t write down “Yahweh.” But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have the divine name in front of them when they read the Septuagint - sometimes it may have had the Greek form of the name, ιαω (Iao). We don’t actually know, but they could have sometimes. Although it’s mostly assumed that their copies of the Septuagint instead had κυριος (Kurios), it’s just possible that they also saw copies with ιαω. But they didn’t write ιαω themselves. They wrote κυριος.
Why did they do this, we may ask? Why did they go all the way in substituting the divine name?
It suggests a particular direction. We have seen such a trajectory goes back to Jesus and the gospels. But as we saw in part one, it starts back further, in the Old Testament books of Chronicles if not earlier. Harmless substitution for the divine name is abundant there. But a reduction in speaking the divine name closer to the time of Jesus. And the first Christians did something new with this.
The main reason why the divine name Yahweh is rarely found in most Christian Bibles has to do with the intentions of the original authors of the New Testament. They were very innovative in how they used the word "Lord" where you might expect to see the word "Yahweh."
The New Testament authors didn't do that to hide something, they did it to reveal something.
To show us something about Jesus. This passage famously does it. An Old Testament verse about Yahweh becomes a New Testament verse about the Lord Jesus:
OT - “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of YAHWEH shall be delivered” (Joel 2:32)
NT - “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Acts 2:21)
I've written posts before about what that reveals about Jesus, how the New Testament authors combine the identities of Yahweh and Jesus. It's there on the page.
There is more to come on this.
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