This is part three of a series. This post will explain why the New Testament has never had the word "Yahweh" in it. That is, why the New Testament has always had the word "Lord" (in whatever language) instead.
A quick recap. Here we can bust some myths. In certain religious circles, a story has been put round that editing the personal name of God (that name is "Yahweh") - editing that name out of the Bible is a wicked thing to do, so some claim. And those 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 that the name does get edited out by original Hebrew authors of the Bible, then we know that the Bible doesn't see that as a wicked thing to do at all.
In part one, we saw the original Hebrew text of Chronicles being a biblical authority for this. It takes passages from the books of Samuel and Kings and sometimes edits out the divine name (hence, the substitution of the divine name by another word). One can go to even older authorities, such as the psalms. Same thing: some psalms copy material from an earlier psalm but edit out the divine name. 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.
Also, in the time of Jesus, there was a religious taboo about saying the full four-letter name YHWH (Yahweh) unauthorised. There was no taboo against saying abbreviated versions such as the -Yah in Hallelu-Yah, or the -iah in Isaiah, as that would be completely impracticable. Such was the case in Jewish life in the first century. (If they didn’t say the full divine name out loud, the reason isn’t that it was unimportant to them, but rather that it was especially holy to them.)
These substitution tools were well known and are used innovatively in the New Testament. Why? To reveal things about Jesus. So, after setting the scene in so many ways, we come to more of the New Testament writings for what they reveal.
Key background
Want to know where something comes from? When something started? If you go to a bookshop and pick up a Bible, you will probably see a striking translators' preference in the Old Testament section. Where you might expect to see YHWH (Yahweh), you typically see "LORD" instead. LORD in capital letters. Turn to the New Testament, and you only see "Lord" in lower-case letters. So what's up with that? Simply, in the Old Testament, it is representing the divine name YHWH with capital letters as LORD. That's fine because it's a way of knowing LORD as meaning YHWH.
But the New Testament never had the full Hebrew divine name YHWH in it. So, New Testament translators never write "LORD". No YHWH, no LORD. You see "Lord" in the New Testament, but that's to represent a Greek word: Kurios.
So, LORD = YHWH (Old Testament - Hebrew)
Lord = Kurios (New Testament - Greek)
Obviously, this does result in Bibles in bookshops that say "LORD" a lot, but rarely have the name "YHWH" (Yahweh) anywhere on the page. (Not all Bibles, but many. Choice is out there.)
This post will explain why the New Testament has never had YHWH/LORD. That is, why the New Testament has always had Kurios/Lord. So let's start with the opening book of the New Testament: Matthew's Gospel. What happens here is that there are places where Matthew renders his Greek versions of some Old Testament scriptures. And where the Old Testament Scriptures have Yahweh, you don't see Matthew writing Yahweh or LORD. You see Matthew writing "Lord" (Kurios) instead.
Matthew's Gospel
On the right, you can see where the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) says 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 on the New Testament
In part 1, we learned about the Septuagint.
Recap: what influenced the New Testament writers, such as we see here, to prefer "Lord"? Basically, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, a big influence on them. And it is what we call the Septuagint translation (or the LXX). In part 1, we saw that there were various ways of conveying the divine name in different versions of the LXX. The versions that are an obvious influence on the New Testament are the ones that say "Lord" instead of Yahweh.
This would be in the second half of the first century. We can ignore the ‘oldest’ manuscripts of the LXX 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 LXX with κυριος (Kurios) existed, right when they needed to be for the New Testament writers working with them. The New Testament itself is evidence for that. We sometimes see a match between copies of the LXX and copies of the New Testament, such that the latter is quoting the former. It just lines up that way.
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. Or sometimes it may have had the Greek abbreviation of the name, ιαω - ΙΑΩ in capitals (pronounced Iao). We don’t actually know, but they could have. Although it’s mostly assumed that their copies of the Septuagint had κυριος (Kurios), it’s just possible that they also saw copies with ιαω. But they didn’t write ιαω themselves. They wrote κυριος. That means they were not using any of the standard ways of representing the divine name except κυριος, a substitute word.
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 and Psalms. Harmless substitutions for the divine name are abundant there. But a great caution about speaking the divine name also happened, closer to the time of Jesus.
And the first Christians did something new.
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 use "Lord" 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)
It means the Lord Jesus.
The New Testament authors combine the identities of Yahweh and Jesus. It's there on the page. This is what using "Lord" enables the New Testament authors to do. There are many occasions of this happening in the Bible. I've posted a small sample of them here.
There is more to come on this.
No comments:
Post a Comment