Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Stephen,

I do not intend to continue this discussion, because its focus is the 
NT rather than the OT. But allow me a few points.  You have the right 
to be unconvinced and deem something as being impossible. But 
something needs to be said about that which you call "concrete 
evidence."

1. We do not have the original NT manuscripts, We have a fragment or 
two possibly being older than 150 C.E., but most manuscripts are 
younger.

2. In these NT manuscripts we find the so-called nomina sacra-two 
letters with a bar above, such as KS for the name of God and QS for 
"God".

This is the concrete evidence-there are no old NT manuscripts either 
with YHWH or KURIOS.

The next step is to interpret the concrete evidence. We do not need 
any conspiracy or apostasy theory in this interpretation. What must 
be said to be certain is that the nomina sacra in the LXX manuscripts 
are not original. If you do not like the word "tamper," we may use 
"change" instead. Some time in the period between the last LXX 
manuscript we have (1st centurry C.E.) and the LXX manuscripts from 
the 2nd century C.E., the name of God (YHWH) was removed from the LXX 
manuscripts and was substituted by KS. While scholarly consensus does 
not necessarily represent the truth, I have never heard any scholar 
say that the nomina sacra were found in the NT autographs. This is 
very unlikely! So in the same period when God's name was removed from 
the LXX, the word used in the NT autographs with reference to God was 
removed, and it was substituted with KS. You cannot just refer to 
"the NT MSS themselves," as if this solved the issue once and for 
all. What we must do is to ask the question: "Which word was found in 
the NT autographs where we in our NT manuscripts find KS?"

One of the real experts on nomina sacra is L. W. Hurtado ("The Origin 
of the nomina sacra: A proposal". Journal of biblical Literature 117 
(1998): 1-14; The Earliest Christian Artifacts Manuscripts and 
Christian Origins, 2006). He suggests that the nomina sacra was a 
Christian innovation based on the Jewish gematria, which involves 
ascribing religious significance to the numerical value of alphabetic 
characters. For example, Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 6.278-80) 
wrote that the 318 servants of Abraham (Genesis 14:14), written with 
the Greek letters (TIH)  foreshadowed Jesus on the cross (T= cross 
and IH (ie) referred to Jesus). Hurtado (2006:114. 115) suggests that 
IH (ie) representing Jesus was the original nomen sacrum. The value 
18  in Hebrew  is YOD Het, which also means "life". Thus the Greek IH 
referred to Jesus as "the life". If this is correct, it does not 
represent any conspiracy theory, but it shows how non-Christian 
viewpoints rather early started to influence the Christian faith.

The main reason why I mentioned the NT manuscripts in the first 
place, was to show that if KURIOS was used as a substitute for YHWH 
in the NT, this must have been an invention of the NT writers 
themselves, because there is no evidence that YHWH in the time of the 
writing of the NT was substituted by YHWH. But such an invention is 
unlikely, because the Tanakh says that this should not occur. As a 
matter of fact, we have no manuscript evidence showing how the name 
of God was written in the original NT.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




> Dear Rolf,
>
> I have heard these arguments before, and am utterly unconvinced by 
> them. The fact is, there is not a single shred of manuscript 
> evidence for the theory as far as the NT itself is concerned - it is 
> a whole lot of clever conjecture and supposition based on a couple 
> of LXX fragments, but that conjecture flies in the face of the most 
> concrete evidence of all: the NT MSS themselves.
>
> On top of that, I find any conspiracy theory saying that the NT MSS 
> were "tampered with" (and there are several such apostasy / 
> conspiracy theories out there on different topics, with different 
> theological agendas) very difficult to swallow, given the historical 
> reality of the way in which the NT texts were copied and propagated. 
> There simply was no centralised control of a set of canonical 
> "Scripture" documents, since the NT canon was a long way off being 
> established, and the early Christian church was not a homogenous, 
> tightly organised body. And the process of copying did not happen 
> through official ecumenical bodies which could control their 
> contents. It was a much more ad hoc process of people making rough 
> (often rushed) copies of their known/favourite letters etc. as they 
> moved from one place to another. I simply cannot see how such a 
> thorough and comprehensive "tampering" was possible - especially 
> since the evidence suggests that a large percentage of the early 
> Christian church would have been very unhappy with such a change 
> anyway. So the idea that such a theological rewriting could have 
> occurred without leaving any evidence of the original is, in my 
> mind, impossible.
>
> I am aware that this discussion is outside the scope of the list. I 
> felt it was appropriate to reply once (albeit briefly), but I 
> personally will not continue this branch of the discussion.
>
> (And Yigal, thank you for the note about the vocalization "Adonai" 
> for YHWH in the Second Temple period. I think this is correct, and 
> is a perfect fit with the substitution of "kurios" in the NT.)
>
> Regards,
> Stephen Shead
> Sydney, Australia