Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Stephen Shead <srshead+bh AT gmail.com>]

Hi James,

Responding to some of your points:

[JC]

> 1) You raise a very good point of the overwhelming volume of MSS without
> YHWH and no MSS with. This is perhaps the most convincing argument and not
> to be taken lightly by any means.
>

[SS] I agree ... not surprisingly :)

[JC]

> 2) Personally, I am unaware of any specific MSS where KS is used in a
> context which is clearly talking about Jesus. Do you know of any concrete
> examples you can point me to?
>

[SS] I really think this point will test the patience of b-hebrew-ers, so I
will take it up offlist.

[JC]

> 3) I am very familiar with JW beliefs. I have studied their beliefs in
> depth as well as a variety of Christian churches and don't feel that your
> claim about what is central to their beliefs is valid or even a fair
> comment.
>

[SS] Just to clarify: If what I said causes offense to any Jehovah's
Witnesses, I apologise - it was certainly not designed to do so. But I
actually didn't say anything about what is "central to their beliefs". I
said that the claim that the original NT autographs contained the Hebrew
tetragrammaton "is crucial to the Jehovah's Witness argument against the
mainstream Christian understanding of Jesus". This is not a value judgment,
nor is it necessarily "central" to JW belief; it is simply my understanding,
based on both my own study of JW beliefs and also my lengthy discussions
with JWs. That is, they do not believe that Jesus is in any way YHWH/Jehovah
God, and they believe that the use of "kurios" for *both* YHWH *and* Jesus
in the Greek NT texts (as a result of a process of textual
corruption/change) wrongly creates the impression that Jesus is Jehovah God.
Again, if this is unfair or offensive to JWs, I am both surprised and sorry.

[JC]

> 4) You interestingly raised the valid observation that we see much ado
> about controversies in the early Christian literature but nothing about
> whether or not the name YHWH should be pronounced.
>

[SS] You're confusing the issues here. I was not considering the
pronunciation of the divine name YHWH when reading/speaking (whether in
Hebrew or Greek), but rather the orthographic issue of substituting KURIOS
for YHWH in Greek texts. These are very different questions. (However, on
the former issue, I think Yigal is right on the money.)

Stephen Shead
Sydney, Australia