Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Stephen Shead <sshead.email AT gmail.com>]

Hi Jonathan,

I know Barry has already replied, but I just wanted to add my 2c on the following:

JM:

This part of the argument baffles me.  The fact that the extant NT mss all have KS says nothing about the first century.  They just speak to the fact that in the second century Scribes put KS for God's name.  That's all.  There is no more evidence in these mss for KYRIOS than for YHWH or IAO.  And it doesn't matter if there is one MS or 5000 MSS.  Until we find MSS from the first century with KYRIOS, we cannot speak of the newer documents as evidence.  The scant evidence (OT Greek mss BCE) that Rolf has presented speaks more to the issue than the silence of the first century autographs.  The argument may be weak, but as an inductive argument, it is cogent.

Hmm... what you say here baffles me! If this is correct, the entire discipline of textual criticism has to be screwed up into a ball, burned, and its ashes scattered to the four winds. Of course the manuscripts matter! They are our primary witnesses (i.e. direct evidence) to the text. And their number and diversity matter also, because of the way copies were themselves copies and spread around different geographic regions. Changes in one "branch" of copies were unlikely to affect other "branches".

The manuscripts and other NT citations (in letters etc.) are the direct evidence we have. I presume what you mean is that, in this case (with KS), the manuscript evidence is so wrong and unreliable, across the board, that we need to turn to other logical arguments to propose the original text. That doesn't stop them from being the most important witness to the NT text. 

So what you (or anybody else) need to argue is that *despite* the direct MS evidence, there are other reasons for suggesting that the ENTIRE manuscript tradition was somehow changed, in a very short space of time, with no variation branches.

Now in one sense, unless you want to argue that the autographs had KS (that is what we do have evidence of, not YHWH), then we all have to do this to a certain (very small) extent. That is, we are discussing the most convincing explanation of the existence of KS across the board, without variation or challenge, from very early. The two sides:

- KURIOS --> KS: This is really hardly a significant change. It's the same word, and the change thus has no theological ramifications (I.e. no objections about changing the text - "merely" a reverential abbreviation). Easily explained by an early tradition in which special names associated with God were highlighted in the written text - with the advantage of being shorter and easier to write. It must have caught on early and not caused any waves.  

- YHWH --> KS: Let's start with the assumption that the NT autographs did *not* use YHWH for Jesus, but only in Scripture quote or other references to Israel's God. Jesus was referred to only with KURIOS. Yet within a generation of the completion of the NT, not only had the text been corrupted by changing YHWH to KS - a change which was, according to you, clearly prohibited by the teaching of Jesus himself in the NT - but at the same time, the references to Jesus as KURIOS (and not references to other KURIOI) were also changed to KS, thus introducing a huge, substantive change to the text and introducing a theological identity or ambiguity which wasn't there before. Yet apparent nobody objected to this, and the earlier true text has not survived.

Not only that, there is not even any comment on this in any of the church fathers, nor explanation of the Hebrew name (in the older/better MSS) for the benefit of poor Greek-speakng Christians. Contrast the LXX, where not only is there variety in the MS tradition, but even post-CE, when KS came to predominate, we still have comments from Christian church leaders on the Hebrew name in the MSS. Not so with the NT. 

Best regards,

Stephen.