Dear James, Rolf and Edward,
I have no inclination to respond to all your counter-arguments, which continue to depend on supposition, and which run counter to virtually all the evidence. You still have not refuted a single piece of my argument. (Incidentally, Rolf, my email to you was offlist. I'm not sure why you posted your reply to the list.)
However, I will respond to some specific points which are new or which may be misleading.
1. James and Edward (via a quote from Prof. McRay) brought up the PIPI phenomenon (a Greek non-word written to look similar to the Hebrew YHWH). However, PIPI does not occur in a single NT manuscript - it only appears in LXX manuscripts. It therefore provides no evidence for anything to do with the NT transmission process.
In fact, it strengthens my point! In the case of the LXX, there is a wide variety of representations of the divine Name in the extant MSS. Variations include YHWH in both paleo and square Hebrew script, the abbreviated form ZZ with a horizontal line, Greek IAW, PIPI, and of course, KURIOS / KS. And the variety of forms continues in documents from the Common Era, after the apparent replacement of the tetragrammaton with KURIOS / KS. This is what one would expect: once people start changing the written form of the Name for the sake of Greek speakers, various solutions emerge and continue to pop up through the textual landscape. So if the tetragrammaton was originally in the NT autographs, how is it that we don't see a similar variety somewhere in the thousands of extant NT MSS?
Stephen Shead
Sydney, Australia
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