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God’s Name in the Bible
Increasing evidence points to the conclusion that God’s personal name (written in Hebrew with the consonants “yhwh,” but usually written in English “Jehovah”) was originally included in what is called the New Testament. Summarizing an article on this in another scholarly journal, a recent publication said:
“In pre-Christian Greek [manuscripts] of the O[ld] T[estament], the divine name (yhwh) was not rendered by ‘kyrios’ [lord] as has often been thought. Usually the Tetragram was written out in Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew letters. . . . At a later time, surrogates [substitutes] such as ‘theos’ [God] and ‘kyrios’ replaced the Tetragram . . . There is good reason to believe that a similar pattern evolved in the N[ew] T[estament], i.e. the divine name was originally written in the NT quotations of and allusions to the OT, but in the course of time it was replaced by surrogates.”—“New Testament Abstracts,” 3, 1977, p. 306.
