[B-Greek] QEOS and KURIOS : a strange choice of words?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Sep 13 10:24:55 EDT 2003
At 6:33 AM -0700 9/13/03, Ted Shoemaker wrote:
>
>Hello,
>
>This is a post which could easily veer
>off-topic. I will try to be careful.
>
>If I am correct, the most common names in the
>Greek NT for the OT Deity are QEOS and KURIOS.
>For the most part, the NT neither translates
>nor transliterates the Hebrew names of Deity.
>That is, instead of calling the Deity
>Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, etc., or
>"I am that I am", "Almighty God", etc., the
>words QEOS and KURIOS are used. (Certainly,
>some of the reasons for this go back to the
>LXX, with which I am unfamiliar.)
>
>I find this strange. The word QEOS seems
>generic -- and this for a God who demands
>exclusivity. The Greeks had used QEOS for
>centuries without referring to Yahweh. And
>KURIOS doesn't even require the concept of
>Deity: it's also used where our own English
>would use "boss" or "mister".
>
>Would anyone care to speculate about the
>reasons for these choices of terms?
I have seen Alex Hopkins' response to this and intend what I say here to be
supplemental to rather than contradictory to anything that he wrote.
I don't know at what time Greek-speaking Jews may have begun to use hO QEOS
as a proper name (we HAVE discussed this previously at some point on the
list over the years), but the LXX has both hO QEOS and W QEE used as
vocatives and of course has KURIOS; presumably hO QEOS could represent
ELOHIM used in direct address, but I would guess that both QEOS and KURIOS
used as proper names have to do with avoidance of voicing the tetragram.
Earlier extra-Biblical Greek used hO QEOS and hH QEOS of any particular
deity, although I've felt that Socrates uses it of Apollo in a monotheistic
sense.
In the GNT, of course, KURIOS is more commonly used as a title for Jesus
Christ rather than as a word for God the Father, e.g. in Phil 2:11 and
generally in Pauline usage.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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