[B-Greek] JWs and YHWH in Greek manuscripts?

craig newsgroupstuff at swiftdsl.com.au
Fri Mar 4 21:05:30 EST 2005


Although the subject might sound doctrinal and interpretive, I am hoping to
get some comments about statements made in the little JW book "Reasoning
from the Scriptures", regarding Greek manuscripts etc.

It says:

"{Matthew} includes 11 direct quotations of portions of the Heberw
Scriptures where the Tetragrammaton is found. There is no reason to believe
that Matthew did not quote the passages as they were written in the Hebrew
text from which he quotes."

"Other inspired writers who contributed to the contents of the Christian
Greek Scriptures quoted hundreds of passages from the Septuagint, a
translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Many of these passages
included the Hebrew Tretragrammaton right int the Greek text of early copies
the Septuagint. In harmony with Jesus' own attitude regarding his Father's
name, Jesus disciples would have retained that name in those quotations."

"In Journal of Biblical Literature, George Howard of the University of
Georgia wrote: 'We know for a fact that Greek-speaking Jews continued to
write YHWH {Hebrew used in actual text} within their Greek Scriptures.
Moreover, it is most unlikely that early conservative Greek-speaking Jewish
Christians varied from this practice... {I}t would have been extremely
unusual for them to have dismissed the Tetragram from the biblical text
itself... Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek
Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to
believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture,
preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text... But when it was removed
from the Greek O[ld] T[estament], it was also removed from the quotations of
the [O]ld [T]estament in the N[ew] T[estament]. Thus somewhere around the
beginning of the second century the use of surrogates [substitutes] must
have crowded out the Tetragram in both Testaments.'--Vol. 96, No. 1, March
1977, pp.76,77."

I'm wondering if the above claims about original occurances of YHWH in Greek
manuscriptus etc can be substantiated or refuted?

Thanks

--
Craig Johnson
Brisbane, Australia 




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