The Name of God in the New Testament - The BAS Library
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The Name of God in the New Testament

Did the earliest Gospels use Hebrew letters for the Tetragrammaton?

By George Howard

Many early copies of the New Testament abbreviate sacred words (nomina sacra). The earliest of these abbreviations stand for “God,” “Lord,” “Christ,” and “Jesus.” Abbreviations of these words were formed by writing their first and last letters and placing a line over them. Thus, using English to illustrate, “God” would appear as G÷D÷ and “Lord” as L÷D÷. The attempt to differentiate and dignify the sacred name of God goes back to pre-Christian times; it was done first by Jews. From the Dead Sea Scrolls we know that Jewish scribes often distinguished the divine name Yahweh. (Yahweh is known as […]

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Footnotes

1.

Palimpsests are parchments written over erased earlier writing.

2.

The Hexapla, written by Origen, a third century Church father, is a multi-columned work containing among other things the translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.