The Translation, use, and reading

of the Divine Names and Titles

in the Apostolic Writings

(Note: three fonts are needed to read this article: 1. SBL Hebrew 2. SBL Greek 3. Koptos Uncial.)

Most people make certain assumptions about the divine names and titles they read in their bible translations. Some people assume when they see “Jesus” is their bibles, that this is what the Messiah’s name was. When they smarten up a little bit, they read in their post IVth century Greek bibles: Ἰησοῦς. Then, they assume that since the translators put “Jesus” in place of Ἰησοῦς, and that since Ἰησοῦς is not actually Hebrew that the Apostles were endorsing the use of foreign pronunciations and versions of Messiah’s name. While it might be all right, or semi-respectable for those who know no better, or who can pronounce no better than to use a foreign approximation, the use of foregin pronunciations of Messiah’s name is not so official as most Christians might assume.

The reason is that the none of the Apostolic Writings (a.k.a New Testament) in their orignal Greek versions actually used the Greek word: Ἰησοῦς.  Nor for that matter did the earliest versions use the Greek word for “Lord”, “God” or “Christ” (κύριος, θεός or χριστός). One can read all about it in books on early texts. For instance, Larry Hurtado devotes a whole chapter to the subject in The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Philip Comfort discusses this in, The Quest for the Original Text of the New Testament. See also, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts, Comfort and Barret, which features the nomina sacra on nearly every page. Also, one can see Early Manuscripts & Modern Translation of the New Testament, Comfort, and page 76, 102, and 283 of The Text of the New Testatment by Aland and Aland.  The last author expresses some bafflement as to the reason for it.

The fact is that the early MSS use symbols for divine names and titles, telling the reader to substitute the Hebrew equivalent.  The following chart lays it out (follow link for larger version):

Certainly in the case of two names (Yãhweh, Yẽshua) and two titles (Alm̃ighty, Mẽssiah), the ideal was to learn the Hebrew. If you have ever seen Jewish writers write “L-rd” or “G-d” they are not trying to insult the English. They are telling you that they mean the Hebrew terms, and that they prefer not to use the English terms. Likewise, by using what scholars call the nomina sacra shorthands in the earliest Greek Papyri, the Apostles were saying, we prefer that you use the Hebrew terms. On the one hand, I am sure that they wouldn't condemn anyone who was unable to pronounce the right way or who wasn't taught it, but on the other hand they were not endorsing the use of foreign terms. They wanted the nations to learn the proper Hebrew.

Of course what they wanted and what happened are two different things. The Church went down the path of lawlessness and decided that they could care less about Hebrew, because they could care less about the Torah. In fact, they have totally forgotten the reason why there are shorthand symbols for divine names and titles in the New Testament Papyri in the first place. It is quite entertaining to see accomplished scholars conjure up theories to try to explain the phenomenon, and all the while suspecting that the theories are to avoid the plain and simple conclusion that the authors of the original autographs simply did not want the faithful to stop using the Hebrew names and titles in favor of foreign pronunciations just because they were born Gentiles.

So without further ado, I will explain how to decipher the symbols and the grammatical and usage conventions that show which substitution to make, which is done for the reader in the MISB, but there still needs to be explained the reasoning.

Serveral matters of ambiguity need to be answered. In the case of the symbol !ks% and case ending variants (cf. No. 1 in chart above), the Greek symbols could stand for one of three Hebrew forms: a: יהוה b: אדני c: אדון; See in the above chart that three choices are given.  The last one is the least likely to occur, and may actually be the proper substitution in some places in the gospels where men are addressing Yeshua who don't know that he is Adonai or who are concealing it.  That leaves two choices for the remaining cases: a. יהוה , and b. אדון .אדני can be spelled three ways: a: אֲדֹנָי b: אֲדֹנַי c: אֲדֹנִי.  The differences are important.  The form אֲדֹנִי is singular and means “my lord”, or “my master”, and is really just the first person singular possesive of אדון, “Sir”, “master”, and the word master or sir is itself singular. The second form אֲדֹנַי is spelled with a short patach vowel instead of a hiriq. This makes the word “lord” an intensive plural, hence it would be written, “Lord” in English.  It means high lord or exalted lord.  It also has a first person singular possesive ending hence, “my Lord” is the proper translation.  The last form אֲדֹנָי  has a long qamets vowel. Originally, the only difference in ancient Hebrew is that the long vowel is pausal.  The word is said slower in the final syllable and the accent emphasized.  Typically the pausal form would occur at the end of a clause or sentence or when someone was trying to emphasize the word Lord.  The word Elohim is similarly used, אֱלֹהָי is the pausal form, “my Elohim”, and אֱלֹהַי  meaning the same thing is non pausal.  In both cases the suffix is 1st person possesive, and in both cases Elohim is an intensive plural, i.e. “my Almighty”.  So the only difference the qamets vs. patach vowel makes is the pause, which is to convey emphasis, and slowing down in reading.

Now, aside from the rules of Hebrew grammer the Masoretes invented their own meaning for אֲדֹנָי.  They decided that they would use the pausal form with the long vowel wherever the text was talking about יהוה.  So when they pointed the consonantal text: if אדני  was referring to the Almighty, then they always gave it the long vowel, and if not they pointed it short as אֲדֹנִי.  But by doing so they were engaging is another minor interpretation of the text, suggesting that the plural form was not used with men.  But it is likely that the original forms were mostly non pausal: אֲדֹנַי, except where pause was really meant or required, and  that the plural form does not distinguish mere men from the Almighty. This can be seen in the 40 times that אֲדֹנָיו “his Lord” is found in obvious reference to men. It is therefore, at least possible, that many אֲדֹנִי forms should be אֲדֹנָי or אֲדֹנַי, and that prior to the Masoretes if someone where to spell it out, it would probably mean the Almighty, but not provably, so that the form אֲדֹנָי was used of both men and the Almighty.

It will be observed from the Greek nomina sacra that the word “my” is implicit unless a plural possesive pronoun is supplied in the Greek, so that when one says Adonai, he or she is really saying “my L-rd”, and when the text says “!ku% ἡμῶν”, then the proper reading is “Adonænu” for the combination, and means “our L-rd”.

It should be pointed out however, that the ay ending on אֲדֹנָי can often be just a honorific plural without any indication of a 1st person possessive ending, and in context אֲדֹנָי  is used this way. Waltke (7.4.3a, pg. 122) explains why, and allows for both just “Lord” and “my Lord” as the sense, so that context is needed to know which was meant.

If you are traditional Jewish, you say Adonai no matter what the case in the text is, and if Adonai should be used next to the divne same, you say Adonai Elohim to avoid saying Adonai twice in a row.  However, we have to distinguish between what is written in the texts and what to say. Jewish people are always seeing יהוה in the texts, but they are saying Adonai or Elohim when they see it. What is written is not a big problem in the Torah and Prophets.  Either יהוה or אדני is clearly indicated in the texts.  What would be in the Hebrew version of the Apostles Writings is another matter.  If it is a quotation from the Torah or Prophets, the solution is easy. Look up the Hebrew used in the Torah or Prophets.  If it says אדני then we indicate the Hebrew by writing Adõnai, but if it says יהוה then I write Yãhweh. Since I still want to indicate something of the symbol system used in the Greek text, I write it Yãhweh, with a /~/ mark over the first vowel. I do the same for the other six forms in the MISB.

Now, so far, this has little to do with whether one actually chooses to say the name or to substitute Adõnai when one comes accross the divine name Yãhweh. As Jews are used to seeing יְהוָה in the texts they should have no problem seeing the Hebrew letters copied over into English Yhwh.  Further, if they object to the vowels I put in, then they should have little problem with that too, because the Hebrew text puts vowels in also, or in those cases where the whole Hebrew text is unpointed, the lack of vowels is little barrier to one who knows Hebrew in saying all the words. Of course they are two vowels of Adonai and two vowels of Elohim (the first and last respectively leaving the middle holem out--usually), but this has done nothing to stop people from pronouncing "Yehovah" and "Yehowah" or "Jehovah" respectively, and there are still Jews and Christians who argue vociferously for both pronunciations.  So if people are going to say it the wrong way no matter what you do, then we'd better have the right vowels.  I explain elsewhere why they are the right vowels. But that is not my point here.  My point is that the Hebrew has vowels.  So too in the MISB.  No Jew can object to it on any traditional grounds.  They can go right on saying Adonai if they want to whenever they see Yãhweh, because they are totally used to seeing Yehwah and Yehwih in their own Hebrew bibles, and have little trouble not pronouncing it aloud.  My point is that what Jews see in Hebrew is a lot closer to Yãhweh than LORD seen in English texts.  The Jew is at least reminded of the fact that the divine name is a proper name every time he or she comes across it. The English mind is programmed to think of LORD as a title, despite scholars saying it means Yahweh to save themselves from being criticized for mistranslation.  The conclusion then is that effectively Christian translations of LORD are more distant from the original than even Masoretic pointings that Jews read every week—even if they are reading a Hebrew translation of the New Testament.

So if there is an objection is can only be over the presence of the correct vowels rather than vowels for the word to be substituted. My answer to this is that it is less likely to profane the name by pronouncing it with the correct vowels than with the incorrect ones. Meanwhile, I am not ordering everyone to vocalize the name.  That is why the symbol /~/ is there in the name Yãhweh. But it is necessary to show what is written, and what is meant to be written in the Apostolic Writings.  For there are many arguments of those who would deny the identiy of Messiah, and these are overturned by recognizing the nomina sacra in the original papyri. Yes, some Jews may object that the vowels are incorrect.  My answer to that is that they are no more incorrect than the Masoretic pointings. Or they may object that they are incorrect because they are correct, and that the correct way to say the name should not be shown. And I would say to that, that saying the name is not profaning it, but that loudly saying one is chosen by the Almighty and then transgressing his laws is what profanes His Name, and of that the Rabbis are guilty along with their brothers in the Vatican.

I said above that in the case of a quotation, it is easy to know whether to have the sacred name Yãhweh or the title Lõrd (which in the MISB means only Adonai). I have disambiguated most of the cases for the reader who does not know the grammatical conventions of Hebrew, which one would need to know in order to tell whether Yãhweh was meant or Lõrd.  The main rule is quite simple: if the name or title occurs with a possesive pronoun, like his, our, their, or your, then the Hebrew substitution is always Adonai. But if it is without a possesive pronoun, then it is the divine name, except where the nomina sacra symbols come before a proper name.  

There are a few exceptions to this in the Torah and Prophets, and of course there are the 134 places that the scribes changed Yahweh to Adonai recorded in the Masora, but these are vanishingly few compared to the 7000 uses of the name (in round numbers).  So this is the rule that I follow in the printed text. In Judging some cases, one must ask what one could actually get away with in the first Temple period, which is probably a lot more than now, but less than before the Babylonian Exile, where men said and spoke the Sacred Name freely. 

Article by: Daniel Gregg.