First-century Christians not responsible for solving the Tetragrammaton conundrum with kyrios

Some scholars have argued for a “later” Christian convention on naming the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh) kyrios, on the basis of a lack of extant Jewish manuscripts from the period. Unfortunately, not only is this presupposition terribly vague, but it fails to account for a) the general scarcity of pre-Christian LXX manuscripts b) the fact that this convention would have had to have been established by a very small and early pre-Pauline Jewish-Christian community for Paul to use it without any worry from 1 Corinthians onward (approx. 53 AD) contra the pattern received by Paul from his great Jewish rabbi Gamaliel, c) this community undertaking the vast project of revising the entire Septuagint with their important update to the perennial Tetragrammaton pronunciation problem, and d) this revision confusingly mimicking evidence of a more piecemeal translation process spanning many decades.

This fourfold argument is, in my view, a slam-dunk for a pre-Christian solution to the Jewish Tetragrammaton issue. I will be defending in particular this fourth point in the fourth chapter of my upcoming book Bye-Bye Lord via the Septuagint research I am presenting there. It should push Septuagint scholars instead to ask what the few desert community Greco-Jewish LXX fragments mean when they deviate from kyrios, rather than assuming that they represent the Bible the apostle Paul read and cited.

A post-Christian era kyrios innovation just does not make any sense of the data.