[very
sorry, I accidentally published a draft version of this post before]
In
my last post, we looked at six factors provided by Pavlos Vasileiadis as to why
the Hebrew divine Name, possibly pronounced something like “Yahweh” (but we
don’t really know!), became unpronounceable in some circles to
the point of being a capital offense in the third century AD.
Today
I hope we're going to see why it is virtually impossible to justify the idea
that it was Christians that came up with the idea of translating the
Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, into Greek kyrios.
At the point we are up to (p. 58 in the journal), Vasileiadis reconstructs
a progression of practice among the desert-based Qumran community, whose writings
were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
These people, our author asserts, went from prohibitions against pronunciation to
prohibitions against writing, involving practices of term replacement—first by
‘God’ and ‘Lord’ equivalents and finally by even broader “hedges”, such as
“heaven”, “the Holy One,” “the Place,” and “the Name” (the references here are
to Stroumsa, A nameless God, 231 and Rösel, “Names of God”, 601,
602), although he will soon point to other possible reconstructions as we shall
see. The reader is reminded again that we are not talking about a universal
Jewish reticence to pronounce and write Yahweh but rather an apparent
majority tendency, since some Jews and non-Jews were still uttering the Name
(thus known) as late as into the AD 200s. This brings us to my first point of slight
disagreement with Vasileiadis, although it may just be semantics—I’ll have to
let you decide.
He states on p. 59, supported by a single quote from 17th-century
theologian Sixtinus Amama, that Christians followed Jews in this reticence to
pronounce the Name (in Hebrew). First, that is to my mind too broad an
extrapolation from this curiously late source to generalise to the Christian
community/communities at large (although I expect Vasileiadis to have other references
in mind and I myself can think of one). Second, if the Greek-speaking Christians
were in the habit of referring to the kyrios translation
option, such as all the New Testament authors manifestly did, then
we need to know quite what is meant by this inaudibility Vasileiadis refers to.
He is thinking specifically of Hebrew pronunciation, of course. However, is
there not an assumption here that all Greek-speaking Jews had a de facto knowledge
that kyrios was not the real deal or a full equivalent to it? For
Greek-Speaking Christians to not have been using the Hebrew name does *not* necessarily
imply that they were relinquishing some right to name their God, even in the most
personal sense. This is especially true in light of the careful efforts of the
translators or rescensional scribes to preserve the anarthrous character
of kyrios in the LXX that I have demonstrated after mapping
out all the 6,866 occurrences (at my count) of the LXX Tetragrammaton
translations into Greek kyrios (96.5 % of nominative and genitive kyrios
translations are anarthrous—Genesis through Malachi).
So,
for me, I don’t think this difference in view is pure semantics. Look how Vasileiadis
concludes this section: “It became an amassingly settled position that it is
impossible for God to have a personal name.” The tension is apparent, however, from
his very next sentence: “Nevertheless, one way or another, the proper name of
God never ceased from use.” What the paper does not inform us, and perhaps cannot
within its scope, is on the capacity of anarthrous kyrios to conceptually
carry over both the function and the character of the Tetragrammaton into
Greek. That is precisely what anarthrous kyrios seems to have been designed
to achieve, both function and character.
Vasileiadis, focussing fundamentally on the Hebrew core, cites an impressive
number of sources throughout this fascinating paper, and his rich Appendices
bear witness to some extensive levels of textual research and scholarship, a
practice he has continued to the present day. So, when he asks, somewhat
starkly, if we may “assume that a Hebrew term would have one, and only one,
pronunciation spanning across all Palestinian and diasporic Jewish populations
throughout this long period?” and “if this were the case for the term in its
source language, would there be a basis for the possibility of a unique
rendering in the target languages?” he is able to answer in the negative in
both instances with some conviction. His evidence of flexibility in
pronunciation over time in Hebrew does seem quite credible, especially given
the rich variety of attempted Greek transcriptions in particular that he will
soon demonstrate. However, it does not
factor in a special “slow-down factor” of linguistic evolution that sanctity can
clearly exercise on language. This phenomenon is actually demonstrable by
Vasileiadis’ own reference to the practice of insertion of paleo-Hebrew
Tetragrammaton into Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible,
which some of the authors he will cite agree is actually an archaising tendency.
That’s an extraordinary practice right there, but we could also widen out and
look at other religious practices for the preservation of holy terminology that
are so powerful as to divert translator/scribe reassessment of ongoing suitability.
That is precisely my thesis on the maintenance of ‘Lord’ in English
Christianity to which I have consecrated a good number of posts and which I am
writing up in book form. In short, we could do with some balance between the
evolution of sanctified language over and against non-sanctified language over
the same time period. Perhaps in light of that research, further informed
estimations could be made as to how much the variations in writing truly
reflected variations in pronunciation as opposed to simply evolving
transcription options.
On the issue of fluctuation and stability, one other thought that occurs to me
given what we now know of the slight variation in rates of article inclusion in
the LXX preceding kyrios, is that kyrios seems to
have been the practice of Jewish scribes/translators over, I would say, at
least several generations, such that the archetype of Deuteronomy (virtually no
articles, regardless of case), would move to nominative-and-genitive-only for
much of the canon, to slightly higher rates of articles in Psalms, Proverbs and
a few other books, to zero awareness on the part of the Job translator (kyrios
is simply a title). That gives us some stability over time within that
particular stream of practice (kyrios translation) and a
familiarity among the Greek-speaking Jewish community spanning a good number of
years, also clearly signifying existence well prior the advent of
Christianity.
With that point in mind, we enter on p. 60 into the section of the paper that
is most helpful for my own work on the translation of the Tetragrammaton into
Greek (and its implications). Vasileiadis lines up an array of perspectives
on when and how the Tetragrammaton was translated,
which has really helped me to a) clarify my own view in light of the results of
the rates of articles preceding kyrios that I have provided
for the whole LXX (Genesis through Malachi) and to b) clearly distinguish that first
issue from a secondary issue of nomina sacra development. Before
entering into the overview, Vasileiadis’ introductory comment clearly indicates
his own scepticism about one significant and ongoing
stream of scholarship: that ‘recent discoveries [have] challenged previously
long-held assumptions’ (i.e., that kyrios was in the original
Greek translation of the Pentateuch). By this, he is referring to an apparently
awkward fact for those of us espousing that kyrios is original to the
Greek Bible: that there are no pre-Christian manuscripts that use kyrios for
the Tetragrammaton. I used to think about
that and look at my own data and the NT authors’ clear familiarity with kyrios
and rapprochements with the kyrios Jesus (e.g. Romans 10:9–13),
and simply say something like ‘we’ve just not been lucky’, ‘look at all the
great library burnings that took place in Caeserea and Alexandria in the wake
of the fall of the Roman empire’, and ‘look at the sheer scarcity of extant
pre-Christian Greek Jewish manuscripts anyway’ (more on this coming in a future
post).
Because
of the way in which this awkward fact seems to be framed, I thought I was being
left to defend the corner that kyrios not only predates the
Christian era, but that it has also to be original. But, as we now
review the range and progression of views, I now see that affirming that kyrios is
pre-Christian does not require me to necessarily affirm that it is
original to the first Pentateuch translation of the third century BC. So
let’s summarise (and slightly supplement) Vasileiadis’ own summary of the
research into this problem as follows (approximately in chronological order and
colour-coded to indicate whether kyrios was a) considered original
[blue], b) kyrios was considered unoriginal but the question of Christian
rendering is left open [purple], or c) kyrios was a later Christian
tradition [red]):
W. G. Waddell (1944), published Papyrus Fouad 266 à kyrios was not original, used Hebrew consonants[7]
P. Kahle (1960) and S. Jellicoe (1968) à kyrios was a Christian innovation (but overreaches
by claiming that the manuscript P458 did have the Tetragrammaton written in
before it was removed to leave blanks, rather than being initially composed
with blanks, which seems to be the majority view).
H. Stegemann (1969/1978) à The
Tetragrammaton was originally transcribed/transliterated Ιαω /i.a.o/ —kyrios was therefore not original (similar but not identical to
Kahle and Jellicoe).
G. Howard (1977/1992) à *written* kyrios was
Christian practice
P.W. Skehan (1980) and M. Hengel (1989) à progression of Ιαω, the Tetragrammaton in square
Hebrew characters, the Tetragrammaton in paleo-Hebrew characters and, finally, kyrios.
No mention here of Skehan or Hengel fully aligning with the Christian-innovation
hypothesis. This is an important contribution since it clearly points out the likelihood
that there was [older script later]
A. Pietersma (1984), the same Pietersma
who helped me come to resolution on the treatment of adonai translation
to kyrios in the LXX about a year ago à kyrios is
original.
G.D. Kilpatrick (1985), E. Tov (1998/2004/2008), J. Joosten
(2011), and A. Meyer (2014) à Pietersma was
mistaken.
J. W. Wevers (2005), a huge name in LXX
circles, and M. Rösel (2007) à kyrios is original.
Robert Hanhart (2006) à kyrios is
original to the Greek Bible
K. De Troyer (2009) à theos
first, kyrios later (not necessarily Christian)
L. Perkins (2008) à kyrios is
original (see my Perkins paper review here)
R. Furuli (2011) à kyrios ‘did
not replace the tetragrammaton before the Common Era’ (some form of Ιαω)
P. Vasileiadis (2014) à “Truly, the hard
evidence available supports this latter thesis”.
But
what is “this latter thesis”? In light of such strong disagreement about the
progressions chronologically and geographically of the Tetragrammaton, why not
accept that there is no “hard” evidence for any particular reconstruction?
That would surely not have endangered the overall usefulness of the paper. Or
perhaps by “hard”, Vasileiadis is referring to extant manuscripts from the era,
in which case he returns us to a place prior to the above discussion, which
points out other important variables (like Romans 10). Could “this latter
thesis” be that kyrios is not the first offering in the original Greek
translation of the Pentateuch as a rendering of Yahweh (that is, a simply
negative hypothesis)? Or is it more specifically that a non-translation was
used first, followed in a mixed-up fashion by translations, transliterations
and “transcription-borrowing”-s? There is certainly no consensus there, as his
own research summary points out. More clarity here would have been appreciated,
although perhaps we will see maybe a bit more clearly what Vasileiadis means by
“this latter thesis” as he begins to illustrate each of the four options faced
by Greek scribes and their commissioning religious authorities/communities.
But
first, I’m going to pitch in! I am lucky to have this extra data to hand of the
full anarthrous picture of kyrios in the LXX (seeing the extent of the
debate it really is rather startling that no-one else better qualified hasn’t
felt the necessity to research this available data as I have done):
J. Bainbridge (2019) à kyrios
cannot have been a Christian translation serving the established use we see by the NT authors from
the early 50s AD, unless these authors felt authorised for the first time to
write that which was previously only spoken anarthrously. This minimum position
is well described by various scholars, including G.D. Kilpatrick (1985), already
included in the above summary, who stated: “[the Christian tradition]
consistently presents us with χυριος. How are we to explain this? Whatever was
written in the manuscripts, we may infer that when the text was read aloud in
the synagogue or elsewhere χυριος was used.”
But
I very strongly doubt that the spoken kyrios by Hellenistic Jews was
its only pre-Christian existence. The extraordinarily anarthrous patterns of kyrios
in nominative and genitive throughout the Greek Bible (96.5% of these Yahweh
translations are anarthrous),
and the ways in which the 3.5% of arthrous occurrences are not evenly spread, all
point to kyrios either being original (most likely) or as an early
written replacement of another proper name, such as Ιαω. But please hear what Rösel
and Pietersma are saying to us, because it speaks profoundly to this question:
“Pietersma was able to show that the distinctive use and non-use of the article
serves to distinguish human kyrioi from the one divine kyrios.
His conclusion is that this refined concept cannot be attributed to a
mechanically working redaction but to the translators themselves”.
I agree, without wanting to stake my life on it. Yes, I do still think the kyrios-is-original
contingent are the most convincing, because for a recension to be so wide
as to encompass the entire Greek Jewish canon (except Job) requires improbable
historical reconstructions. The data is more easily explained by postulating
that kyrios is indeed original, thus favouring Pietersma, Wevers, Rösel
and Perkins’ additional findings.
To
summarise, I think we need to clarify the options for kyrios, and where
I stand on each.
1.
Kyrios was written in the original
Greek translation of the Pentateuch 3rd century BC. Likely, but not
staking my life on it.
2.
Kyrios
came to be
written before the advent of Christianity. Extremely likely.
3.
Kyrios
was already
used at least as a spoken surrogate for the Tetragrammaton by the time
Christianity was born: I am certain.
4.
Kyrios
was used by
the earliest Christians: nearly everyone agrees I think.
It
is my position to state in the strongest terms that we have a written Jewish
Greek practice of kyrios from which the NT authors carefully avoided
straying.
One
other point remains, perhaps to be developed in a subsequent post, that nomina
sacra is a related but distinct issue. If the well-proportioned
gaps (potentially kyrios-sized) found in Papyrus Rylands Greek 458
described by Rösel and dated to the second century BC (making it perhaps the
oldest we have) are to allow for either a Hebrew Tetragrammaton or a Greek kyrios
— and I agree Meyer’s objections to kyrios will need further
investigation — then that is most likely in a non-contracted form: KYRIOS, not
KS, thus supporting majority scholarship that nomina sacra were a
Christian innovation, even if kyrios was almost certainly not. This distinction
is then dismissive of Gertoux’s view that Vasileiadis seems to favour (and
showcased on the Wikipedia page Names and titles of God in the New Testament)
whereby the two questions are collided. Indeed, Dr. L. Hurtado has expressed to
me directly his skepticism of the idea that “YAH” (i.e. Jewish) was a nomen-sacrum
preceding the Christian nomina sacra practice (Hurtado’s own view is
that Jesus’ Greek name itself was the first to benefit from this practice).
I am
not quite sure if Gertoux is the only reason the two issues became entangled for
me, but the point is that Jewish Christians could have innovated on nomina
sacra, but that does not mean that they had to have been behind the kyrios
translation for the Greek Bible’s Tetragrammaton Problem. They most
assuredly were not.
Has that summary helped?
Hopefully still further clarity will emerge as we look at Vasileiadis’ 4 types
of Greek renderings.
APPENDIX:
“Arthricity” of Septuagint Yahweh Translations Per Greek Case
As a reference to my research
on the LXX rendering of the Tetragrammaton into Greek, I hereby include a
slightly snazzier graphical summary:
