Larry Perkins: paper review

I am currently researching the Divine Name in the Greek Old Testament, very curious to understand how we ended up with "the LORD", and the implications that confusing title and name might have in our theology. Dr. Larry Perkins is a very well-read Christian scholar, President of North-West Baptist Seminary, Canada, and provides a valuable contribution to the debate around the Greek Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament. He specialises in the Old Testament book Exodus, and if you are interested in seeing the original I am responding to in this post, you can consult it for yourself here.

The conclusions to his paper are threefold.

Firstly, he affirms and demonstrates that the very common translation for YHWH is kyrios, without the definite article (absence of "the"), and that this strongly implies a consistent grammatical rendering for a name. Although only looking in detail in Exodus, there are still hundreds of samples to work with, and Perkins shows that of the exceptions to the rule (i.e. those times where Kyrios is articulated), it is well within the norms, at approximately 6%. Other names like "Israel", "Moses" etc have similar percentages of articulated translations in the Greek.

Secondly, it is therefore for Greek reasons, not for Hebrew reasons, that the articulation occurs, implying even more consistent intention - I would say anything from 95% to 100% of Kyrios occurrences with reference to YHWH - that Kyrios is a translation of the divine Name, and not a (or the) divine Title when translating Yahweh (there are a few instances - not many - of Adonai in the Pentateuch, that need separate consideration).

Thirdly, Perkins is confident that the original translator of the LXX applied "Kyrios", anarthrously of course. On this third point, however, there seems to be an underlying assumption in Perkins (and possibly some of the other work done in this area - I need to re-check Martin Rosel's benchmark piece) that overstates the translator/copyist distinction. Like Rosel, he covers some of the complicated historical issues. The most critical of these is a lack of explicit textual support for a pre-Christian rendering of Kyrios in the Old Testament, although various explanations can be provided for this, which I may summarise in another post. My view on this is that without further evidence, we need to adopt a more fait accompli approach to this complex translation process, whereby Kyrios, without the article, emerges as a suitable translation for the divine Name. The meaty question remains: why in English and other modern languages is the carefully preserved name converted back to a title? It's an historical question that will take us back at least to the KJV.

FYI: Perkins includes an interesting footnote on the last page of his paper. It reads: "The reasons why the Greek translators of the Hebrew text chose kyrios as the rendering of the divine name remain somewhat unclear. It is quite possible that the use of this term within Egyptian documents to describe the Pharaoh and divine beings gave its use in the Jewish Alexandrian community for YHWH."

Praying in the Name

I have done quite a lot of thinking about the idea of Jesus' name - but today I put it into practice with what appeared spectacular results during a flight I took today. Theology in practice - it doesn't prove anything, but as a believer, I am very encouraged with this perspective.

I am no longer a huge fan of flying. Well, that's not quite accurate I suppose. I am a big fan of getting somewhere quicker. What I do not enjoy is turbulence, after a really horrid experience about a year ago, where I thought I might actually die (by the way, thinking about death can be a good practice - the generations of Jewish and Christian belief did not hide this reality of human life, see here also for an interesting cultural slant from Bhutan, some of the happiest people on Earth apparently).

Studying the Bible with more intensity over the last two years has lead me to detect some differences between modern and ancient terminology in Christianity. One of those words is "name".

The ancient world thought more holistically than we do. They were still keen to make some important distinctions to avoid misinterpretation (written almost 2000 years ago, the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:27 For ‘God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’ But when it says, ‘All things are put in subjection’, it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. I believe this is such a key verse because it shows how important distinctions always have been. So what of being holistic? Being holistic means keeping the rest of the context in perspective. You don't look at the atoms of a caterpillar's leg and forget that it's a caterpillar's leg. You don't look at the belief apparatus of a specific aboriginal tribesman concerning the afterlife and disregard the wider beliefs held by his people group at this time.

In philosophy we want to be black and white. But particularly in relation to ancient ways of thinking and in many non-western cultures today, that does not work so well. So we have to speak of "senses" when we do detailed word analysis in order to avoid contradiction by sane authors. The example I took in my paper Trinitarian Interpretations was from John 7-8. At one point, John has Jesus saying to his listeners that they do know him and where he is from and then a few verses later he is saying that they **don't** know Jesus (compare 7:28 and 8:19).

What am I trying to say? Philosophy wants to separate what is essential to something and what is not. It is frustrating to have to confess that, while distinctions remain important and necessary as we have seen, the essential and non-essential properties debate does not seem to work out neatly in theology with relation to "Jesus" and "name".

Have you ever noticed how there is not really a word in the Bible for "title"? There is a reason for that. A title can be something utterly exterior or peripheral to one's self-understanding in the West. It can be a 9-to-5 job, one even that you don't enjoy very much, like "Ground-Floor Office-cleaner". It does not matter at all if this role is fulfilled by Tom, Dick or Harry.

The "who" performing the function of ancient and non-Western royal households, however, is hugely significant. King David had a function to govern and lead the people of Judah, then Israel. He did not start this at 9am and finish at 5pm. He became king at a certain age, like all the kings after him, and reigned to his death. His function and his identity completely converge for most of his life.

Hang on - when is he going to talk about Jesus' name and turbulence in flights? Very nearly there! So when we talk about Jesus' name, I am now almost certain, we need to keep not one, but *two* senses in view simultaneously. The first sense is the J-E-S-U-S sense, that is the Tom, Dick or Harry sense. That is not to say that Tom, Dick or Harry don't have meaning, but the names primarily serve to identify them as distinct persons throughout their lives. Jesus was to receive the name J-E-S-U-S. But at some point - and that point can be debated as to precisely when - he was given the name that is the Father's name, which I think might be closest to T-H-E  L-O-R-D (or even anarthrously, "L-O-R-D"). Both of these were his "names", received at various times and could thus be combined for a holistic first-century person into "The Lord Jesus". It is a bit like saying "King David". So when we hear of the cosmic extent of Jesus' authority now that he is seated at the right hand of God, then we can see that he has in first-century eyes assumed a most-unique and Divine position of rule.

So sat in my plane 10 minutes after a smooth take-off, I felt some turbulence kick in. Focussing on this idea, contained perfectly in Philippians 2:9, John 11:7 and Hebrews 1:5 (and elsewhere):

• Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.
• Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me.

• So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.

I prayed that this turbulence would stop in the name of Jesus. This was not a prayer in the name of just J-E-S-U-S, but in the name of THE LORD JESUS.  And the turbulence stopped, almost immediately. As I prayed to God, I was acutely aware thanks to His Word, that the "name" of Jesus was not some magical formula, but the attribution and inheritance of supreme power from the Father entrusted to the Son, available to us, once again revealing the Father through the Son.

I felt very grateful for this, and the flight calmly continued almost all the way. On a second occasion shortly before landing, the effects of the prayer were less immediate. I chose to interpret this as a need to simply trust in God and love him, which also helped dissipate the fear.

I don't know if it will materialise, but I am considering doing a book-by-book study of New Testament understanding of "the name" to better understand its usage.

Son of God, Messiah, Jewish Religious Establishment's expectation on national salvation

Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’

62‘I am,’ said Jesus. 

This quote is from Mark chapter 14. The key point of this quote for me, as with my other post about Mark 12's present tense descriptions of the Messiah, is that we are able to access a 1st century jewish worldview here, because we can consider that we are accessing (for the moment, see the obvious assumption below) what a Jewish LEADER is thinking, teaching and upholding at the time of Jesus' ministry. That is a pretty cool peace of research if we can claim it.

For this high priest, we could say that he is aiming for total unambiguity here. Because he does not want any confusion to surround the "blasphemous" claims of Jesus, he makes it totally plain to us that for Jews at this time, there is a truly great Messiah to be expected, and who is also defined as the Son of God. The priest takes his vocation very seriously here of course and refers, like Matthew frequently does, to a synonym for God, "Blessed One". So for the Jewish establishment, represented here by the high priest, we can see that

THE MESSIAH = THE SON OF GOD

The assumption we must recognise of course is that the report we are reading through a follower of Jesus, Mark, has accurately reported the words of the high priest. I am very happy with this assumption, especially as we generally see a less stylised and earlier account through this gospel.

I would like to think that while the Jewish establishment were theologically favourable toward resurrection, that we do not have as much solid evidence that they were expecting a triune God to show up in his second hypostasis taking on flesh in Jesus in a hypostatic union (!). For the Jewish establishment, what is blasphemous here IS NOT that God would have a son, that was a given, but the issue of blasphemy here is that JESUS WOULD CLAIM HE WAS GOD'S ANOINTED ONE WHEN HE WAS NOT (or so it was presumed). It is difficult for us to imagine what is going through the High Priest's mind at this stage. The outrage. The fury. This man is trying to shake up and down his life, responsibilities, doctrine...

We have not even looked at the centurion's reaction as Jesus "breathed his last", but the implications of this mini-study on Jewish establishment perception on Messiahship and son of God, while less far-reaching perhaps on the unitarian vs trinitarian debate, can perhaps help us (certainly me) in dialogue with other faiths that do consider being "son of God" to be a blasphemous statement on totally different premises.