Did Jewish Scribes Remove the Name of God from the Greek New Testament Manuscripts?

[Jack Ryan]

I have a question I was hoping someone here could answer. I know JW's say that Jewish scribes removed the name of God from the Greek New Testament manuscripts, but I have not seen any documented evidence from reputable scholars to substantiate that claim. In fact, today I was reading through the Watchtower edition #4 under the section titled "The Bible Survived Attempts to Alter Its Message" and I found an interesting quote there. Basically, it makes the argument that due to the strict standard involved in copying the manuscripts, the sheer volume of Greek manuscripts available, and the availability of early manuscripts as early as the second century, we can be confident that the Greek manuscripts read nearly exactly as the originals.
So, if that is true, and I agree it is, how can the claim be made on one hand that the Bible has been accurately transmitted through the centuries, and on the other hand say that Jewish scholars took the name of God out of all 27 books of the New Testament? Either one believes the integrity of the Bible has been preserved through the centuries, or one doesn't. If the name of God has truly been omitted, how can we trust many other things haven't been omitted or changed?
Below is the quote from the Watchtower article.i would be interested to see the sources from credible scholars that show evidence that the name of God has been omitted.
______
A member of the editorial team of the Dead Sea Scrolls concluded that one scroll “provides irrefutable proof that the transmission of the biblical text through a period of more than one thousand years by the hands of Jewish copyists has been extremely faithful and careful.”
The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, features a collection of papyri that represents nearly every book of the Christian Greek Scriptures, including manuscripts dating from the second century C.E.—only about 100 years after the Bible was completed. “Although the Papyri supply a wealth of new information on textual detail,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary observes, “they also demonstrate remarkable stability in the transmission history of the biblical text.”
“It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted”
THE RESULT: Rather than corrupting the Bible text, the age and multitude of Bible manuscripts have actually improved it. “No other ancient book has anything like such early and plentiful testimony to its text,” wrote Sir Frederic Kenyon about the Christian Greek Scriptures, “and no unbiased scholar would deny that the text that has come down to us is substantially sound.” And regarding the Hebrew Scriptures, scholar William Henry Green stated: *****“It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted.”*****

http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2016247

Originally asked in here

[JW Insider]

4 minutes ago, Jay Witness said:

A member of the editorial team of the Dead Sea Scrolls concluded that one scroll “provides irrefutable proof that the transmission of the biblical text through a period of more than one thousand years by the hands of Jewish copyists has been extremely faithful and careful.”

He was referring to the Isaiah Scroll, which is a very long scroll that is often quoted as being 99.9% faithful to the original. In fact, it also shows that literally hundreds of changes occurred over just 12 centuries, but that most of them appear accidental and they were of only minor importance to the overall text. What makes your question even more interesting is the fact that the name YHWH was never removed from those texts over that thousand year period. We only claim that the YHWH (or some Hebrew/Greek/hybrid form of it) was removed from Greek texts. Hebrew texts remained intact.

[HollyW]

1 hour ago, Jay Witness said:

I have a question I was hoping someone here could answer. I know JW's say that Jewish scribes removed the name of God from the Greek New Testament manuscripts, but I have not seen any documented evidence from reputable scholars to substantiate that claim. In fact, today I was reading through the Watchtower edition #4 under the section titled "The Bible Survived Attempts to Alter Its Message" and I found an interesting quote there. Basically, it makes the argument that due to the strict standard involved in copying the manuscripts, the sheer volume of Greek manuscripts available, and the availability of early manuscripts as early as the second century, we can be confident that the Greek manuscripts read nearly exactly as the originals.
So, if that is true, and I agree it is, how can the claim be made on one hand that the Bible has been accurately transmitted through the centuries, and on the other hand say that Jewish scholars took the name of God out of all 27 books of the New Testament? Either one believes the integrity of the Bible has been preserved through the centuries, or one doesn't. If the name of God has truly been omitted, how can we trust many other things haven't been omitted or changed?
Below is the quote from the Watchtower article.i would be interested to see the sources from credible scholars that show evidence that the name of God has been omitted.
______
A member of the editorial team of the Dead Sea Scrolls concluded that one scroll “provides irrefutable proof that the transmission of the biblical text through a period of more than one thousand years by the hands of Jewish copyists has been extremely faithful and careful.”
The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, features a collection of papyri that represents nearly every book of the Christian Greek Scriptures, including manuscripts dating from the second century C.E.—only about 100 years after the Bible was completed. “Although the Papyri supply a wealth of new information on textual detail,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary observes, “they also demonstrate remarkable stability in the transmission history of the biblical text.”
“It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted”
THE RESULT: Rather than corrupting the Bible text, the age and multitude of Bible manuscripts have actually improved it. “No other ancient book has anything like such early and plentiful testimony to its text,” wrote Sir Frederic Kenyon about the Christian Greek Scriptures, “and no unbiased scholar would deny that the text that has come down to us is substantially sound.” And regarding the Hebrew Scriptures, scholar William Henry Green stated: *****“It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted.”*****

http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2016247

Originally asked in here

 

The WTS has two opposing views on the Bible’s reliability.

While on the one hand they maintain that the Bible manuscripts have unquestionably come down to us exactly as God had inspired them to be written; on the other hand they say the NT manuscripts have been tampered with in “one of the saddest and most reprehensible” ways, by removing “Jehovah” from them……which might make them wonder what other parts were tampered with. 

Bible reliability:
 

 

Awake, 6/11/1972: Almighty God himself has unquestionably had a hand in seeing that his Word has been preserved so faithfully all these years. Any way one looks at it, the overall reliability of the Bible text is beyond question.

Road to Paradise tract, pg. 3: HAS NOT THE HOLY BIBLE BEEN TAMPERED WITH? Almighty God could by no means allow such a thing……... When our present-day Bible is compared with such old manuscripts, it becomes quite clear that the text we have today is the same as that which God inspired his ancient servants to write.

Insight-1 p.321: Copies—Hebrew or Greek—Soon after the originals were written, manuscript copies began to be produced. The copyists exercised great care to transmit the text accurately; the Masoretes counted even the letters that they copied. 

Insight-1 p.448: The available evidence convincingly demonstrates the remarkable accuracy and care that distinguished the copying of the Bible books, resulting in the preservation of their internal integrity. 

Insight-2 p.313: What assurance is there that the Bible has not been changed? Despite the care exercised by copyists of Bible manuscripts, a number of small scribal errors and alterations crept into the text. On the whole, these are insignificant and have no bearing on the Bible’s general integrity. They have been detected and corrected by means of careful scholastic collation or critical comparison of the many extant manuscripts and ancient versions.

NWT introduction: Since the Bible sets for the sacred will of the Sovereign Lord of the universe, it would be a great indignity, indeed an affront to his majesty and authority, to omit or hide his unique divine name.

Bible tampered with:
 

 

Close to Jehovah, p.8: God’s personal name has been removed from countless Bible translations and replaced with titles, such as “Lord” and “God”. This is one of the saddest and most reprehensible things that has been done in the name of religion.

Insight-2 p.10: Why, then, is the name absent from the extant manuscripts of the Christian Greek Scriptures or so-called New Testament? Evidently because by the time those extant copies were made (from the third century C.E. onward) the original text of the writings of the apostles and disciples had been altered. Thus later copyists undoubtedly replaced the divine name in Tetragrammaton form with Ky′ri·os and The·os′. 

Insight-1 p.324: Eventually, in most translations of the Bible the divine name was completely replaced by expressions such as “Lord” and “God.” It is noteworthy that only the most vital name of all—Jehovah—was tampered with; other Bible names were not.

Watchtower 10/1/1997 p.20: Show discernment in the selection of the Bible you use. (Proverbs 19:8) If a translation is not honest about the identity of God himself—removing his name from his inspired Word on whatever pretext—might the translators also have tampered with other parts of the Bible text?

[HollyW]

And for the NT lack of YHWH, they blame what they call "brother Christians":

[w10 7/1 p.6-7] When brother Christians made copies of the Christian Greek Scriptures, they evidently took Jehovah’s personal name out of the text and substituted Ky′ri·os, the Greek word for “Lord.” The Hebrew Scriptures did not fare any better. No longer reading God’s name aloud, brother Jewish scribes replaced the divine name in their Scriptures with ʼAdho·nai′ more than 130 times. 

[JAMMY]

@Jay Witness, I do not know if this will help you any, but I would be remiss if not sharing with you. The articles are rather long, so I am posting the links to the info.,plus what I thought interesting

 

Quote

A few English translations of the Bible do use Jehovah in the New Testament. For example, William Newcome, in what is sometimes known as "Archbishop Newcome's new translation", has the name Jehovah a few times where the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament, such as Matthew 22:24.^[20] The first complete Bible printed in America^[21] by John Eliot, although not in English, frequently uses "Jehovah" in the New Testament.^[22]

Quote

Main article: Bible translations into Hebrew

Over the centuries, various translators have inserted the Tetragrammaton into Hebrew versions of the New Testament. One of the earliest Rabbinical translations of Matthew is mixed in with the 1385 critical commentary of Shem-Tob. He includes the Tetragrammaton written out or abbreviated 19 times, while occasionally including the appellative HaShem (השם, meaning "The Name").^[18]

Quote

 

Laurence Schiffman^[7] views this as a discussion of whether to rescue section of the sifre minim (Hebrew language texts of Jewish Christians) containing the tetragrammata from a house fire. Another interpretation suggests this is a reference to Old Testament Torah and not the Gospels.^[8]

Although none of the extant Greek New Testament manuscripts contain the Tetragrammaton, scholar George Howard has suggested that the Tetragrammaton appeared in the original New Testament autographs,^[9] and that "the removal of the Tetragrammaton from the New Testament and its replacement with the surrogates κυριος and θεος blurred the original distinction between the Lord God and the Lord Christ."^[9] In the Anchor Bible Dictionary, Howard states: "There is some evidence that the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, Yahweh, appeared in some or all of the OT quotations in the NT when the NT documents were first penned."^[9]:392

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton_in_the_New_Testament#The_New_World_Translation                                     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton_in_the_New_Testament#The_New_World_Translation

 

 

 

[HollyW]

2 hours ago, JAMMY said:

@Jay Witness, I do not know if this will help you any, but I would be remiss if not sharing with you. The articles are rather long, so I am posting the links to the info.,plus what I thought interesting

 

 

George Howard's theory that YHWH was in the OT quotes that are in the NT covers just a small portion of the 237 times the NWT has "Jehovah" in its NT.  There's also the question about how it was actually read, if it did indeed appear there, since it is also stated that Jews read YHWH as "Lord".

One of the articles in your references refers to the use of "Jehovah" by the Aramaic Bible in Plain English.  I wonder if Howard would agree with it's translation of  1 Corinthians 12:3 Because I inform you of this: there is no man who speaks by The Spirit of God and says, “Yeshua is damned”, neither can a man say, “Yeshua is THE LORD JEHOVAH”, except by The Spirit of Holiness.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on it.

[JW Insider]

19 hours ago, HollyW said:

And for the NT lack of YHWH, they blame what they call "brother Christians":

One of the administrators/moderators must have used the "dirty-word-filter" and used it to change the word "a-p-o s-t-a-t-e" to "brother." The original Watchtower article calls them "APO"+"STATE" Christians, NOT "brother Christians."

Don't know if the punctuation I just used will get around the filter. 

[JW Insider]

On 7/30/2016 at 1:05 PM, HollyW said:

[w10 7/1 p.6-7] When apo-state Christians made copies of the Christian Greek Scriptures, they evidently took Jehovah’s personal name out of the text and substituted Ky′ri·os, the Greek word for “Lord.” The Hebrew Scriptures did not fare any better. No longer reading God’s name aloud, apo-state scribes replaced the divine name in their Scriptures with ʼAdho·nai′ more than 130 times.

Technically, there is still no evidence that Christian scribes took Jehovah's personal name out of the text of the Christian Greek Scriptures, so it is probably not fair to judge these persons as "apo-state" since they are technically imaginary, so far.

Also, we shouldn't say that the Hebrew Scriptures did not fare any better. They fared much better in this regard, if we are correct about what we imagine might have happened to the Greek texts. Those Hebrew texts contain the divine name nearly 7,000 times, and only in about 130 places does it appear that the divine name was replaced with "Lord." That means that between 98% and 99% of those occurrences fared perfectly well. But we believe that at least 237 out of 237 cases in the Greek texts were removed. To review, then, the score is:

• Greek texts: 0%
• Hebrew texts 98%

There is no reason, then, to say that the Hebrew Scriptures did not fare any better than the Greek. That was a mistake. Also, the Masoretes left a recognizable pattern which helps us understand the reasoning behind the removal in a lot of these cases. I'm not sure why we would praise these same scribes for their faithfulness on the one hand and then judge them as apo-states in 2010.

We should take this subject very seriously because if we have done the wrong thing here we have actually removed the word Lord 237 times from the text of the Greek Scriptures and replaced it with Jehovah. In most of these cases there is NOT a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures, and in a couple of cases where it IS a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures where the divine name was used, we do NOT use the divine name, but leave it as Lord.

 

[HollyW]

9 hours ago, JW Insider said:

One of the administrators/moderators must have used the "dirty-word-filter" and used it to change the word "a-p-o s-t-a-t-e" to "brother." The original Watchtower article calls them "APO"+"STATE" Christians, NOT "brother Christians."

Don't know if the punctuation I just used will get around the filter. 

Good to know.  Thanks!

[HollyW]

54 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

 We should take this subject very seriously because if we have done the wrong thing here we have actually removed the word Lord 237 times from the text of the Greek Scriptures and replaced it with Jehovah. In most of these cases there is NOT a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures, and in a couple of cases where it IS a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures where the divine name was used, we do NOT use the divine name, but leave it as Lord.

 

That's interesting.....which scriptures are you referring to?

[JW Insider]

16 hours ago, HollyW said:

That's interesting.....which scriptures are you referring to?

Happy to get to that soon. Let's say:

Category #1 would be cases where the NWT uses the name "Jehovah" when the NT (GS) is NOT quoting from the OT (HS). There are over 100 of these cases.

Category #2, then, would be rare cases where the NT (GS) quotes or references the OT (HS) in places where "Jehovah" was used in the OT but the NWT chooses NOT to translate the name "Jehovah."

That means I left out a couple of important categories:They might seem minor at first but one of them, we'll call it "Category #3" turns out to be important in the way they show the reliance on the LXX in the NT (GS) instead of the Hebrew in quotes of the OT (HS).

Category #3, then, contains the few instances where the Hebrew was known to contain the Divine Name but the LXX did not replace it with the usual "kyrios" (Lord) but instead replaced it with "God."

Category #4 could be the many cases where the "J" texts use the name Jehovah, but the NWT does NOT choose to translate "Jehovah" in those locations.

What would we expect to happen in the case of a Category #3? The NWT is based on the "Masoretic" texts (MT) from more than 1,000 years after the time of Jesus. That's because we have very few full texts of Hebrew Bible books (in Hebrew) from any earlier. (The Dead Sea Scrolls [DSS] weren't published in time to affect the NWT, but full books are rarely covered.) In cases where the MT and other texts including available DSS use the Divine Name, the LXX usually replaces with the word "Lord." if the NT (GS) quotes from one of those places, would we expect the MT and/or DSS or would be expect the LXX version of the OT verse?

[HollyW]

2 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Happy to get to that soon. Let's say:

Category #1 would be cases where the NWT uses the name "Jehovah" when the NT (GS) is NOT quoting from the OT (HS). There are over 100 of these cases.

Category #2, then, would be rare cases where the NT (GS) quotes or references the OT (HS) in places where "Jehovah" was used in the OT but the NWT chooses NOT to translate the name "Jehovah."

That means I left out a couple of important categories:They might seem minor at first but one of them, we'll call it "Category #3" turns out to be important in the way they show the reliance on the LXX in the NT (GS) instead of the Hebrew in quotes of the OT (HS).

Category #3, then, contains the few instances where the Hebrew was known to contain the Divine Name but the LXX did not replace it with the usual "kyrios" (Lord) but instead replaced it with "God."

Category #4 could be the many cases where the "J" texts use the name Jehovah, but the NWT does NOT choose to translate "Jehovah" in those locations.

What would we expect to happen in the case of a Category #3? The NWT is based on the "Masoretic" texts (MT) from more than 1,000 years after the time of Jesus. That's because we have very few full texts of Hebrew Bible books (in Hebrew) from any earlier. (The Dead Sea Scrolls [DSS] weren't published in time to affect the NWT, but full books are rarely covered.) In cases where the MT and other texts including available DSS use the Divine Name, the LXX usually replaces with the word "Lord." if the NT (GS) quotes from one of those places, would we expect the MT and/or DSS or would be expect the LXX version of the OT verse?

If the NWT is using the Hebrew OT as its guide for translating the Greek "kyrios" as "Jehovah", it would follow that regardless of what the LXX has, any Category #3 verses would rely on the OT and use "Jehovah".  Are Romans 14:11 and Philippians 2:9-11 instances of this?

Regarding the J docs of Category #4, the NWT translation committee appears to have not followed them exactly because there are a number of instances in them when "Jehovah" is used but the NWT does not.  1 Cor. 12:3 and 2 Timothy 1:18 are some examples of this.