In the period that Jesus lived, there were a variety of conventions used by scribes to deal with the divine name. Second of all, their claim is only a half-truth. It is Ironic that Jehovah’s Witnesses will use Old Testament manuscripts from 1,500 years after the time of Moses to prove the name YHWH is original to the Torah while trying to claim that manuscripts less than 200 years after the time of Jesus can’t be trusted. A wide spectrum of manuscript evidence shows that to be the case, while also showing with equal force that the name YHWH wasn’t in the New Testament. Response: The Tetragrammaton and Scribal Practiceįirst of all, obviously the Tetragrammaton is in the Old Testament. Be that as it may, what they present here as evidence is that, in the time period of Jesus, Old Testament manuscripts in both Hebrew and Greek contained the Divine Name. If scribes could do this to the Old Testament, then maybe they also did it to the New Testament. The claim they are trying to make is that the Septuagint exclusively used YHWH in Jesus’ day, and then scribes changed it. This second point is particularly important to their case because the vast majority of manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint use the word “Lord” rather than the Tetragrammaton. So in Jesus’ day, copies of the Scriptures in Greek did contain the divine name.” 2 ibid Those fragments contain the personal name of God, written in Hebrew characters. Then, in the mid-20th century, some very old fragments of the Greek Septuagint version that existed in Jesus’ day were brought to the attention of scholars. For centuries, scholars thought that the Tetragrammaton was absent from manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. “In the days of Jesus and his apostles, the Tetragrammaton also appeared in Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures. “Copies of the Hebrew Scriptures used in the days of Jesus and his apostles contained the Tetragrammaton throughout the text.” 1 New World Translation: 2013 revision, Appendix A5 They attempt to buttress this claim by pointing to Old Testament manuscripts, first explaining: They teach that early scribes changed the text to remove God’s name and replace it with the word “Lord.” They believe this in spite of the strong, unanimous, early manuscript evidence to the contrary. The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the original copies of the New Testament books used the “Tetragrammaton,” (YHWH, the Hebrew word for the Divine Name) which they translate Jehovah.

Original paleo hebrew manuscripts