The Divine Name

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The divine name certainly falls within the dictionary, lexical and semantic range of Lord/Kurios, and that is why many other versions/translations have seen fit to also include the name in their New Testaments.

In the end, our oldest and most comprehensive lexicon of the New Testament’s use of Kurios is the Septuagint itself. It has been suggested that the majority of NT quotations were taken from the Septuagint. Therefore, if we follow this through to the logical conclusion, based on the following facts, we will see that the NT's use of Kurios means YHWH or Jehovah. Even if we discard the fact that our earliest Septuagint manuscripts used the Tetragrammaton, we know that the Septuagint was translated from the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures used the divine name. We have evidence of this in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text. Therefore, at some point the translators of the Septuagint either translated the Tetragrammaton as Kurios or scribes replaced the name at a later date. Now, using our current manuscript copies of the New Testament that use only Kurios, and because the quotations and other references to the God of the Hebrew Scriptures in the NT are from the Septuagint, the intended meaning behind the word Kurios would be the divine name. The NWT is merely using a different, valid lexical English word for Kurios to denote the divine name in the New Testament quotations and elsewhere when God is intended.

Double Standards in Translation

Critics like to point out that because the NWT translators used the term Jehovah, they did not faithfully follow the Greek New Testament manuscripts in connection with the word Kurios 237 times. These critics are inflexible when it comes to translating the Greek word Kurios...

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...ios based on the lexicons listed above and many others.

4) The external evidence and history of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures of the OT point heavily to original NT manuscripts using the Tetragrammaton.

The Book of Revelation

The book of Revelation gives us our greatest insight to the use of God's name in the New Testament. The imagery of the book of Revelation is very similar to the prophetic books of the Old Testament where the name was used frequently. But even more, the book of Revelation can be used to disprove most theories as to why the divine name was not used in the NT. The book uses many references to God's name. These are not just some kind of reference to God's character, since we are told this name is written on something on a number of occasions. You can not write someone's character on a forehead. These must be references to a literal name.

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