Posted by J.H. [JH] on March 29, 1999 at 13:04:06 {HR5JhS9/hcbuOm9CIjLYMWsHSG.vl05do}:
In Reply to: Divine Name in New Testament posted by Rick on March 29, 1999 at 12:00:03:
Rick,
I have a slight problem understanding how it suddenly adds credibility to a set of arguments when a True Believer posts them to a mailing lists where it is likely to be read by real experts. The "arguments" are exactly the same as the WTS has asserted for a long time.
The whole argument from Howard, which is not at all accepted by his peers, is reduced to this sentence:
"Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the Early church, it is reasonable to believe that the NT writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text"
This is also dangerously close to a known and common fallacy in argumentation, namely arguments "from authority". Howard may be an expert in Greek and theology. But the question about whether the Hebrew (or Arameic) form of the tetragrammon existed in the earliest Greek mss of the New Testament is one that belongs to the realm of historians. Linguists are not necessarily better at evaluating historical evidence than plumbers.
The historical fact is that there exist not a single Greek mss that contains the tetragrammon. No evidence suggests it ever existed. We have thoussands of such mss, some of which go all the way back to some few decades after the orginals were written. This fact can't be contested. And this fact alone pushes the whole theory from the realm of plausible historical realities into the shadow world of fantasies and conspiracy theories.
There is no sane principle of historical research that would even allow the theory to be merited serious consideration, since the real world screams against it with a 100% absense of any actual evidence.