Posted by doug [doug] on March 29, 1999 at 20:23:21 {7nb3mCfGvUpx4jlZiJt2JgGWpI0TP.}:
In Reply to: **Divine Name in New Testament posted by Rick on March 29, 1999 at 18:39:44:
Dear Rick,
Be not misled. Anyone can predict that mysterious things may emerge. But what mysterious things? Perhaps the mysterious thing that will emerge is proof positive that the divine name is NOT in any Qumran ms. except for that one fragment.
The fact is that all the Dead Sea Scrolls that have been found have been published. What we know is what we know--not what we don't know. Perhaps, some day, the third volume of Luke-Acts will be found, if there was one. But it hasn't been found, so we can't argue in a superior tone about what's in the volume that would presumably have described the deaths of Paul and Peter. Nor can we translate the Bible on the basis of our speculations. "Anyone who adds to the words of this book..." You know the rest of that message.
About the analogy between (1) murder weapon and ms. fragment, and (2) murder and divine name as (supposedly) used in the OT mss. read by the NT writers: when you come up with that pair of analogies, you're in the position of the person who has found a gun but still has no evidence whatever that there was a murder committed--yet someone on the Discovery channel predicts that eventually we may find that there was a murder, or ... something.
What we know, for sure, is that Frederick Franz looked at transcripts of NT mss. that did NOT contain the divine name, and he nevertheless put the divine name into his translation.
Be not misled, my friend, by every wind of doctrine.
doug