the name Jehovah in the New Testament

by jahrule 29 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • jahrule
    jahrule

    I am not writing this to argue. I agree that God is not a trinity, there is no immortal soul, God's name is jehovah, etc. But I see a fundamental error in your doctrine you need to address.

    Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the NT is very reliable in detail. There are 5,300 extant Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin vulgates, and 9,300 other versions. Thus, there are about 24,000 anuscripts of the NT in existence, none of which contain the name Jehovah. Yet, how could it have been removed from so many manuscripts?

    How did a group of men manage to remove Jehovah's name from all of the availablemanuscripts of the original Greek new testament? To do this they would have had to seize and change every single copy that was floating around throughout all of the known world, since the Watchtower admits that there is not a single copy of the Greek manuscripts that contain Jehovah's full name. These men would have had to go from door to door and confiscate every single copy of every single new testament book. How is it that Jehovah God faithfully protected his Old Testament word throughout thousands of years when men tried to destroy it, yet was powerless to protect the newtestament manuscripts from corruption for even a few hundred years? And if Jehovah was powerless to protect even his name, what else did these unscrupulous men remove? Once you admit that it is possible to tamper with all of the available manuscripts, the reliability of the new testament is shattered, is it not? In contrast, the faithfulness of Jehovah God to protect all of his sovereign word is evident. The faithfulness of the original Greek text can be verified by comparing copies produced at different times from different original copies and made by different copyists. In addition Jehovah God caused so many copies of his word to remain that any human error incorporated into the text is evident by comparing the copies.

    Were there no true Christians throughout history making an effort to preserve God's name? This raises the problem of the church fathers. Would not a heresy as big as the romoval of God's name be mentioned in the writings of the early church? Yet, Iraneus writing 50 years after the death of John quotes Scriptures which use Jehovah in the NWT, but he says "Lord" without qualification. Between 75 and 100 CE, Clement writes to the Corinthians using "Lord" instead of Jehovah. In fact, EVERY SINGLE early Christian writing uses "lord" in place of Jehovah when quoting the Gospels, and these writings date from just after the apostles in the very first to early second centuries! Isn't that LONG BEFORE the superstition towards the name developed? I thought that JWs taught that the name was only removed in the THIRD century, was I wrong?

    I guess the crust of my question is this: do we posess faithful copies of the NT? All Scripture is Inspired of God and Beneficial, WTB&TS 1990, p.319 quotes Sir Frederick Kenyon, saying, "The interval between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligeble, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed." IS that true? If so, doesn't it show that the original used the word lord and not YHWH?

    If the Kingdom Interliner is trustworthy, I mean, just look at how old those manuscripts are! 200 CE, 125 CE, and so on, these dates alone would push the apostasy back into the time of the apostles!

    The question still remains, if Jehovah God is Sovereign over his inspired word and faithfully protected its transmission to us today, why doesn't the Greek manuscripts contain God's name?

  • AllTimeJeff
    AllTimeJeff
    The question still remains, if Jehovah God is Sovereign over his inspired word and faithfully protected its transmission to us today, why doesn't the Greek manuscripts contain God's name?

    It seems if you aren't a JW, you are a JW sympathizer. No problem per se with that.

    Your question is a good one. The answer is that it isn't there, and was never there. It is my belief too that the Governing Body lies and misrepresents this fact in defense of their dogma.

    This isn't a minor flaw or weakness. It is real, and it is bad.

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento

    Well, the first issue is that Jehovah is NOT God's name but one possible, though not likely, version of Gods personal name.

    Second,

    There is no possible reason for the Wt to add the term in the NT if it was not there from the very beginning and the reason they they do it, because according to them it was REMOVED by the "apostate" scribes, pretty much dictates that NONE of the NT can be viewed as reliable.

    So I ask the WT this:

    WHich one is it?

    Was YHWH in the NT and then removed from the many 10's of 1000's of recorded documents, thus making all the NT questionable and unreibale?

    Or did the WT insert the term for their own dctrinal reasons, overriding the original writers of the NT ?

  • yknot
    yknot

    What 'bible scriptures' were in circulation when 1 Tim 3:16 was written?

    The NWT is biased as is other translations.......plain and simple

    As for why...... I can think of two schools of thought.... one is atheist and says this is just a remaining superstition from earlier humans, the second is to say that the Father appointed his Son as our shepherd..... Jehovah wanted to be addressed as 'sky daddy, heavenly father, big poppa' instead of YHWH because he was bringing himself closer to everyone not just as some Israelite god named YHWH but as the father of all......but that is just my very amateur POV

  • yknot
    yknot

    oops I forgot to say.....

    To our little group!

    I hope to see you on other threads!

    What has brought here, ......you JW/WTS connection?

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento

    Yknot:

    What 'bible scriptures' were in circulation when 1 Tim 3:16 was written?

    The NWT is biased as is other translations.......plain and simple

    As for why...... I can think of two schools of thought.... one is atheist and says this is just a remaining superstition from earlier humans, the second is to say that the Father appointed his Son as our shepherd..... Jehovah wanted to be addressed as 'sky daddy, heavenly father, big poppa' instead of YHWH because he was bringing himself closer to everyone not just as some Israelite god named YHWH but as the father of all......but that is just my very amateur POV

    You, sir, have bitch slapped the correct !

  • jahrule
    jahrule

    are there any jehovah's witnesses on this site who can asnwer my question? if not, where will i find them?

  • Mad Sweeney
    Mad Sweeney

    Or perhaps the God of the New Testament isn't the same god the Jews worshipped? That Jesus didn't just fulfill the Mosaic Law, he completely overturned it and its god. If this is the case, replacing the NT God with the name of the god of the Jews is an even greater blasphemy.

    There are those who believe this and they make a fairly compelling case for it.

    Me, I don't currently believe (or disbelieve) anything. My beliefs are infinite possibilities at present. (well, I'm sure I disbelieve some things but you get the point)

  • glenster
    glenster


    "Jehovah"s are in the NWT to get rid of "Lord"s which can be taken as refer-
    ring to Jesus, notably cases indicating Jesus was prayed to. 1st century Jews
    indicated belief in one God with prayer and worship for Him alone. The rest of
    the JWs leaders' case is just meant to rationalize the replacement.
    http://gtw6437.tripod.com/id18.html

    It's weird trying to imagine the original believers rewriting all those
    writings, written in various places over decades and spreading to various other
    areas, to replace "YHWH"s with "Lord"s. You'd have to imagine it being done so
    thoroughly, with such agreement, that there's no record of it even among the
    volumes of teachings about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, including disputes,
    that arose. Even the Arians aren't known to refer back to there having been
    "YHWH"s replaced with "Lord"s to support their case.

    The JWs leaders aren't even good liars--a good liar would at least try to be
    consistent to be credible.

    Contradiction 1:

    - The JWs leaders' case for being a still-growing 144,000 has it that the
    earliest Christians were like them about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (but
    strangely non-committal) and disappeared quickly (so quickly that history
    doesn't record them).
    - Yet the "Should You Believe in the Trinity?" tract mischaracterizes the
    1st several centuries of Ante-Nicene Fathers as JWs leaders types on the issue
    of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
    http://gtw6437.tripod.com/id23.html

    Contradiction 2:

    If we pick the latter stance, the mischacterization of the Ante-Nicene Fathers
    as JWs leaders' types on the issue of Father, Son, and Holy Sprit, that would
    mean JWs leaders' types removed a bunch of "Jehovah"s from the NT and replaced
    them with "Lord"s so readers would think they were supposed to pray to Jesus--
    the mainstream view of Jesus--in conflict with their own view.

    Contradiction 3

    Much of the rest of the JWs leaders' case for NT "Jehovah"s is that they go
    with the JWs leaders' stance that the original Christians had the JWs leaders'
    stance about scriptures regarding the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which shows
    the JWs leaders to misrepresent and contradict the actual comparison with the
    basic mainstream view and contradict what related history actually is.

    To see the difference between the actual mainstream view of the issue and
    related history, and the way the JWs leaders misrepresent them, see pp.6b-10 at
    the next link.
    http://glenster1.webs.com/gtjbrooklyn6b.htm

  • carla
    carla

    Your looking for active jw's to debate? If you have not previously debated with jw's then you should know that they tend to run away when they can't answer a question or if you have confused them with actual facts.

    If you still wish to debate docrtines and didn't realize this board doesn't have very many jw sympathizers you may want to try at CARM or Beliefnet on the jw discussion boards.

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