aqwsed : And importantly, the Talmudic text does not refer to "the divine name" but to "names of God" (plural), which does not necessarily refer to the Tetragrammaton.
Earlier you quoted Karl Georg Kuhn as arguing that
- sifrei minim should be understood not as gospels but as Old Testament texts belonging to heterodox Jewish groups such as those at Qumran as well as to Jewish Christians; and gilyonim should be understood not as gospels but as Marginalia cut off from Biblical texts;
Are you seriously suggesting that these did not contain the tetragrammaton, or that "names of God" in these texts do not include THE name of God? Whether or not they pronounced it, we are talking about what was written, but there is evidence that the divine name was used by
Jews in and around the first century as discussed in this thread earlier.
aqwsed : You don't get my argument: the very fact that SO MANY readings of the text have survived, just not [those containing God's name], proves [they didn't exist].
As far as we know, NO readings of the text have survived from the time the church was primarily Jewish. Put aside your fixation of a conspiracy and consider the first audience of the gospels, particularly Matthew, and letters like Hebrews and Jude. Let us just suppose that these writers used a form of God's name when quoting or alluding to the OT. If we look at copies of the LXX from that time, they had the tetragrammaton although they were written in Greek. Other copies had the Greek form of the name, IAW. Let us suppose that the writers quoting or alluding to the OT wrote down what they read. Of course, copies of these are made and circulated. After the destruction of the temple, the nature of the church changes from a predominantly Jewish church to a predominantly Gentile one. Now that the copyists are gentiles, they do not understand what the tetragrammaton is and so do the obvious thing and replace it with a word they know fits the context, usually Lord or God. Maybe this happened, maybe it didn't. But it is not surprising that among the texts copied more than a hundred years later the use of the tetragrammaton had died out. After all, that is exactly what happened with the LXX texts of the OT. And it did not require a conspiracy or a central church authority, it only required the change of the church from Jewish to Gentile.