SACRED NAMES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

 

Philip Wesley Comfort, in his book A Commentary on the Manuscripts and Text of the New Testament introduces the reader to the interesting phenomena of sacred names (nomina sacra) in the NT and the way they were originally written in Greek manuscripts. Below is a brief summary of that discussion. It is well known that Old Testament scribes wrote the personal name of God, Yahweh, in a special manner so that it would not be taken in vain when someone was reading it out loud. It was written as YHWH in all caps.

It is well known that Old Testament scribes wrote the personal name of God, Yahweh, in a special manner so that it would not be taken in vain when someone was reading it out loud. It was written as YHWH in all caps.

Taking that practice as an example, Christian scribes soon began to adopting it when copying the NT. Comfort notes a general trend over time in which Kurios (Lord) and Iesous (Jesus) were the first words to be written in an abbreviated form, soon followed by Christos (Christ), theos (God), and pneuma (Spirit). Nomina sacra for these were common in manuscripts by the beginning of the second century AD.

By that time, also dignified in the same manner were the Greek words for “cross” and “crucify.” During the next century, a few individual scribes experimented with showing the same sort of honor to words such as man (in 'Son of man'), Father, Son, David (in 'Son of David'), Jerusalem, Israel, and heaven.

However, an opposite trend set in with the arrival of the 4^th century by which the nomina sacra were confined to the earlier words: Lord, Jesus, Christ, God, Christian and Spirit.

At this time I should describe the actual method of denoting such sacred names in Greek manuscripts.

The most obvious tip-off is the fact that the scribes placed an an overbar (sort of like the opposite of an underline) for each occurrence. Keep in mind that merely writing these words in all capitals would have done little to set them apart from most early manuscripts since these were already written in all capitals. Thus, the next thing scribes did was to abbreviate the words, such as was done with “Yahweh” in the OT. But, as Comfort points out, “there was no official rule book as to the exact form in which the nomina sacra were to be written,” giving rise to several variations.

For example, some abbreviated “Christ” (XPICTOC) using the first and last letters XC; a very few wrote it with the first two letters XP; and others utilized XPC as a sort of combination form. And the same lack of consistency occurs for the abbreviations of the other sacred names.

Advantages of the Nomina Sacra

As with YHWH in the Old Testament, “One of the primary results of making a name a nomen sacrum was that it desecularized the term; it uplifted the term to sacred status. For example, scribes could differentiate between 'the Lord' and 'lord'/'sir'/'master'...and they could distinguish between 'Spirit' (the divine spirit) and 'spirit' (the human spirit)...The term pneuma in ordinary secular Greek meant 'wind,' 'breath,' or 'spirit.' Writing it as a nomen sacrum signals that this is the divine Spirit.” (Comfort)

He also notes, “The special written forms of the nomina sacra would not be enigmatic to Christian readers; they could easily decipher them. In fact, these forms would heighten their importance in the text and prompt the readers (lectors) to give them special attention when reading that text out loud to the congregation.”

Disadvantages of the Nomina Sacra

These are few and far between and are outweighed in importance by the advantages of using this method of writing. One notable example is found in I Timothy 3:16 which contains the following uncertainty, reading either:

    “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion: God was manifested in the flesh...” or

    “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion who was manifested in the flesh...”

There is not a great deal of difference in meaning between the two, but one would like to pin down the precise wording of the original, which was either “who” (os) or God (theos), commonly abbreviated as a sacred name by using only the first letter (theta, which looks like an “o” with a line through it) and last letter, sigma, with a line over both (a superbar). It is easy to see how either word could be accidentally read as the other when a scribe was copying an earlier manuscript.

Metzger, writing for the translation committee of the RSV, opts for os as the original wording since almost all the earliest manuscripts read that way. As to theos instead, he says, “The reading theos arose either (a) accidentally...or (b) deliberately, either to supply a substantive for the following six verbs, or, with less probability to provide greater dogmatic precision.”

Comfort arrives at the same conclusion, citing the wording in the earliest manuscripts: “The documentation supporting 'who' (or 'he who') is very strong; many MSS were corrected to read 'God' – clearly the result of scribal emendation. Obviously, the pronoun 'who' refers to Jesus Christ, God incarnate.”