Sacred Name Bibles - Historical Background

Historical Background

The Tetragrammation (Hebrew YHWH) occurs in the Hebrew Old Testament, and also (written in Hebrew within the Greek text) in a few of the manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It does not occur in early manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Although the Greek forms Iao and Iave do occur in magical inscriptions, generally Hellenistic Jewish texts, such as the works of Philo, Josephus and the New Testament, use the word Kyrios, "Lord", when citing verses where YHWH occurs in the Hebrew. Translators of Sacred Name Bibles argue that Sacred Name Bibles are about restoring the original Name back to the text, usually because of a desire to know Yahweh. For centuries, Hebrew-language editions of the New Testament have included in their text ha-Shem "the Name" or the Tetragrammaton rather than "Lord" or similar.

For centuries, Bible translators around the world did not transliterate or copy the tetragrammaton in their translations. For example, English Bible translators (Christian and Jewish) used "LORD" to represent it. Many authors on Bible translation have explicitly called for translating it with a vernacular word or phrase that would be locally meaningful. The Catholic Church has formally called for translating the Tetragrammaton into other languages rather than attempting to preserve the sounds of the Hebrew.

But a few other Bible translators, with varying theological motivations, have taken a different approach to translating the Tetragrammaton. In the 1800s–1900s at least three English translations contained a variation of the Name In some cases, these translations were of only a portion of the New Testament; they did not represent a stated effort to restore the Name throughout the body of the New Testament. However, in the twentieth century the first translation to employ a full transliteration of the Tetragrammaton was the Rotherham's Emphasized Bible, but his translation only does so in the Old Testament. Angelo Traina's translation, The New Testament of our Messiah and Saviour Yahshua in 1950, then The Holy Name Bible containing the Holy Name Version of the Old and New Testaments in 1963 was the first to systematically use a Hebrew form for sacred names throughout the New Testament, the first complete Sacred Name Bible. The Jerusalem Bible in 1966 and over a dozen other translations in the years since used the name "Yahweh" in the Old Testament.