I wonder why Jesus always called him the Father
Some very old fragments of the
Septuagint Version that actually existed in Jesus’ day have survived down to our day, and it is noteworthy that the personal name of God appeared in them. The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Volume 2, page 512) says: “Recent textual discoveries cast doubt on the idea that the compilers of the LXX [Septuagint] translated the tetragrammaton
YHWH by
kyrios. The oldest LXX MSS (fragments) now available to us have the tetragrammaton written in Hebrew characters in the Greek text. This custom was retained by later Jewish translators of the Old Testament in the first centuries A.D.” Therefore, whether Jesus and his disciples read the Scriptures in Hebrew or Greek, they would come across the divine name, YHWH.
So, Professor George Howard, of the University of Georgia, U.S.A., made this comment: “When the Septuagint which the New Testament church used and quoted contained the Hebrew form of the divine name, the New Testament writers no doubt included the Tetragrammaton in their quotations.” (Biblical Archaeology Review, March 978, page 4) What authority would they have had to do otherwise?
God’s name remained in Greek translations of the “Old Testament” for a while longer. In the first half of the second century C.E., the Jewish proselyte Aquila made a new translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and in this he represented God’s name by the Tetragrammaton in ancient Hebrew characters. In the third century, Origen wrote: “And in the most accurate manuscripts THE NAME occurs in Hebrew characters, yet not in today’s Hebrew [characters], but in the most ancient ones.”
Even in the fourth century, Jerome writes in his prologue to the books of Samuel and Kings: “And we find the name of God, the Tetragrammaton [יהוה], in certain Greek volumes even to this day expressed in ancient letters.”
The apostasy foretold by Jesus had taken shape, and the name, although appearing in manuscripts, was used less and less. (Matthew 13:24-30; Acts 20:29, 30) Eventually, many readers did not even recognize what it was and Jerome reports that in his time “certain ignorant ones, because of the similarity of the characters, when they would find [the Tetragrammaton] in Greek books, were accustomed to read ΠΙΠΙ.”
In later copies of the
Septuagint, God’s name was removed and words like “God” (
Theos) and “Lord” (
Kyrios) were substituted. We know that this happened because we have early fragments of the
Septuagint where God’s name was included and later copies of those same parts of the
Septuagint where God’s name has been removed.
The same thing occurred in the “New Testament,” or Christian Greek Scriptures. Professor George Howard goes on to say: “When the Hebrew form for the divine name was eliminated in favor of Greek substitutes in the Septuagint, it was eliminated also from the New Testament quotations of the Septuagint. Before long the divine name was lost to the Gentile church except insofar as it was reflected in the contracted surrogates or remembered by scholars.”
So, while Jews refused to pronounce God’s name, because some lame reason such as a superstitious fear, the apostate Christian church managed to remove it completely from Greek language manuscripts of both parts of the Bible, as well as from other language versions.
All this information proves that while Jesus was on earth he pronounced the named the four Hebrew consonants YHWH represented. We know this because in Jesus day at Luke 4:17-19 Jesus was handed the scroll of Isaiah where the four Hebrew consonants YHWH are there in two places, Jesus would have pronounced the the name the four Hebrew consonants represented.
