Watauga County, NC

God has a Name (it is The Name), but no one knows how to pronounce it. It was revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, most notably to Moses at the burning bush as YHWH, though it appeared before that.

Ancient Hebrew only recorded the consonant sounds, not the vowels, so one would have had to hear the word to learn how to pronounce it. If we used that system today, America would be spelled MRC, and we would know how to pronounce it by hearing the word read by others. YHWH is called by scholars the Tetragrammaton (Greek for “four letters”) and by Jews HaShem, which is Hebrew for “The Name.”

Because religious Jews believe deeply that God’s Name is holy, they did not (and still do not) pronounce it orally. Instead, when HaShem came up in public Scripture reading, they would substitute the letters YHWH by saying Adonai, another Hebrew word that means Lord. As a result, the pronunciation of the Name of God was lost to history.

The one thing we know for sure is that the correct way to pronounce YHWH is not Jehovah. This mistake came about in a transliteration error where the Name was written as JHWH in some Latin manuscripts. William Tyndale unwittingly used this error and wrote it in English as Jehovah. This influenced other English translations, and the mistake took off. This is why we have hymns such as Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah and religious groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. The latter have the unfortunate history of both embracing the Arian heresy (that there was a time that the Son of God did not exist and therefore is a creature) and basing their group’s identity on a mistranslation.

During the time of Second Temple Judaism (the period when Solomon’s original temple was rebuilt in 516 BC but before it was destroyed in AD 70), Jews no longer could or would pronounce HaShem but always substituted it with Adonai, even though they were thinking YHWH. Greek-speaking Christians after the time of Christ took on the same practice by using the word Kyrios, a Greek word that, like Adonai, also means Lord.

Nevertheless, there is good textual evidence that just as when Jews substituted the word Adonai, they were thinking YHWH, so also when early Greek Christians used the word Kyrios for Jesus, they too were thinking YHWH.

For example, in Romans 10, where Paul argues that those saved are those who “confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead,” he quotes as parallel support the passage in Joel 2:32 that “everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved,” where LORD (capitalized in many Bibles to make this clear) is YHWH. In Paul’s mind, confessing Jesus as Lord is the same thing as calling on HaShem, the Name of the LORD, the God of Israel.

The earliest known hymn of the Christian church is in Philippians 2:10-11, where “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” This anthem is sung out unabashedly against the undeniable parallelism with the pronouncement of God in Isaiah 45:23, “‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance.’”

But to which God? This is made unambiguously clear in the verse before (Isaiah 45:22), “For I am God, and there is no other.” And the verse after (Isaiah 45:24), “Only in the LORD (YHWH), it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength.”

These early Christians were wholly aware that when they sang of every knee bowing to Christ, they were claiming for Christ what YHWH, the God of whom there is no other, was claiming exclusively for Himself.

Such a brazen association would be idolatrous in the extreme if it were not true. When Jesus applied HaShem to Himself in John 8:58, the pious Jews immediately picked up stones to kill Him for His presumed blasphemy. Yet to confess that Jesus is Lord, indeed the God of the burning bush, is the very thing that identifies one as a Christian.

It puts us on the orthodox-believing side of the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the weight of Scripture. To say Jesus is Lord does not merely mean He has mastery over our lives (though it means at least this). Rather, it is to say that the Son of God, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, has the very Name—The Name—of which Israel declares, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

For a fuller treatment of this topic, see the chapter “And In One Lord” in the book The Nicene Creed: An Introduction by Phillip Cary.

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David B. Sable is one of many lay ministers at Christ the King Anglican Fellowship in Boone, NC.  He is married to Loretta and they live in Deep Gap.  He may be reached at [email protected]. 

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