In the Journal of Biblical Literature, George Howard, associate professor of religion at the University of Georgia, wrote: “Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text.”​—1977, Volume 96, No. 1, page 77.

Professor Howard says: “This removal of the Tetragram, in our view, created a confusion in the minds of early Gentile Christians about the relationship between the ‘Lord God’ and the ‘Lord Christ.’”​—Page 63 of the article quoted earlier.