The consensus of opinion used to be that, because of a Jewish superstition regarding God’s name, the Greek Septuagint translators had substituted in their version the Greek titles Kyʹrios (Lord) or ho The·osʹ (the God) for the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters (יהוה) that represent God’s name Jehovah. But comparatively recent discoveries have shown that the oldest fragments of the Greek Septuagint actually do contain God’s name in its Hebrew form!

Commenting on this fact, Dr. Paul E. Kahle says: “We now know that the Greek Bible text [the Septuagint] as far as it was written by Jews for Jews did not translate the Divine name by kyʹrios [Lord], but the Tetragrammaton written with Hebrew or Greek letters was retained in such MSS [manuscripts].”

Who, then, replaced the divine name in copies of the Greek Septuagint with the titles “Lord” or “God”? Dr. Kahle goes on to answer: “It was the Christians who replaced the Tetragrammaton by kyʹrios [Lord], when the divine name written in Hebrew letters was not understood any more.”​—The Cairo Geniza, pp. 222, 224.

But when did “Christians” in their Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures replace God’s name in its Tetragrammaton form by the titles Kyʹrios (Lord) and ho The·osʹ (the God)? If we can determine this, it will shed light upon whether the writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures actually used God’s name in their inspired writings, and whether the earliest copies of their original writings contained the divine name.

WHEN THE DIVINE NAME WAS REPLACED

The replacing of God’s name in Tetragrammaton form in the Christian Greek Scriptures evidently occurred in the centuries following the death of Jesus and his apostles. This is apparent because in Greek translations of the “Old Testament” or Hebrew Scriptures made in the first centuries of the Common Era by professed Christians the divine name is found. For example, in Aquila’s Greek version, dating from about the year 128 C.E., the Tetragrammaton still appeared in Hebrew characters.

Also, around 245 C.E., the noted scholar Origen produced his Hexapla, a six-column reproduction of the inspired Hebrew Scriptures. On the evidence of the fragmentary copies now known, Professor W. G. Waddell says: “In Origen’s Hexapla . . . the Greek Versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and LXX [Septuagint] all represented JHWH by ΠΙΠΙ; in the second column of the Hexapla the Tetragrammaton was written in Hebrew characters.”a Others believe the original text of Origen’s Hexapla used Hebrew characters for the Tetragrammaton in all its columns. Origen himself stated that “in the most faithful manuscripts THE NAME is written in Hebrew characters, that is, not in modern, but in archaic Hebrew.”

As late as the fourth century, Jerome, the translator who produced the Latin Vulgate, says in his Prologus Galeatus prefacing the books of Samuel and Malachi: “We find the four-lettered name of God (i.e., יהוה) in certain Greek volumes even to this day expressed in the ancient letters.”

What does such information indicate? It makes clear that the so-called “Christians” who “replaced the Tetragrammaton by kyʹrios” in the Septuagint copies were not the early disciples of Jesus. They were persons of later centuries, when the foretold apostasy was well developed and had corrupted the purity of Christian teachings.​—2 Thess. 2:3; 1 Tim. 4:1.

Why, then, is the name absent from the ancient manuscripts of the Christian Greek Scriptures or so-called “New Testament” we now have? Evidently because by the time those ancient copies were made, which was from the third century C.E. onward, the original text of the writings of the apostles and disciples had been altered. The divine name (possibly in Tetragrammaton form) was undoubtedly replaced with Kyʹrios and ho The·osʹ by later copyists, precisely what the facts show was done in later copies of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.