“Jehovah” is God’s name, and “everyone who calls on the name of Jehovah will be saved” (Rom. 10:13). Many scholars favor the spelling Yahweh, but it is uncertain and there is no agreement among them. On the other hand, Jehovah is the form of the name that is most readily recognized, because it has been used in English for centuries. In the New Testament, uses of the word Kurios, when referring to the Father, should be rendered “Jehovah.”1
In considering these statements, it is instructive to look at the Watchtower Bible dictionary, Aid to Bible Understanding:
The first recorded use of this form [Jehovah] dates from the 13th century C.E.
Raymundus Martini, a Spanish monk of the Dominican Order, used it in his book Pugeo Fidei of the year 1270. Hebrew scholars generally favor “Yahweh” as the most likely pronunciation.2
Interestingly, these facts were omitted from the most recent Watchtower Bible dictionary, Insight on the Scriptures. This omission, however, does not change the fact that even the Watchtower affirmed that the term Jehovah is—of all things—a Catholic coinage from the Middle Ages! Moreover, numerous reference works, such as the Jewish Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Judaica, Webster’s Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, Encyclopedia International, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, and The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, agree that the rendering “Jehovah” is erroneous and was never used by the Jews. So where does the name Jehovah come from? James Akin explains:
When the word LORD appears in Scripture, it will be in the Old Testament and is translating the Hebrew word for the name of God—YHWH, or JHVH (biblical Hebrew has no vowels, only consonants). Any vowels later added are not a part of the original text. The Ten Commandments forbid anyone to misuse the name of Yahweh, stating: “You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh your God, for Yahweh will not hold anyone who misuses his name guiltless” (Ex. 20:7; cf. Deut. 5:11).
Although the name Yahweh was used freely in the early history of Israel, by the time of Jesus the Jews (especially the Pharisees) had become scrupulous about breaking the Mosaic Law and, in an attempt to “build a wall” around the commandments of the Law so that no one could even get close to breaking them, they ruled that no one should speak the name of Yahweh—ever. The only exception to this was during one feast day of the year when the priest would intone the actual name “Yahweh” once during the liturgy.
This prohibition on saying “Yahweh” created a problem for people reading the Bible out loud in synagogue liturgies. Since the name of Yahweh was freely used in
the Scripture texts, what were they to say in its place as they read the Bible out loud? The answer that was reached was that they were to say the word “Adonai”
instead. Adonai is the Hebrew word for “lord,” or actually “my lord.”
When the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Old Testament) was translated, it replaced the Hebrew word YHWH with the Greek word for “lord” (kurios).
[W]hen vowels were eventually introduced into the Jewish alphabet, they came in the form of vowel points above and below the consonant letters that were written divine name, have actually named themselves after something that isn’t the name of God. Jehovah is not God’s true name. Based on the patristic and other evidence available, the actual way the divine name was pronounced was “Yahweh,” not
“Jehovah.”
Furthermore, because they have named themselves after something that isn’t God’s name and then gone out and rubbed this in the face of the world, they have actually perpetuated the “hiding” of the divine name by reinforcing in the world’s memory the name Jehovah instead of Yahweh.3
Reading New Testament Greek, one quickly notices a problem for the Witnesses that the Watchtower has never been able to explain fully. The authors of the New Testament never use the word Jehovah, or even Yahweh. Even in quotes from the Old Testament where the divine name had been used, the authors of the New Testament decided to use the word Lord (Greek, kurios) instead. The Watchtower explains that the original manuscripts surely must have had Jehovah in them, but later copyists from the
“apostate” Church altered them to hide the true name of God.4 To correct this, the NWT added the word Jehovah 237 times in the New Testament.5 In the appendix to the NWT the reader is assured:
To avoid overstepping the bounds of a translator into the field of exegesis, we have been most cautious about rendering the divine name in the Christian Greek Scriptures, always carefully considering the Hebrew Scriptures as a background. We have looked for agreement from available Hebrew versions of the Christian Greek
Did the original authors of the New Testament use the name Jehovah before apostates altered the text to hide the name of God? There is absolutely no trace of that name’s
being used in the oldest manuscripts. There are thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopian, Arabic, Gothic, Armenian, and Latin—but not one of them uses the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) in the New Testament, let alone Jehovah.
Beyond the manuscript evidence, the witness of the early Christians is also unanimous.
Christians often suffered martyrdom for the faith, and they were scrupulous about preserving the accuracy of every word of Scripture. Take for example, the people of Oea. St. Augustine wrote to St. Jerome:
We have come to this that a brother Bishop (of Oea), having ordered your translation to be read in the church to which he was accredited, people were disturbed because you had rendered a passage from the prophet Jonas in a very different manner from that which had grown old in all their memories and which so many generations had repeated. All the people were in an uproar; the Greeks especially, passionately accusing you of having falsified the text. . . . Our Bishop found himself obliged to rectify the passage as being erroneous in order to retain his people who were on the verge of abandoning him.8
If the people of Oea were infuriated over a translation of one passage from a minor prophet in the Old Testament, is it plausible that the very name of God was torn out of the New Testament 237 times by apostates, and not one Christian complained?
The reason the authors of the New Testament never used the word Jehovah is that they had never heard of that mispronunciation. The word Yahweh was never used in the New Testament because they were following the custom of their day, reverencing the name by refraining from saying it. Different ages show reverence in different ways. It is the reverence itself, not how it is shown, that is central.