Does "Jehovah" belong in the New Testament?
The New World Translation uses the name "Jehovah" 237 times in the New Testament — in places where every other Bible, and every surviving Greek manuscript, reads "Lord" or "God" instead.
Jehovah's Witnesses call this restoring what was lost. The question worth asking plainly is: restoring it from what? Not from a manuscript — from an argument about what must have been true of manuscripts nobody has.
No Greek New Testament manuscript that has ever been found — not one, out of the thousands that survive — contains God's personal name. Every single one reads "Lord" or "God."
That is not the same as saying there is no evidence anywhere touching this question — there is some, and it deserves to be stated precisely rather than overstated in either direction. Some ancient Greek copies of the Old Testament do preserve God's name rather than replace it with "Lord." That shows the practice existed somewhere, sometime, in Greek biblical manuscripts generally. It does not show it in any actual New Testament document.
The New World Translation's own reasoning, and the scholarly hypothesis it draws on, are both explained fairly below, in What They Teach. They are a real argument, not a fabrication — but an argument about lost originals is still not manuscript evidence, and readers deserve to know the difference.
What survives — every papyrus, every codex, every quotation by an early Christian writer — reads "Lord" or "God" where the New World Translation now reads "Jehovah." The case for the name being original has to be made by inference from other evidence entirely, because no direct evidence for it exists.
Examine it for yourself
The evidence, the interpretations and the conclusion, separated so you can examine each step. Every passage is linked; read them in context.
What every surviving manuscript actually says
From the earliest substantial papyri onward, every Greek New Testament manuscript ever catalogued represents the divine name with "Lord" (Kyrios) or "God" (Theos), typically abbreviated as a nomen sacrum. This includes New Testament quotations of Old Testament passages that, in Hebrew, contain the Tetragrammaton — the Greek text of the quotation still reads Kyrios, not the Hebrew name.
- Acts 2:34
Peter quotes Psalm 110:1 — "the LORD said to my Lord" in Hebrew and English translations of the Psalm — and every Greek manuscript of Acts reads Kyrios both times.
What they teach
Stated accurately, on its own terms, then examined against Scripture.
The Christian Greek Scriptures (New Testament) originally contained God's personal name, Jehovah — represented in Hebrew by four consonants, the Tetragrammaton — which later copyists removed and replaced with "Lord" or "God." The New World Translation restores the name in 237 places where it judges this to have happened.
No surviving Greek New Testament manuscript — none of the thousands catalogued, including the earliest ones dated within about a century of the apostles — contains the Tetragrammaton anywhere in the New Testament text. Every one reads "Lord" (Kyrios) or "God" (Theos). The New World Translation's own appendix does not claim otherwise; it does not point to a manuscript that reads differently. Its argument is an inference about what the lost originals must have contained, built from how some pre-Christian Greek Old Testament copies handled the divine name — not a manuscript finding about the New Testament itself. The scholarly hypothesis this argument leans on, George Howard's 1977 proposal that New Testament writers may have retained the divine name when directly quoting the Old Testament, is a minority position within New Testament scholarship, not a consensus finding — and it is a hypothesis about the autographs, not a report of any manuscript that has actually been found to contain the name.
- Acts 2:34
Quotes Psalm 110:1, which has the Tetragrammaton in the Hebrew. Every Greek manuscript of Acts reads Kyrios ("Lord") both times — the New World Translation renders the first occurrence "Jehovah."
That no known Greek New Testament manuscript contains the Tetragrammaton is a textual fact, not an interpretation. The earliest substantial New Testament papyri (for example the Chester Beatty Papyri, from around AD 200) already show the pattern found in every later manuscript: the divine name is represented by Kyrios or Theos, commonly abbreviated as a nomen sacrum, never written out as the Hebrew letters YHWH or a Greek transliteration of them.
This is not the same as saying there is no evidence at all on either side. Some pre-Christian Greek copies of the Old Testament did preserve the divine name rather than substitute "Lord" for it — Papyrus Fouad 266, a Greek manuscript of Genesis and Deuteronomy from roughly the first century BC, writes the Tetragrammaton in square Hebrew letters in the middle of the Greek text every time it occurs, and a related manuscript (4Q120) uses a Greek transliteration, IAO, instead. That is real, independently attested historical evidence — for how some pre-Christian Greek Old Testament manuscripts were copied. It is evidence about a different set of documents than the New Testament, from a different period, and it does not itself show what any New Testament manuscript said.
George Howard's article ("The Tetragram and the New Testament," Journal of Biblical Literature 96/1, 1977, pp. 63-83) proposed that New Testament authors, following that same Jewish scribal practice, might have retained the Tetragrammaton in their own quotations of Old Testament passages that contained it, and that later copyists — writing for an increasingly Gentile, non-Hebrew-reading church — replaced it with kyrios. This is a historical hypothesis about how the New Testament text changed after it was written, offered to explain a pattern Howard observed; it is not a report of a manuscript discovery, and it has not become the consensus view among New Testament textual scholars. Larry Hurtado, among others, has argued against Howard's account of how the nomina sacra (the reverential abbreviations used for divine names in every surviving manuscript) actually originated.
What the evidence supports
"Jehovah" does not appear in any known New Testament manuscript. Its presence in the New World Translation rests on an inference about lost originals, not on textual evidence.
Every surviving Greek New Testament manuscript reads "Lord" or "God" without exception. The argument for the divine name's original presence draws on real but indirect evidence — pre-Christian Greek Old Testament manuscripts that preserved the name, and a minority scholarly hypothesis (George Howard, 1977) about how the New Testament text may have changed after it was written. Neither is a manuscript finding for the New Testament itself. Therefore The Berea does not accept the New World Translation's 237 insertions of "Jehovah" as restorations of the original text.
Examine further
- Psalms 110:1
The Old Testament passage quoted in Acts 2:34, containing the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew.
Discuss and study
- Why does it matter whether an argument is based on a surviving manuscript versus an inference about a lost one, even when the inference is made in good faith?
- Does knowing that some ancient Greek Old Testament copies preserved the divine name change how you weigh the absence of it from every New Testament copy?