Chris Deweese

Too long to respond in comment so here we go..

“the NT was written in Greek” -

This is an assumption. A scholarly assumption but not in the sense of it being the result of scholarship. Rather it is a scholarly assumption in the sense that a vast number of scholars believe it and repeat it and so it remains the majority narrative. But thankfully genuine scholarly work is not democratic and true scholars follow the facts not the crowd.

There are two major reasons the NT is thought to be originally Greek. One is that the oldest manuscripts we’ve found so far outside the Vatican archives are Greek. And the vast majority are Greek aswell. The other reason is that everyone thinks it was originally Greek. The theory is an ouroboros.
And if one was to truly check into it it falls apart instantaneously and irreversibly.

Greek is incompatible with Hebrew thought.
The Greek manuscripts have Hebrew idiom all throughout. Hebrew grammar, Hebrew syntax, transliterated Hebrew all throughout. The narrative constantly says or implies that the Jews were fluent in speaking in Hebrew, which runs contrary to scholars who blindly believe the language was only used for temple worship by that time (and only cause the church fathers thought so). There are mistakes upon mistakes in the Greek texts that make no sense in a Holy Spirit inspired work but make perfect sense in translation as they are common to all translations. The scribal errors, glosses, wrong words, and invented words, all point to the Greek being a translation not an original. Also there are Hebrew manuscripts which do not reflect a Greek or Latin origin and destroy the textual questions the Greek leaves us with. The list goes on and on for the reasons to not believe the Greek to be original, not the least of which would be the inability to divorce the Greek language from the Greek religions.

“They used Theos for God.”

“God” so ingrained in our nature we even say it anachronistically. They didn’t use theos for “God” because “God” wasn’t a word yet and they were still thousands of miles and years from the invention of the word “god” out of “Gott” which best guess originated with the Goths who very likely might have been members of the lost tribe of Gad as they moved north, though no scholarship has yet nailed that down as factual. It’s still more reliable than the scholars have been able to be about the meaning of the word “God” though. Their best guesses are that it means to invoke or to pour upon or invocation by pouring upon.
Either way it doesn’t means anything close to Elohim.

“They had no problem using the generic word for god in their day.”

Again this is reading the British tradition “god”back into a land and time when it did not exist yet and no one had yet thought to adopt a foreign concept. They were trying to render Elohim as theos not gif as theos. (Yes the details matter.) Moreover calling on God in such a place and time would have sounded exactly like calling on Gad who’s worship still had not yet been stomped out even in the first century, and it would be rightly courting death for Torah violation. But since the term hadn’t yet been invented in a foreign land and far off time there was as yet no threat.

But do we know they had no problem using a generic term for (we will say) divinity? No we don’t know that because we don’t know that Greek was the original. And we have an over abundance of reasons to believe it was not the original.

It’s hardly a question of generic terminology at all though. It’s an issue with accepting false associations from foreign languages as translations of the Hebrew because they are familiar, traditionally rendered as such, and commonly understood to be synonymous…without anyone ever checking to see if it is so.
And the fact that again the Greek is inseparable from the pagan religion of her people…

“The decision to use theos for god was made when the Tanakh was translated into Greek about 150 years before Yeshua.”

Again theos wasn’t used for “god” because god wasn’t a word yet. It was from a country and time far away. But do note how deeply rooted that term is in your vocabulary that you read it back in time and cross-culturally three times in one comment without noticing the absurdity of it being wildly out of place.

Yes, theos was chosen by the lying scribes who rendered the Hebrew into Greek for the LXX…and nobody checked their translations…but everybody repeated them blindly. Down to the scribes who rendered the writings of the disciples of Yeshua into Greek. And what did they do? Checked nothing and repeated everything as trained to do.

Theos was a replacement for Elohim not a translation. Elohim means Mighty Ones, Majesties, Forces, Powers (and could even be stretched to Authorities, Great Ones, Powerful, etc). Where as theos is of unknown origin and meaning, though best scholarly guesses surmise that it actually morphed from the Latin - “deus” which is itself directly derived from the name of zeus. Usually Latin borrows from Greek but upon occasion the reverse.

All in all if we don’t know the meaning of a word and can’t know for certain what it means and those who gave us this word had the bad habit of equating things from different cultures rather than translating for meaning, we can’t rightly say they were correct.

The term for mighty ones in Hebrew does not automatically equate to the term for mighty ones in Greek because the job of a translator is to convey meaning not association based on assumed equality. And Hebrew has singular, plural and dual natures to its terms where as Greek has only singular and plural.

And most of all, the translator is supposed to be conveying the Hebrew culture, mindset and understanding to the Greek audience. That’s not what happens when he adopts the terminology and tradition of the Greeks and tells them it’s all equal and the same.
The scribe must use the Greek language obviously but he is not supposed to be trying to convey Greek ideas. The Septuagint and Greek translations of the disciples’ writings wrongly convey a Greek view of Hebrew not as it should be - a Hebrew view spoken with a Greek tongue.

It would have been tough to do but it could have been done. If the scribes had done their job rightly. But alas they did not. And all the lying scribes repeated blindly thereafter.

The same behavior occurred in the English beginning with Wycliffe. The Anglo-Saxons of his day were allowed by the church in the spirit of syncretism to keep their term for the things they used to worship and transfer it over to one generic deity. The term “God” was born as a Christian honorific only then and Wycliffe walked it right into his English version of the vulgate without a second thought. Followed by Tyndale copying the bad habit without checking and Coverdale after, right on down to the KJV committees.

Treated like a Name until someone calls it a name and then it’s bearers quickly decry it being a name…until someone drops it with the words “oh my” before it or “damn it” thereafter. Then it’s proponents are quick on the stick to say “You just blasphemed.” Or “don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”

Nothing to see hear. Notice no contradictions. Carry on.

“English bibles don't substitute God for
YHVH, they use LORD for that, following a similar pattern.”

In general this is true though there are a few instances in which the Bible says Adonai YHWH and the lying scribes can’t do what’s right so instead of translating it as Lord YHWH and not wanting to call attention to their bowdlerism by redundancy of Lord LORD, they instead render Adonai as Lord (a foolish habit in itself) and replace YHWH with GOD in all caps.

The replacement of YHWH with the profane term “God” as a quasi-non-name-name happens in usage since it’s the most common term folk use who are trying to worship the Mighty One of the Bible. God, Lord, and Lord God, FatherGod, seem to be the dominant.

YHWH said He’s jealous of His Name. He even says His Name Itself is jealous. He said He wants His Name known in all the earth, mentioned for all generations. That we should let them know that YHWH is the sovereign over all the earth.

Not a word in the Book about letting everyone know that there is only one (insert vague term from foreign land and far off time made popular by a foreign culture who conquered 1/4 of the earth). Woopdydoo you believe in “God”. What’s that mean? You believe in a Lord. What’s that mean?

Generic. Generalized. Gentrification.

No thanx. That’s not what YHWH Elohim told us to tell everybody.

“We who use the Names properly do so out of reverence and to be more correct.”

Correct. The goal is reverence and respect. Correctness and consecration. And how exactly is this true if we shelve the Sacred Name and the term that can only be rendered in a transliteration (followed by explanation) of Elohim? How is this true if we replace YHWH Elohim with a generic LORD God?

“When we make up stuff about the Names that's clearly incorrect, it cheapens our efforts to spread the Gospel more accurately.”
Clearly you intended this somehow as a means of justifying the use of the made up stuff. I’m very curious as to how this was penned down by you without noticing the irony. And this seems a great moment to toss it back in your direction to ponder on.

What does it matter if we tell all the wonders of YHWH Elohim as done by somebody called LORD God instead. It would be like telling your life story in every detail but saying I did all that not you…only infinitely worse.

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