(December 3, 2013 at 3:43 am)Aractus Wrote: I agree with the premise with what you're saying, but not the detail.I can't offer a definitive rebuttal of this, just a comment to bear in mind. The Jews do not necessarily know how their language was pronounced many centuries ago. A long time ago back in grad school I studied Old Norse. Modern Icelandic is but little changed from that in grammar. However, the Icelanders believe the pronunciation is equally unchanged over the centuries, a view not shared by any linguists outside Iceland.
... Nobody argues that Jesus/Joshua/Yesus/Yoshua/Jeshua/Yeshua isn't all the same Hebrew name - and we all agree that "Jesus" was never the correct pronunciation of the Hebrew name, and just because it was written down transliterated into Greek doesn't mean it was ever vocalized at the time of Christ as a Greek variant. Yet that doesn't make his name being "Jesus" as opposed to "Joshua" wrong, and the same applies to the Tetragrammaton, and the fact that it too can be transliterated in different ways into English.
And in order to make his argument he is appealing to Christian apologetics, Christian scholars for his answer. He doesn't get his answer from the Jews, which use "Yehovah" (although they don't say it - well actually some do and that's how we know how the Jews pronounce it), or from the Muslims who teach that the Tetragrammaton isn't a name. But even so, all Christians pretty much recognize that any why you write the Tetragrammaton as a transliteration: YHVH/YHVH/JHWH/YHWH/Jehovah/Yehovah/Jehowah/Yehowah/Jahweh/Yahweh you are writing one and the same thing. The question didn't ask anything about vocalization, and in written form virtually all Christians would agree that all are correct, and in written form they are all equal, and we even recognize LORD as representing it too.
When I was in the ministry, I avoided the name Jehovah like the plague because of the JWs.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
