|
|
|
AN ANSWER TO
OBJECTIONS Daniel Botkin published a bi-monthly magazine entitled
“Gates of Eden.” He ran an article entitled “Objections to use of the
Sacred Name.” A copy of this article was forwarded to brother Bill Burton who
has responded with a rebuttal concerning Daniel’s article.
So why should
I question any of his views when he is scholar, and I do not measure up to that
standard? Good question, and I really don’t know why I am, except I feel it
needs to be answered. Let me first say that there are many Christian
theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, who are also true Biblical scholars
whose ideas or view points I also question as to being Scripturally correct –
again in my opinion. In fact many of these dedicated scholars who have ample
time to study the Scriptures come up with view points or dogma that clash with
each other, and also with the plain simple meanings of the Scriptures
themselves. I truly feel that we are all deceived or blinded to some extent as
Rev 12: 9 states and we all see through the glass darkly, and will do so until
our Savior comes and we are given the unadulterated truth. *2Daniel Botkin states, (If I
understand it correctly) SN believers reject the words God and Lord because
these are generic words that often refer to pagan gods. He then goes on and says
that the Hebrew equivalents are also generic terms which also refer to pagan
gods, but that the Creator refers to Himself as Elohim and Adonai hundreds of
times in the Hebrew Scriptures. In my opinion right there is where his understanding is off the
mark from the studies I’ve read from various SN groups, and from the
Scriptures themselves. Most SN assemblies reject the Lord and God not because
they are ‘generic words’ (titles) that often refer to false pagan gods,
but because both the words ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ were actually personal names of false pagan deities
according to
the historical evidence that I have read. Granted they are now used as titles (generic words)
which are used for the Almighty, pagan gods and mortal man, except when they are used as a substitute
name replacing the Name of the Heavenly
Father. At
that time when they are used as a substitute name for His True
Name, do they not then become a name, a personal name
for the Creator, at least in the eyes of the ones using them? Have they not forgotten (or for most never known) the True Hebrew Name of our Heavenly Father and His Son for substitute names that
originally were personal names for pagan deities?
Isn’t that the same thing that Jeremiah was warning the Israelites about in
Jer. 23:25-27?
According to any good English Dictionary, ‘Lord’ is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Hlaf-Weard’. Hlaf is the basis
for the modern word, loaf, as a loaf of bread. Weard has the meaning of Fate,
Fortune, Destiny or Event. So the word, ’Lord’ or it’s Anglo-Saxson root
stood for the ‘Queen of Heaven’ {the Goddess Astarte, or Ishtar} whose
favors are sought through offerings of bread {Hot Cross Buns see Jer 7:18 NIV
footnotes}3.
So, whether the name Lord came from ‘Hlaford’, which
originally came from ‘Hlaf-Weard’, or
from the Pagan Deities ‘Larth, Loride, or
Lordo’ or an assimilation of them all, according to the scholars
it originated from the names of Pagan Deities,. The Lord, like
its synonyms in the different languages (Baal,
Adonai, Kurios, Herr, Pan, etc., which all
came from the names of the Pagan Deity from the country that it was used)
eventually became a title for all the Pagan Deities and men. Later, it was used
as a title for the Almighty in Christianity, and then as a replacement name or a substitute
name for the Name of the Almighty, along with its use as a title for the Almighty
and for pagan deities4. God/Gad/Gawd was the proper Hebrew name of the
Assyrian/Syrian/Canaanite/Babylonian God of Fortune/Troop/Good luck associated
with Sun Worship. God was carried into the English language as a
title for Heathen Deities from the Teutonic people.
But, as stated above it was originally the name of the Assyrian God of Fortune, which
was adopted by the Hebrews5.
Furthermore, Isa. 65:11,12 shows how IAUE feels about those that worship the deity of Fortune (Gad (pronounced Gawd, or God) instead of SEEKING
HIM. Verse 12 says that
those who set a table for Gad/Gawd/God He (IAUE) will destine for the
sword!6 Both Ex 23:13, and Joshua 23:7
tell us, we are not to even mention the names of other
deities, or swear by them, or worship (bow down) to them. In
Deut
12:3 IAUE told
the Israelites that they were to destroy the names of the Gods
of the people they were displacing. However in verse 4, He tells them they are
not to do the same unto IAUE
your Mighty One.
In Isa. 42:8, IAUE
states; "I Am IAUE,
that is My Name, and My Esteem (Glory) I will not give
to another...".
Isa. 48:11 says practically the same; "... for how shall My Name be
polluted? I will not
give my Esteem
to another." In
both these verses, the subject shows that IAUE will not give
His esteem to another Name, and definitely not to a
name that the Adversary came up with!
Daniel makes a point that SN
(Sacred Name) believers substitute a dash for the vowels in the words G-d, L-rd,
and J-s-s Chr-st when they refer to the Creator and His Son, because these refer
to pagan gods. However, they do not hesitate to print out the full names of
Satan, Molech, Ashtoreth, etc. He then asks why if God, and Lord and Jesus are
not fully printed because (according to SN’ers) they refer to pagan gods, why
are the other pagan gods honored with the full printing of their names? He then
states, ‘Let’s be consistent’.
However, the reason
for
the dash in the printing of the names of the pagan gods, L-rd, G-d, and, J-s-s Chri -st,
is that when
they are quoting someone who uses these substitute
names for the Creator or His Son, or explaining to someone who doesn’t know
anything about the True Name of the Father or His Son and they have to use the common names used in Christianity
in order to explain about their True Hebrew Names, they need some way to show that they are not giving honor or esteem to these names.
Someone who might be scanning over the material might read where they are using
these names and get the idea that since they use them its OK to use them along
with the correct Hebrew Names, therefore it really doesn’t make any difference
what name they use. Which is exactly the position
that many Christian theologians take.
I think it rather ironic that a prominent spokesman for Messianic Judaism
makes this point, since there are Messianic Judaic scholars who also put a dash
in the words G-d and L-rd. They do so not because these are
substitute names that are derived from pagan deities, and therefore should not
be given the honor and esteem that the Almighty places on His Great Name, but do so “because custom of traditional Judaism which forbids them from speaking or completely writing the proper name
of G-d, or L-rd (sometimes
translated Jehovah in English) in order to insure that it is not desecrated.
We continue this practice in order to not
offend our readers.”7
The SN believers are trying to follow the
Torah which tells us we are not to even mention
the names of other G-ds, we are not to bring the Name of IAUE to naught, nothing, or destruction, or falsify His Great Name. Therefore they add the dash in
those names to show that
these names
are not to be honored or esteemed, especially in place of, or as a substitute to take the place of the Almighty’s
Great Name. After all we are also told in 5 different
places in the Scriptures not to add or take
away from His Word or suffer dire consequences. Surely this must
also apply to His Name, the Name above All names, the Name that is written in
over 7,000 places in the Tanak.
The Messianic Judaic believers are also trying to follow the Torah, and
to get back to the Biblical-Hebraic Heritage of the faith once delivered to the
saints, which, I might add, is also the goal of the ‘SN” believers. However, the ‘MJ’ (Messianic
Judaism) believers in putting the dash in place of the vowels in the words,
Lord, and
God, do so out of deference to the Jewish custom of not
speaking or writing the Name of the Almighty, a custom or tradition which has no Scriptural basis. Especially since the
words, Lord and God, are neither translations nor transliterations of the Name of the
Almighty, and are in reality, originally the names of pagan deities, which
have been substituted for His Name. Therefore the
Jewish religious leaders, and MJ believers are in effect giving their esteem or honor to these words along with the
Name of the Almighty, by saying these generic words (titles), L-rd, and G-d, are too holy to write
or pronounce because they are
representative of the Almighty’s Name.
What a paradox!!!
In the Scriptures, the Almighty gives
us His Name8
and tells us to call upon, praise and proclaim it to the nations of the
world9
as a memorial for all times10.
He also in His Scriptures tells us He will not give His esteem, or honor to any other name of any other deity11, as all other deities are
false mighty ones, or demons12,
and we are prohibited from even mentioning or
pronouncing their names.13
He tells us He is Jealous for His Name14,
and that we are not to bring His Name to naught,
desolation, ruin, or falsehood.15 However,
the Rabbinic Jewish leaders following a tradition of the nations that
they had been held captive in, decided that the Almighty’s Name was ‘too holy’ to pronounce or to use in their worship and praise.
Instead of following the directive of the covenant commandments that prohibited even the mention or pronunciation of the names of the pagan
mighty ones, they conversely, prohibited
the mention or the pronunciation of the
Name
of IAUE, their true Mighty One.
Daniel then calls the SN doctrine
having to do with the Name of the Almighty, nothing more than linguistic
superstition, which brings about strife’s of
words, or creating unnecessary divisions between those who accept God, Lord,
Jesus, Yeshua etc., and those who do not.
All I have to say to that is that the Messiah said He came not to bring
peace but division.16
Also that we
must worship in truth and spirit.17
The
reason that people all over the world utilize these ‘generic
words’ in place of the Almighty’s Name
contrary to Torah commands of course goes back
to the tradition18 started by the Jewish religious leaders. Why was this tradition of substituting
another deity's name in place of the Heavenly Father's Name started by the
Jewish priests? While they were in
captivity they saw His Separated Name blasphemed every
day.19 When the Jews returned from their Babylonian captivity, there was a strong
effort by the priests to remove from common use the Personal Name of the
Heavenly Father. To keep His Name from being profaned or blasphemed
by the common uneducated people they legislated against anyone other than a
priest pronouncing The Name Of The Heavenly Father; making it a death
penalty to do so!
In the over 7,000 places where the
Separated Name was written in the
Scriptures, in order to keep the people from pronouncing The Heavenly Father's
Name, the Talmud ordered the people to pronounce Adonai instead.
"This is My Name to
be hidden" was their oral command, supposedly given by the Almighty, which became a written law of the
Talmud.
Another text of the Mishna reads: "In
the sanctuary the priest were accustomed to pronounce the Name as it is written;
in the town, by
disguising it." This shows that they
were still pronouncing it, but only in the temple at Jerusalem, and the Name was
disguised in other places or in the synagogues
The idea that only the priest could utter
The Separated Name of The Heavenly Father and that he was to disguise or hide it
from the common people, came from the idea that the Name was ineffable or
unutterable. However this was a pagan doctrine that they adopted from the Egyptians,
Babylonians and the Greeks, each which held dominion over them at one time. This caused the Name of IAUE to be replaced
in all the countries of the world with titles, which were originally used for a
pagan deity of that particular pagan country.
In many cases the name of the local pagan
deity was adopted to replace the Name of The Most High.
Daniel then brings out that the
‘glaring silence on the ‘Name’ issue, also refutes the SN doctrine. He
asks, why do the New Testament writers consistently use the generic Greek words
Theos, Kurious, and the Greek form Iesous Xistos? They could have used the
Hebrew characters (yod, hei, waw, hei ) or the Greek letters iota, alpha,
omega,, as many pre-Christian manuscripts of the Septuagint did.
Actually, Daniel partially answers the silence of the ‘New Testament
writers’. In the first place the ‘New Testament’ writers were the
Apostles, and Shaul, Mark, and Luke, all who were Yahudim, or as called today,
Jews, actually Messianic Jews. George Lamsa’s Holy Bible, A Translation from the Aramaic of the
Peshitta
states in his introduction; “The Israelites never wrote their sacred
literature in any language but Aramaic and Hebrew. ... The Septuagint was made in the 3rd
century, B.C. for the Alexandrine Jews. This version was never
officially read by the Jews in Palestine who spoke Aramaic and read Hebrew. Instead the
Jewish authorities condemned the work and declared a period of
mourning because of the defects in the version! Evidently Jesus and His disciples used a text
that came from an older Hebrew original. This is apparent because Jesus’
quotations from the Old Testament agree with the Peshitta Text but do not
agree with the Greek Text. … This is not all, Jesus
and His disciples not only could not converse in Greek, but never heard it
spoken!” Dr. Lamsa also brings out that
the Gospels were written early, a few years after the resurrection and Matthew
wrote some portions while Jesus (Yahushua) was preaching.
They
were not handed down orally and then written after the Pauline Epistles as
some western scholars say; They were written many years before those Epistles. ... The Gospels, as well as the Epistles (Paul’s) were written in Aramaic, the
language of the Jewish people both in Palestine and in the Greco-Roman Empire. The book Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus
by David Bivin and Roy Blizzard Jr. states on p 4: “Our reason for writing this book are not only
to show that the original biography of Jesus was communicated in the Hebrew
language, but to show that the entire New Testament can only be understood from
a Hebraic perspective”. On
p 17; “Many
scholars in Israel are now convinced that the spoken and written language of the
Jews in the Land of Israel at the time of Jesus was indeed Hebrew; and that the
Synoptic Gospels were derived from original Hebrew sources”.
Dr. Pinchas Lapide, an orthodox Jewish Scholar, one of the
four Jewish scholars on the New Testament today, stated on the John Ankerberg
Show that the Greek in the New Testament is preposterously
bad in the New Testament, and cries out for retranslating into the Hebrew it was
originally decades before the Greeks got hold of it! He
asked the question;
“Why read Jesus in Greek, if He never preached in Greek, nor probably knew
Greek?” In his book, Israel, Jews, and Jesus on p 1 he states; ”The earliest writings
about Jesus were composed in Hebrew, and appeared most
probably in Jerusalem. ...It is certain, however, that all four Greek Gospels display distinct traces
of an original Hebrew text in their vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and Semantic
patterns. Hence we cannot seriously question the existence of a ‘Hebrew
Gospel’ – No Fewer than ten fathers of the Church testify to it!” Dr. George
Howard in his
article, ‘The Tetragram and the New Testament’ in the Journal
of Biblical Literature 1977, shows that the Heavenly Father’s Name
was written in the Pre-Christian Greek Bible (Septuagint) in Aramaic or in
Palaeo-Hebrew letters or was transliterated into Greek letters. However,
when we come to the Christian Copies of the Septuagint, we are immediately struck by the absence of
the Tetragram and its almost universal replacement by Kurios.
He then shows that the Tetragram in the Christian Septuagint began to be
surrogated (replaced or substituted) by the contracted Kurios or Theos at least
by the second century. As long as it was retained in the Greek Old Testament
(LXX), the Tetragram was incorporated into the New Testament text when it quoted
from the O.T.. However when it was removed from the Greek O.T., it was also
removed from the quotations of the O.T. in the N.T.. Thus somewhere around the
beginning of the 2nd century the use of surrogates crowded out the Tetragram in
both Testaments. Before long the Divine Name was lost to the Gentile Church
altogether except where it was occasionally
remembered by scholars!
Perhaps the primary cause, which drove the majority of the Christians to search
for a new day of weekly worship and a new day for the annual celebration of the
Passover, was the feeling of the necessity to
dissociate and differentiate themselves from Judaism. The
fact that they were persecuted by the Romans as a sect of the Jews because they
kept the Sabbath, and persecuted by the Jews because they believed that Yahushua
(Jesus)
was the promised Messiah, and couldn’t accept Barkokeba as the Messiah, caused
great antipathy towards the Jews from the Gentile converts that became the
majority of the emerging religion ‘Christianity’.
Thus, this hatred for the Jews or anything Jewish was
one of the major reasons they sought a different day to worship on, to separate
them from the ‘Jews’ who crucified our Lord’. This coupled with the fact that after
the year 135 A.D., Gentile bishops replaced Jewish leaders of the emerging
Christian Church, indicates that a distinction took place at that time between
Gentile-Christians, and Judeo-Christians (Nazarenes), characterized by a new Theological orientation, especially towards the Law and the Sabbath!!
The forsaking of the Sabbath and the adoption of Sunday are perhaps the most
visible aspect of this break with Judaism. End of quote,
It is more than likely that
this hatred for anything Jewish was
also the primary cause which drove the Gentile
Christians to remove the Tetragram (which
they considered to be Jewish) from
the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Septuagint).
Especially since this is exactly the same time from when it was removed
from the LXX (Septuagint)!! Now it is
true that the Jews themselves had already set a precedent of substituting another name for the Heavenly Father’s Name whenever it was pronounced. However, they never removed it from their Scriptures, including the
LXX. It remained up to the Gentile Christians to
do this! From
the above facts I believe they answer the assertion that the New
Testament writers utilized the Greek pagan titles instead of the Almighty’s
true name and the true name of His Son and also that the New Testament was
originally written in Greek. There is a mounting abundance of evidence that most
if not all of the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and
that the Greek New Testament that we have today is nothing more than a
translation of the original Hebrew.
Next, I’d
like to take up his assertion that the ‘SN’ers’ (Sacred Namers)
misunderstand the ‘Name’ issue because they do not understand the broader
meaning of the Hebrew word shem (name). He brings out that Shem means a lot more
than simply the name of person or personage, that it conveys the meaning of the
reputation, honor, or character of that person. He then points out that the Scriptures say many things about the name of YHWH. “There are verses that speak about misusing, blaspheming, or shaming the name of YHWH. There are verses that speak of knowing, glorifying, praising, trusting in, and speaking of the name of YHWH. These verses are not referring to correct pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton; they are speaking about the character and reputation of YHWH. Thus trusting in “the name’ of YHWH means that we trust in His character, ... and His reputation |