Argument for Late Adoption of κύριος (kyrios)

Recently, scholars have discovered Septuagint manuscripts that do not use “Lord” (κύριος, kyrios) for the Tetragrammaton. Instead, some of these manuscripts write the divine name in paleo-Hebrew or Aramaic letters, or even with the Greek transliteration ΙΑΩ (IAŌ) (Howard, “Tetragram,” 65). Origen noted that the “more accurate exemplars” of the Septuagint contained the (transliterated or transcribed) Tetragrammaton instead of κύριος (kyrios) (see Pietersma, “Kyrios or Tetragram,” 87).

Based on this evidence, there is a new argument that New Testament authors were not following the Septuagint when they used κύριος (kyrios) in place of the Tetragrammaton (Howard, “Tetragram,” 63–83; and see also Conzelmann, Theology of the New Testament, 83–84). According to this view, it is possible that the earliest Jewish Christians—in keeping with Jewish tradition—preserved the Tetragrammaton in their quotations of the Old Testament. This practice would mean that the New Testament autographs might have contained the Tetragrammaton where the authors quoted from Scripture (e.g., Matt 22:44; Mark 1:3; Rom 10:16; Howard, “Tetragram,” 76–78). However, by the second century ad, the use of the Tetragrammaton (in Semitic script or Greek transliteration) fell out of favor, and other options (like κύριος, kyrios) gradually became the norm. This pattern of development could have occurred for the suspected “Christian” manuscripts of the Septuagint as well as for the New Testament manuscripts.