My current and still developing view of the nomina sacra.

[Ben C. Smith]

It occurs to me that, in the ancient world, with a lack of printing presses, if you wanted mass copies of a text you took your text to a copy shop composed of people who could write, where you or the shop owner would read aloud the text for the writers in the room to copy out. These writers didn't need to be Christian to copy Christian texts and would have no idea what the NS abbreviations were supposed to be, or care.

I think what we find in the manuscripts suggests Christian scriptoria.

So if the reader says IS does he say I and then S or does he run the letters together?

It seems pretty clear to me that the reader said Ἰησοῦς and the scribes abbreviated. Is there a better explanation of the data?

We have no real idea how ancient Greek actually sounded but I note that NS abbreviations like ThN, ThOm, ThS, and ThU are consistent across all of the texts that we have unlike IS, IHS etc.

It is true that Jesus gets a more diverse treatment than God, but Father seems even more diverse to me than Jesus. Some have suggested Jesus being the first nomen sacrum as an explanation: it was suspended early (in line with the more typical Greek practice) and only later was it contracted, thus creating the situation of tradition versus convenience. Numerology and symbolism may also come into play, with some scribes preferring ΙΣ for its alternate meaning as a transcription of the Hebrew for man/husband and others preferring ΙΗΣ for reasons having to do with what Barnabas offers us.

It seems to me that something like Theta Neu or Theta Sigma is less likely to be written incorectly than something like Iota Sigma or whatever IS sounded like pronounced as a word.

Pretty sure the reader was saying θεός and the scribes were abbreviating according to their own custom/habit/tradition/instructions.

[Ben C. Smith]

We have no real idea how ancient Greek actually sounded but I note that NS abbreviations like ThN, ThOm, ThS, and ThU are consistent across all of the texts that we have unlike IS, IHS etc.

It is true that Jesus gets a more diverse treatment than God, but Father seems even more diverse to me than Jesus.

To be even clearer, given the variation found in Greek abbreviations, it is the consistency of the treatment of God that bears explaining more than the inconsistency of the treatment of Jesus.

[Jax]

Oh well, thanks Ben, with no way that I can see to show any of this conclusively I find us stuck in the mud yet again.

[Jax]

Not to beat a dead horse but a couple things occurred to me today.

1: If you have the NS throughout your document what would be the point of saying the name in full out loud? For example you have the tetragrammaton often written with four dots to keep the reader from accidently saying YHVH when reading out loud. What would be the point of having the NS if one can simply circumvent it any time one wishes simply by reading the NS aloud?

2: Is the NS, IS, IHS etc a way for Christians to give vip status to the names or is it supposed to further the mystery as Paul states?

3: If the reader is saying the name Iesous in full out loud to the people making copies why in 72 does the copyist use IS and then IHS, IN and then IHN, IU and then IHU? That doesn't make much sense to me. It seems to me that neither the reader or the copyist is using anything but the NS.

Just some thoughts.

[Ben C. Smith]

1: If you have the NS throughout your document what would be the point of saying the name in full out loud? For example you have the tetragrammaton often written with four dots to keep the reader from accidently saying YHVH when reading out loud. What would be the point of having the NS if one can simply circumvent it any time one wishes simply by reading the NS aloud?

Well, the idea would not be that the nomina sacra are a way to prevent the pronunciation of anything. They obviously were not that, so in that way they are not analogous to the Tetragrammaton.

2: Is the NS, IS, IHS etc a way for Christians to give vip status to the names or is it supposed to further the mystery as Paul states?

I gave a reason that I personally like quite a lot in the OP, but YMMV.

3: If the reader is saying the name Iesous in full out loud to the people making copies why in 72 does the copyist use IS and then IHS, IN and then IHN, IU and then IHU?

For that matter, why do the copyists spell words differently, as well? There is a lot of variation, for example, between i and ei. It makes little sense to our modern mindset, but this was before standardized spelling.