http://www.thetextofthegospels.com/2015 ... lness.html
Even before any New Testament books were composed, copyists of books of the Old Testament already treated the name of God with special reverence. In Hebrew, this name consists of four Hebrew letters, and for this reason is known as the Sacred Tetragrammaton. In some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, when the Sacred Tetragrammaton appears, it is written in its own distinct script; the copyists used ordinary lettering elsewhere but for the name of God, paleo-Hebrew letters were used. 11Q Psalms, a scroll of Psalms, has many examples of this.
The Sacred Tetragrammaton
The ancient custom of acknowledging the presence of the name of God without audibly pronouncing it persists in English Bibles to this day in translations in which the word “Lord” appears in small capital letters to represent the presence of the Sacred Tetragrammaton in the base-text. “Lord” in ordinary letters usually represents Adonai, a different Hebrew word.
In intertestamental times, the Old Testament was translated into Greek; the most popular Greek translation was known as the Septuagint. In the first half of the 200’s, the patristic writer Origen, in his Homily on Psalm 2, as he commented about the second verse, made this observation about some copies of the Septuagint: “In the most accurate manuscripts, the name [i.e., the name of God] occurs in Hebrew characters – not in modern-day Hebrew, but in the very ancient lettering.”
Very early in the transmission-history of the Gospels, Christian copyists developed four names to be treated in a manner congruent to the Judaic treatment of the Tetragrammaton; the first four Christian nomina sacra probably appeared as a group: ΚΣ , ΘΣ, ΙΣ, and ΧΣ. It was at this early stage that some Christian copyists (probably copyists who were already engaged in the production of copies of the Septuagint), modifying the practice of leaving space for the Tetragrammaton and adding it in a second copying-stage, left overlined space for these four words in the first copying-stage, and they were added during the proof-reading stage. Occasionally the proof-reader worked from memory and interchanged the names, or failed to insert a contraction in the space reserved for it.
The next words to become nomina sacra were Πατηρ, Υιος, and Πνευμα. Following this, the group of contracted words was expanded to include words that were components of titles of Christ – the Son of Man, the Son of David – or which were paralleled in the Gospels by a sacred name (as, frequently, Matthew refers to the kingdom of heaven where Mark refers to the kingdom of God). The contraction of Σωτηρ probably began at the same time, in the same way; it was considered a title of God and/or Christ.
The contractions of “Jerusalem” and “Israel” may have originated as ordinary abbreviations of names which obtained the same format as the nomina sacra to keep format-variations to a minimum. (The presence of the letters ι and η in these two nomina sacra may have had something to do with their adoption, too.) The contraction of μητηρ was a result of increased devotion to the Virgin Mary. This leaves the origin of one nomen sacrum unaccounted for: why would σταυρος be considered a word worth venerating?
The answer might have something to do with Greek numerals.
The nomina sacra are a significant part of a manuscript’s meta-text. In descriptions of a manuscript’s format and secondary features (such as chapter-titles, section-numbers, lectionary apparatus, decorations, etc.), its copyists’ treatment of the nomina sacra should also be noted. Unusual treatments of the nomina sacra shared by manuscripts may indicate a link between them.
In addition, if the theory that some early copyists added the nomina sacra at a secondary copying-stage can be maintained, then some special considerations should come into play in the evaluation of variant-units that involve nomina sacra:
(1) Even a text that is otherwise excellent may not be reliable where nomina sacra are involved; during the proof-reading stage of an ancestor-manuscript, when the nomina sacra were added, the proof-reader might have relied on his memory to a greater degree than the copyist relied on his exemplar. (For example, Codices B and À, in the hands of their initial copyists, both read Ις Χς in Matthew 16:21.)
(2) Evidence of secondary-stage insertion of nomina sacra, either in the production of an extant manuscript or in the production of a manuscript’s ancestor, might be detected via the detection of nomina sacra which are uniquely out-of-place. (For example, ΚΩ where the text should be ΚΥ in Matthew 21:42 in À, and ΠΝΚΟΣ in First Corinthians 15:47 and ΧΡΥ in Ephesians 5:17 in P46.)
(3) Evidence of secondary-stage insertion of nomina sacra, either in the production of an extant manuscript or in the production of a manuscript’s ancestor, might also be detected via the detection of the loss of otherwise secure nomina sacra; the explanation being that a copyist, in the secondary copying-stage, simply failed to notice the overlined blank space. (See, for example, the loss and subsequent insertion of Κε in À in John 13:6 and 13:9.)
(4) The text, as read with nomina sacra, must be considered when evaluating rival variants. Sometimes a nomen sacrum could elicit a parableptic error which would not be elicited without the contraction. For this reason, publishers of Greek texts for textual critics ought to consider printing the nomina sacra in the text and in the apparatus.
(5) In a close contest between ancient rival variants which both (or all) consist of nomina sacra, when a form of Κυ is one of the readings, it should be preferred, on the grounds that it is the less specific reading.
(6) Inconsistencies in a copyist’s contraction or non-contraction of nomina sacra are sometimes opaquely arbitrary; something, though, they may indicate how the copyist, or the copyist of his exemplar or ancestor-copy, interpreted the text. Similarly, anomalous treatments of nomina sacra may alert researchers to other anomalies. (The non-contraction of Ιησουν in Mark 16:6 in À, for example, is part of the copyist’s attempt to stretch the text into the following column.)
(7) In passages where several nomina sacra occur in close proximity, a contraction could be lost if the overlines were not neatly separated, as the proof-reader, encountering what appeared to be one overline, casually assumed that one overline implied that one name should be inserted.
(8) If an overline and blank space were longer than necessary, the proof-reader might assume that two nomina sacra were called for. This, rather than a natural tendency for embellishment, may have contributed to expansions from one name to two names.
Oh hush, James. Everyone knows the real explanation is, "Constantine did it."Nomina sacra were used not only in Scriptures,
but also in inscriptions such as this one, from
a mosaic in Megiddo which was part of
the floor of a building used for
Christian gatherings in the late 200's:
“Akeptous, she who loves God,
has offered the table to God Jesus Christ
as a memorial.”
No surprise, of course, but nomina sacra are also found in the Dura Parchment 24 ('the crucified', Jesus, and God, respectively).
It looks like this piece of paper is not done haunting LC.
You can also find it (applied to the word God) in an early fourth century letter from a Christian sent during the Great Persecution (probably from Alexandria).
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 140#p30627
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 519#p30507(3) The problem of a satisfactory theory of the universal use of the orthodox "nomina sacra" by heretics.
Why did the heretical authors consistently used the orthodox nomina sacra? The alternative theory offers the
explanation that Constantine, as the rightful Pontifex Maximus, had the right to nominate and patronise the god of his
choice. Constantine's god was an encrypted name in a sacred codex. The heretics were responding to the emperor's agenda
and they used his explicit literary forms for these sacred name. The universal use is explained on account of the small
time frame of a decade or so, rather than two or more centuries required under the mainstream theory. The longer the
timeframe, the lesser is the possibility of universal consistency.
Nonsense.As such we only need a very small timeframe to generate a mass of diverse literature related to the SACRED CODEX manufactured by Constantine. This small timeframe elegantly explains the history of the use of the nomina sacra in the non canonical literature, and its almost universal consistency. The one generation which wrote and produced the "Christian gnostic literature" simply copied the nomina sacra convention employed in Constantine's Bible (think Vaticanus, Sinaticus, Alexandrinus).
Naturally, "There Is No Evidence" of which Leucius Charinus is aware that contradicts his ideas. He doesn't look very hard, and, then, if someone points it out, he tries very hard to work around it.