Nomen Sacrum

In Christian scribal practice, (singular: , Latin for 'sacred name') is the abbreviation of several frequently occurring divine names or titles, especially in Greek manuscripts of the Bible. A consists of two or more letters from the original word spanned by an overline.

Biblical scholar and textual critic Bruce M. Metzger lists 15 such words treated as from Greek papyri: the Greek counterparts of ''God'', ''Lord'', ''Jesus'', ''Christ'', ''Son'', ''Spirit'', ''David'', ''Cross'', ''Mother'', ''Father'', ''Israel'', ''Savior'', ''Man'', ''Jerusalem'', and ''Heaven''. These are all found in Greek manuscripts of the 3rd century and earlier, except ''Mother'', which appears in the 4th. All 15 occur in Greek manuscripts later than the 4th century.

also occur in some form in Latin, Coptic, Armenian (indicated by the '' pativ''), Gothic, Old Nubian, Old Irish and Cyrillic (indicated by the ''titlo'').

Origin and development

]
are consistently observed in even the earliest extant Christian writings, along with the codex form rather than the roll, implying that when these were written, in approximately the second century, the practice had already been established for some time. However, it is not known precisely when and how the first arose.

The initial system of apparently consisted of just four or five words, called ''nomina divina'': the Greek words for ''Jesus'', ''Christ'', ''Lord'', ''God'', and possibly ''Spirit''. The practice quickly expanded to a number of other words regarded as sacred.

In the system of that came to prevail, abbreviation is by ''contraction'', meaning that the first and last letter (at least) of each word are used. In a few early cases, an alternate practice is seen of abbreviation by ''suspension'', meaning that the initial two letters (at least) of the word are used; e.g., the opening verses of Revelation in write (''Jesus Christ'') as . Contraction, however, offered the practical advantage of indicating the case of the abbreviated noun.

It is evident that the use of was an act of reverence rather than a purely practical space-saving device, as they were employed even where well-established abbreviations of far more frequent words such as ''and'' were avoided, and the ''nomen sacrum'' itself was written with generous spacing. Furthermore, early scribes often distinguished between mundane and sacred occurrences of the same word, e.g. a ''spirit'' vs. the ''Spirit'', and applied ''nomina sacra'' only to the latter (at times necessarily revealing an exegetical choice), although later scribes would mechanically abbreviate all occurrences.

Scholars have advanced a number of theories on the origin of the . Biblical scholar Larry Hurtado has suggested Greek numerals as the origin of the overline spanning the ''nomen sacrum'', with , the ordinary way of writing "18", being taken as reminiscent of a suspended form of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ (Jesus). In some Greek Scripture manuscripts the Hebrew tetragrammaton (transliterated as YHWH) is found unabbreviated in the Greek text. The Septuagint manuscript Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1007 even uses an abbreviated form of the tetragrammaton: two Greek zetas with a horizontal line through the middle, imitating two Paleo-Hebrew ''yodhs'' (𐤉‬𐤉).

Greek culture also employed a number of ways of abbreviating even proper names, though none in quite the same form as the . Inspiration for the contracted forms (using the first and last letter) has also been seen in Revelation, where Jesus speaks of himself as "the beginning and the end" and "the first and the last" as well " the Alpha and the Omega".

Linguist George Howard argues that (κύριος) and (θεός) were the initial , created by non-Jewish Christian scribes who "found no traditional reasons to preserve the tetragrammaton" in copies of the Septuagint. Hurtado, following Colin Roberts, rejects that claim in favour of the theory that the first was (Ἰησοῦς), as suggested in the Epistle of Barnabas, followed by the analogous (Χριστός), and later by and , at about the time when the contracted forms and were adopted for the first two.

Cilliers Breytenbach and Christiane Zimmermann report that by the end of the 2nd century occur even in Christian tomb inscriptions in Greek in Lycaonia (modern central Turkey).

List of Greek

Source:

New Testament Greek manuscripts containing (before 300 CE)

Greek manuscript identification has the main Gregory-Aland siglum first, with the shelf number at the respective papyri locations in brackets.All and ''dates of manuscripts'' taken from ''Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts'' - Philip Comfort and David Barrett (2001).

See also

* Christogram
* Staurogram

References

Further reading

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Abbreviations
Christian symbols
Early Christian inscriptions
Christian terminology
Latin words and phrases