THE IN GREGORY NAZIANZEN (OR. 30.17)

BY

F. W. NORRIS

In support of his central argument against the Neo-Arians that God's essence cannot be named, Gregory Nazianzen says the following in Or. 30.17:

"The divinity is not designated by its name. And this not only the arguments [above] demonstrate but also the wise and ancient Hebrews used special characters to venerate the divine and did not allow that the name of anything inferior to God should be written with the same letters as that of "God," on the ground that the divine should not have even this in com- I mon with our things."' In 1899 A. J. Mason commented on that statement: "While it is well known that Jews never pronounced the name, there seems to be no ground for saying that it was written in a peculiar script."2 In a similar vein E. R. Hardy noted in his 1954 English translation that the Theologian's observation has caused a certain amount of confusion primarily because it refers to alphabetical letters rather than words.3 Paul Gallay in his 1978 edition of Nazianzen's Theological Orations refers the text to the same context, i.e., the Jewish practice of pronounc- ing the divine name as ADONAI rather than YAHWEH, but he does 4 not indicate that such an interpretation creates a problem.' It does. Nazianzen's statement refers not to the pronunciation of a different word, but to the writing of different characters. The practice that marks the Massoretic editing of texts involves a dissimilar procedure. In the Massoretic text the Tetragrammaton is writ- ten one way and pronounced another. That is the wrong referent. Gregory does not speak of different words but different letters. Joseph Barbel provides a clearer context for Nazianzen's observation in his 1963 commentary on the Theological Orations. Citing a volume from P. E. Kahle, he notices that Aquila's Greek translation of the Old Testament rendered the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew script rather than 340 transliterating or translating the divine name into Greek.5 On the basis particularly of a palimpsest manuscript of Aquila's translation, Kahle argued that Christian manuscripts containing Greek translations of the Old Testament, at least up to the time of , had followed such a practice by writing the divine name in Hebrew characters. They neither transliterated it into Greek letters nor replaced it with the word I ``kyrios."6 Barbel's interpretation is sound and can be strengthened by further evidence. Discoveries of texts have contradicted Mason's observation that "there seems to be no ground for saying that it [the divine name] was written in a peculiar script." Bruce Metzger discusses a group of Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament that contain the Tetragrammaton written in Hebrew script.' The oldest extant text of the Septuagint is the set of fragments in Fouad Papyrus 266, which dates from the first century B.C. and came to light in 1943. Thirty-one times in the more than one hundred fragments the divine name is written in "square Hebrew letters."8 Fragments of a ninth or tenth century palimpsest of Origen's Hexapla contain the same style Hebrew letters when the Tetragrammaton is written.' Greek Fragments from a roll con- taining the Twelve Prophets, sometimes dated as early as the last half of the first century B.C. or the first half of the first century A.D., pro- vide examples of the divine name written in palaeo-Hebrew letters.'° Fifth or sixth century manuscript fragments of the palimpsest contain- ing Aquila's translation of the Old Testament employ the same prac- tice." It is difficult to say whether Gregory saw Greek manuscripts with the square Hebrew characters or with the palaeo-Hebrew characters, but in either case Hebrew characters for the divine name in a Greek manuscript could be the phenomena to which he refers. A second interpretation that serves as an alternative to Gallay's explanation involves groups of Greek letters used for the divine name. They may represent either an attempt to transliterate the divine name, an attempt to render it in phonetic form, or a representation of older symbols for divinity. In most instances they remain confusing, at least to me. A papyrus fragment from the Septuagint of Leviticus, found at Qumran, contains the divine name perhaps written phonetically, i.e., as iota, alpha, omega.' Evagrius of Pontus, who studied with Gregory, noted that there were other such forms which he had seen: iota, omega, 3 theta; eta, pi; omega, upsilon, alpha, iota; and iota, eta, pi.11 The most frequently attested and most understandable of these