Why did Catholics remove God's name from the Bible?

Answer 1

They didn't. God is found throughout the Catholic Bible, Old Testament and New Testament.

Which Bible translation or version you use also determines how often you see God's "name" used. "Jehovah" is found in many Bibles. You will find it about 7000 times in the American Standard Version, The Bible in Living English, the 'Holy Scriptures' (Darby), and the New World Translation.

In the King James Version it is found in 4 places, but in the New King James Version, it has been totally removed. The same situation exists in the Revised Standard Version and the New International Version. In some translations, such as the Jerusalem Bible, the Hebrew rendering "Yahweh" is used throughout.

Quite simply, no Bible removes God's name from it - that is absurd. The problem is that JWs will have you believe this to be the case because that is what they have been taught. However, their founder, Charles Taize Russell, had no formal Bible training and had no idea of the original languages of the Old or New testament. When he claimed to have great knowledge, he was forced to backtrack under oath in court and confess that he did not even have a basic knowledge of Biblical New Testament Greek - he could not even recite the Greek alphabet when commanded. as for his knowledge of Hebrew, this was non existent too.

As any Bible scholar will tell you, in the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) the name of God, 'Yah Weh' meaning 'I am who I am' is used only twice. Once in Exodus when God speaks from the burning bush and reveals his name to Moses, and the other in the Gospels, where Jesus uses the same title when he says to the Pharisees "even before Abraham was, I am" at which the Pharisees tried to attack him because, as they say "he claimed to be God".

We Anglicise 'Jah Weh' and use a corruption of this name - Jehovah - as the name of God. However, far from being omitted from the Old Testament, and far from it being 'Satan's plan to make God impersonal', to the Jews the name of God was so holy that it was unutterable. It was never spoken nor written down. In its place they used words like 'Adonai' which means, roughly, 'Lord'.

That is why, in many Bibles, you will not see God's name 'Jehovah' used. You will not see it in Jewish synagogue scrolls. You will not see it in the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls either. It was not written down. Instead, you will see other replacements, 'Adonai' being the most common.

In Bible translations today, Adonai is not used but Lord is. When you see a Bible and the word 'Lord' is written with a capital 'L' and lower case 'ord' then it simply means 'Lord'. However, when you see it written as a large upper case 'L' followed by a small upper case 'ORD', then that signifies that in the original Hebrew that word was Adonai or another replacement for the unutterable, holy, name of God.

Of course, some Bibles do not follow this convention, but contrary to the answer above, the New King James version, the RSV and the NIV all do, and God's unutterable, holy name is replaced throughout by LORD, as it would have been in the original Hebrew. It could therefore be argued that those Bibles that DO use Jehovah's name throughout, like the Jehovah's Witness new World 'Translation' are guilty of disrespect, and certainly a Jew reading the Hebrew scriptures containing the unutterable holy name of God would certainly be offended by it.