Why is the name Jehovah not contained in the New Testament?

Answer 1

Commenting on the use of the name of God in it's Hebrew form (tetragrammaton), in the Journal of BiblicalLiterature, George Howard of the University of Georgia wrote: "We know for a fact that Greek-speaking Jews continued to write יהוה within their Greek Scriptures. (New Testament writings) Moreover, it is most unlikely that early conservative Greek-speaking Jewish Christians varied from this practice. Although in secondary references to God they probably used the words [God] and [Lord], it would have been extremely unusual for them to have dismissed the Tetragram from the biblical text itself. . . . Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text. . . . But when it was removed from the Greek O[ld] T[estament], it was also removed from the quotations of the O[ld] T[estament] in the N[ew] T[estament]. Thus somewhere around the beginning of the second century the use of surrogates [substitutes] must have crowded out the Tetragram in both Testaments."-Vol. 96, No. 1, March 1977, pp. 76, 77.

In other words, he states that the evidence indicates that the name was in the original New Testament writings, but it was also at a time when the New Testament was brand new, it had just been recently written. He says that the use of substitutes such as "Lord" and "God" was at that time crowding out the use of the divine name in both the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament(NT). When the name was removed from the OT, it was removed from the NT as well. There are many examples of scriptures that the NT writers quoted directly from the OT. Yet, in most NT translations we have today, the divine name is substituted for a surrogate title, even though the divine name of God was found in the original OT scripture that the NT writer was quoting from.

A historian living in the fourth century, named Jerome wrote: "Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed." (De virisinlustribus, chap. III) This Gospel includes 11 direct quotations of portions of the Hebrew Scriptures where the Tetragrammaton is found. There is no reason to believe that Matthew did not quote the passages as they were written in the Hebrew text from which he quoted. Any changes that were made to the passages, including leaving out the divine name of God, were made later.

Answer 2

The name "Jehovah" is not contained in the New Testament because it is a Latinized version of the Hebrew name for God, "YHWH." The New Testament was written in Greek and uses the Greek equivalent "Kyrios" (Lord) instead of "YHWH" when referring to God.