Jesus Is Yahweh: The Divine-Name Argument

There was a name the people of Israel would not say aloud. Written with four Hebrew consonants—YHWH—it was the personal name of the God who had spoken to Moses from the fire, and reverence for it ran so deep that when a reader reached it in the text he said Adonai, “Lord,” instead. As Israel’s Scriptures circulated in Greek, the divine name came to be rendered, again and again, with Kyrios, “Lord”—though how early is debated, as we will see. That name belonged to God alone. “I am the LORD; that is my name,” he says through Isaiah; “my glory I give to no other” (Isaiah 42:8).

And yet the earliest Christians—Jewish monotheists who guarded that name as jealously as anyone—did something startling with it. They took the texts that spoke of YHWH, and the name itself, and they applied both to a crucified Galilean. This essay makes a bounded historical claim: that the New Testament writers identify Jesus with the God of Israel not by inventing a new title but by giving him the old one—the divine Name, and the Scriptures that belong to its bearer alone. The claim is not that any one verse settles the doctrine of the Trinity; it is that a consistent, deliberate pattern runs across distinct kinds of early material, and that the pattern is very hard to explain if Jesus was, for these writers, anything less than the LORD.

A word to handle with care

One honesty must come first, because this is where popular apologetics most often overreaches. It is sometimes argued that the Hebrew word for “one” in the Shema—“the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4)—is echad, a word for “compound” unity (as in “one flesh”), and that it therefore hints at plurality within God. That argument proves far less than its enthusiasts suppose, and intellectual honesty requires saying so plainly: the plurality in “one flesh” comes from the noun, not from echad, which is simply the ordinary Hebrew numeral “one” and routinely describes things that are emphatically singular.¹ The case that Jesus is the LORD does not rest on a lexical trick about a single word. It rests on something much harder to wave away: what the New Testament writers actually do with the divine name.

The name that renders YHWH

Here a second honesty is owed, because the point is more disputed than apologetic summaries usually admit. Exactly what the earliest Greek copies of the Jewish Scriptures wrote where the Hebrew had YHWH, and what was said aloud over them, is genuinely debated: several pre-Christian copies preserve the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew letters rather than the Greek Kyrios.² But the New Testament writers settle the question for their own usage. When they quote a passage where the Hebrew has YHWH, they write Kyrios—and they then take those very passages and apply them to Jesus. Whatever a first-century synagogue said aloud, that is what the apostles did in Greek, on the page. It is that move, repeated and deliberate, that carries the argument.

Yahweh’s own texts, spoken of Jesus

Begin with Paul writing to the Romans. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord… you will be saved,” he says, and then clinches it: “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (Romans 10:9–13). That last line quotes Joel 2:32, where the Lord upon whose name one calls is YHWH himself. Paul takes a text about calling on the covenant name of God and, without a word of apology, makes it a text about calling on Jesus.³

The pattern recurs. The hymn Paul quotes in Philippians reaches the moment of Jesus’s exaltation and reaches, for its language, into Isaiah 45—one of the most fiercely monotheistic chapters in all of Scripture, where the LORD swears, “To me every knee shall bow… every tongue shall swear allegiance” (Isaiah 45:23), in the very passage that insists “I am the LORD, and there is no other.” The hymn bends that exclusive oath to Jesus: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10–11).⁴ Peter does the same with the reverence Isaiah reserves for God: “in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy” (1 Peter 3:15) reworks Isaiah 8:13, where it is “the LORD of hosts” whom Israel must “honor as holy”—now redirected to Christ.⁵ And the writer to the Hebrews takes Psalm 102, a hymn addressed to the eternal Creator—“you, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth,” as Hebrews quotes it from the Greek—and puts it on the Father’s lips as words spoken to the Son (Hebrews 1:10–12).⁶

A monotheist does not do this by accident, and he does not do it with a creature. To take the chapter of Isaiah that most insists there is no god beside the LORD, and to apply its exclusive oath to Jesus, is not to add a second, lesser lord to the picture. It is to say that the one who bears this name is the LORD.

The name above every name

The Philippians hymn says as much in so many words. God “has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). In a Jewish frame there is only one name above every name; it is the Name itself. The gift Jesus receives at his exaltation is not a promotion to some high rank among creatures but the disclosure that the name he bears—Kyrios, the word the New Testament writers use where the Hebrew has YHWH—is the divine one. (Whether the hymn invokes the Name specifically, rather than “Lord” more loosely, is itself debated among interpreters; but the exaltation to “the name that is above every name” points that way.) On that reading, to confess “Jesus Christ is Lord” is to confess him with the creed’s own word for God.

Inside the Shema itself

The boldest instance is a single sentence from a former Pharisee. Writing to Corinth around AD 53, in a chapter explicitly about the danger of idolatry, Paul sets the gospel against the pagan world’s “many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’” and then confesses: “yet for us there is one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6). To hear its force you have to hear the Shema underneath it. In the Greek of Paul’s Bible, Deuteronomy 6:4 runs Kyrios ho theos… Kyrios heis—the creed carries two words for the one God of Israel, theos (“God”) and Kyrios (“Lord,” standing for the Name). Paul takes those two words and distributes them: the “one God” is the Father, and the “one Lord” is Jesus Christ. He has not added a second deity alongside the creed; he has reached inside it and placed Jesus within it. Richard Bauckham calls this including Jesus in the “unique divine identity” of the God of Israel; N. T. Wright, that Paul has rewritten the Shema around Jesus.⁷ The reading is influential, arguably dominant—and genuinely contested, as we will see. What is not in doubt is that Paul does it in the middle of an argument against idolatry, where smuggling in a second divine power would be the very sin he is condemning.⁸

“Before Abraham was, I am”

John gives the pattern its sharpest edge. Several times Jesus speaks an “I am” (eg&omacron; eimi) with no predicate to complete it—most startlingly, “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), at which his hearers pick up stones. The closest and most widely recognized background is the LORD’s self-declaration in Isaiah 40–55—“I am he” (Hebrew ’anî hû’), which the Greek Old Testament renders with the very same absolute eg&omacron; eimi: “understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me” (Isaiah 43:10).⁹ (A tie to God’s self-naming at the burning bush, “I AM WHO I AM” in Exodus 3:14, is often heard as well, but it is the weaker and more contested link, since the Greek there renders the divine name not by eg&omacron; eimi but by ho &omacron;n, “the One who is.”) A determined critic can read the present tense as a mere “I have been,” and the saying still claims existence before Abraham; but the natural reading names an existence that never began, and the hearers plainly heard a claim only God could make—which is why they reached for stones.

The strongest objections, at full strength

Three replies are owed, and each has serious defenders.

“Kyrios just means ‘lord’—a title of respect, or at most a supreme agent.” The word is ordinary on the surface; it can mean “sir” or “master.” And Second Temple Judaism knew of exalted intermediary figures—great angels, personified Wisdom, exalted patriarchs—who bear God’s authority, even his name, without being God. On this reading (pressed by Jehovah’s Witnesses and by biblical Unitarians) Jesus is God’s supreme agent, given the Name as an ambassador bears his king’s, not as the LORD himself. This must be met on its merits, and part of it is granted: not every “Lord” on Jesus’s lips carries the freight of the Name. But the argument here does not rest on the ordinary uses; it rests on the loaded ones—the places where a YHWH-text is quoted and turned on Jesus. And an agent has a ceiling. The intermediary figures of Second Temple Judaism characteristically refuse worship and redirect it to God (“Worship God,” cries the angel in Revelation 19:10), whereas the first Christians prayed to Jesus, called on his name, and sang to him. No shaliach was ever given the exclusive oath of Isaiah 45 or written into the Shema. Agency conferred authority; it never conferred the Name and the worship together.

“Calling Jesus ‘Lord’ was a late, Greek development.” A century ago Wilhelm Bousset argued in Kyrios Christos that worship of Jesus as “Lord” arose not among the first Aramaic-speaking disciples but later, in the Hellenistic Gentile churches surrounded by the “lords” of pagan cult.¹⁰ The most damaging reply is a single Aramaic word. Writing in Greek to Corinth in the early 50s, Paul preserves untranslated an Aramaic prayer his readers already knew: Marana tha, “Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22). Bousset’s defenders reply that he located the Kyrios-cult in bilingual Syrian centers—Damascus and Antioch—where Aramaic was spoken alongside Greek, so an Aramaic formula does not by itself reach behind that mission. But Paul was in contact with the Jerusalem leaders within a few years of his conversion (Galatians 1:18–19), and he records his clashes openly—over circumcision with the “false brothers” (Galatians 2:3–5) and over table fellowship with Cephas himself (2:11–14); nowhere does he record any dispute over praying to Jesus as Lord. A formula his Greek readers knew untranslated, addressed to Jesus in prayer and never, so far as Paul records, disputed by Jerusalem, points back behind Paul’s Greek toward the earliest church.¹¹ The devotion is primitive and Jewish, not late and Greek. (James Dunn, who grants the early date, still resists the conclusion: for him “Lord” distinguishes Jesus from God rather than identifying him with God—an exalted Lord exercising God’s rule. But the distinction Dunn finds is one the Christian confession itself insists on: Jesus is distinguished from God the Father. The title that distinguishes him is the Name itself. Paul is not demoting Jesus by calling him “Lord” but including him in the Shema; far from a lesser title, “one Lord”—on the reading of Bauckham and Wright set out above, which McGrath contests and the next reply defends—places Jesus inside Israel’s confession of the one God. So Dunn’s dissent does not hold.)

“You have built a mountain on one creative theologian.” This objection has a factual kernel, and the kernel should be granted precisely. The single verse in 1 Corinthians 8:6 is contested: James McGrath argues that Paul sets “one Lord” alongside the one God rather than folding him inside the creed.¹² And it is true that several of the strongest divine-name texts are Paul’s, two of them in a single letter—so they are not, strictly, independent sources.¹³ But two things answer the charge. First, the dilemma inside 1 Corinthians 8:6: because “one Lord” carries the creed’s own divine title, the “alongside” reading, in an anti-idolatry argument, yields not strict monotheism but a second divine power through whom all things were made—which is exactly what it set out to avoid. The reading that keeps monotheism is the one that confesses the one divine identity under both of the creed’s titles. Second, the material is not all of one kind or all from Paul: it runs across a fixed liturgical prayer (Marana tha), scriptural citations (Joel, Isaiah), a creedal reformulation (the Shema), the Petrine reworking of Isaiah 8, Hebrews’ use of Psalm 102, and the Johannine “I am”—and at least two of these are widely judged to be tradition Paul inherited rather than coined. A critic who wants the pattern gone must explain a Greek-speaking mission preserving, untranslated, an Aramaic prayer to Jesus it did not invent.

What this establishes, and what it does not

The reach of the argument should be stated plainly, because overstating it is how a true case turns brittle. It does not prove the doctrine of the Trinity from a single verse, and it does not rest on the discredited claim that echad means a plural unity. Several of the readings it draws on are genuinely contested—the split of the Shema above all—and honesty names the scholars who read them the other way. Nor does it settle, by itself, the metaphysics of how the one God is Father, Son, and Spirit; that is the larger work of the doctrine of the Trinity, argued elsewhere in this Library.

What it does establish is enough to be going on with, and it is remarkable. The earliest Christians—monotheists who would die before bowing to an idol—took the name their people would not pronounce, and the Scriptures that name its bearer as the only God, and gave both to a crucified man. They did it early, some of it in Aramaic, and they did it on purpose. That is not the reverence owed a great teacher, or even a supreme angel. It is the confession that the one who was crucified bears the Name that is above every name—and that, in a Jew, is a claim about the identity of God himself. And we hold that the confession is true. Jesus is the LORD—not a second god beside YHWH, and not the Father under another name, but the Son who shares the one divine Name with the Father. He is, as Nicaea confessed, true God from true God, one God with the Father and the Spirit, a mystery we confess rather than a formula we have mastered. He is also truly the crucified man: fully God and fully man, two natures in one person. This argument does not prove all of that. It shows that the earliest Christians confessed Jesus as the LORD, early and on purpose, and it clears the charge that his deity was a later invention.