In Christian scribal practice, nomina sacra (singular: ''nomen sacrum'' from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

''sacred name'') is the abbreviation of several frequently occurring divine names or titles, especially in

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

manuscripts of the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts ...

. A nomen sacrum consists of two or more letters from the original word spanned by an

overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a '' vinculum'', a notation for grouping symbols which is expressed in m ...

. Biblical scholar and textual critic

Bruce M. Metzger Bruce Manning Metzger (February 9, 1914 – February 13, 2007) was an American biblical scholar, Bible translator and textual critic who was a longtime professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and Bible editor who served on the board of the ...

lists 15 such words treated as ''nomina sacra'' from Greek papyri: the Greek counterparts of ''God'', ''Lord'', ''Jesus'', ''Christ'', ''Son'', ''Spirit'', ''David'', ''Cross'', ''Mother'', ''Father'', ''Israel'', ''Savior'', ''Man'', ''Jerusalem'', and ''Heaven''. These ''nomina sacra'' 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. ''Nomina sacra'' also occur in some form in

, Coptic,

Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...

(indicated by the '' pativ''), Gothic,

Old Nubian Old Nubian (also called Middle Nubian or Old Nobiin) is an extinct Nubian language, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and closely related to Dongolawi and Kenzi. It was used throughou ...

, and Cyrillic (indicated by the ''

titlo Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol initially used in early Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek "", "title" (compare dated English '' tittle' ...

'').

Origin and development

] ''Nomina sacra'' are consistently observed in even the earliest extant Christian writings, along with the codex form rather than the

roll Roll or Rolls may refer to: Movement about the longitudinal axis * Roll angle (or roll rotation), one of the 3 angular degrees of freedom of any stiff body (for example a vehicle), describing motion about the longitudinal axis ** Roll (aviation) ...

, 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 ''nomina sacra'' first arose. The initial system of ''nomina sacra'' 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 ''nomina sacra'' 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 ''nomina sacra'' 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 ''nomina sacra''. Biblical scholar Larry Hurtado has suggested

Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to tho ...

as the origin of the

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 The Tetragrammaton (; ), or Tetragram, is the four-letter Hebrew theonym (transliterated as YHWH), the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. The four letters, written and read from right to left (in Hebrew), are ''yodh'', '' he'', '' waw'', and ...

(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

zeta Zeta (, ; uppercase Ζ, lowercase ζ; grc, ζῆτα, el, ζήτα, label= Demotic Greek, classical or ''zē̂ta''; ''zíta'') is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived f ...

s with a horizontal line through the middle, imitating two Paleo-Hebrew ''

yodh Yodh (also spelled jodh, yod, or jod) is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd /𐤉, Hebrew Yōd , Aramaic Yod , Syriac Yōḏ ܝ, and Arabic . Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many l ...

s'' (𐤉‬𐤉). Greek culture also employed a number of ways of abbreviating even proper names, though none in quite the same form as the ''nomina sacra''. Inspiration for the contracted forms (using the first and last letter) has also been seen in

Revelation In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or other supernatural entity or entities. Background Inspiration – such as that bestowed by God on the ...

, where Jesus speaks of himself as "the beginning and the end" and "the first and the last" as well "

the Alpha and the Omega Alpha (Α or α) and omega (Ω or ω) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a title of Christ and God in the Book of Revelation. This pair of letters is used as a Christian symbol, and is often combined with the Cross, Chi-r ...

". Linguist George Howard argues that (κύριος) and (θεός) were the initial ''nomina sacra'', 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 The ''Epistle of Barnabas'' ( el, Βαρνάβα Ἐπιστολή) is a Greek epistle written between AD 70 and 132. The complete text is preserved in the 4th-century ''Codex Sinaiticus'', where it appears immediately after the New Testament a ...

, 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 ''nomina sacra'' occur even in Christian tomb inscriptions in Greek in

Lycaonia Lycaonia (; el, Λυκαονία, ''Lykaonia''; tr, Likaonya) was a large region in the interior of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), north of the Taurus Mountains. It was bounded on the east by Cappadocia, on the north by Galatia, on the west by ...

(modern central Turkey).

List of Greek ''nomina sacra''

New Testament Greek manuscripts containing ''nomina sacra'' (before 300 CE)All ''nomina sacra'' and ''dates of manuscripts'' taken from ''Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts'' - Philip Comfort and David Barrett (2001)

Origin and development

List of Greek ''nomina sacra''

New Testament Greek manuscripts containing ''nomina sacra'' (before 300 CE)All ''nomina sacra'' and ''dates of manuscripts'' taken from ''Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts'' - Philip Comfort and David Barrett (2001)

See also

References

Further reading