IN HIS NAME: What’s in a name? – 1

• IN HIS NAME – Whose ‘Word’ is the Bible? – 2
• God Has Two Names?
• IN HIS NAME – Where in What Bible is His Word? – 3
• IN HIS NAME: YHWH True Name of our Creator – 4a
• IN HIS NAME – 4b: Disagreements on Declaring the Name
• IN HIS NAME: The problem with Ha Shem, G-d, L-rd – 5
• IN HIS NAME, amen! -8
• The Names of God —- Perspective of a Noahide
• The Names of God – a Jewish perspective

“Who would you be if you didn’t know your name?” is the first line of a song my son wrote.  I had to think about that . . . Really, what’s in a name?  Identity, character, personal history, reputation, achievement, connectivity, context, legacy, stigma, to name a few.

How important is it to get a name right? To function in this world, absolutely necessary! It figures in employment, drivers license, company/school ID, citizenship, social security, bank transactions, property rights, routine matters, death certificates, relational issues such as paternity, inheritance, royalty blue blood claims to the throne.

Reputation —whether honor or shame—is likewise carried in the name, whether persons lived well or badly.  And fortunately as well as unfortunately, such good or ill repute spill over to progenitors; hence proverbs such as ‘the apple does not fall far from the apple tree’.  Drop a name and it either opens or closes doors of opportunity.

We are named at birth, and unless it is changed in marriage and for legal reasons, that name spells out our very existence. It ends up etched on a gravestone, but mention the name of a deceased and that alone evokes specific images and thoughts associated with that name.

Talk show hosts occasionally play an interesting name game with their guests who are asked to give in an instant, a word that best characterizes the person named, at least in that guest’s viewpoint.  Think about what one word would characterize you? Or does that word depend on the perceiver? Do people see the real you or do you have a public face different from private?  Are you an open book or a closed one? Does your essence fit the name you bear, if it was not your choice?

In this day and age of unbelievable scams perpetrated on personal information relating to a name, it is all the more urgent to take precautionary measures protecting one’s name, identity, and personal information. Just as ruinous is gossip or false accusation as well as scandal broadsheets that proliferate which blow out of proportion the slightest rumor whether baseless or not, which are so easily taken for truth, simply because they are spread around even by disreputable media.

You would think identity theft is a new phenomenon but no, it is as old as the need to impersonate someone for any reason at all. In the field of literature, forgeries proliferated all through the centuries.  Unfortunately we do live in a world of deceptions and forgeries and it is becoming more difficult to ferret out the truth, though science has developed enough technology to unmask counterfeits.

Bart D. Ehrman, Christian scholar turned atheist, wrote a fascinating book about this with a simple title: FORGED:

“When I give public lectures on forgery, I am often asked, “Who would do such a thing?”  The answer is, “Lots of people!”  And for lots of different reasons.  The most common reason today, of course, is to make money . . . . The forgery trade continues to thrive; forgeries in the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, an many, many others continue to flood the market, as recent literature on modern forgery so aptly attests.  These forgeries are almost always produced in order to be sold as authentic.  There was a good deal of that kind of activity in the ancient world as well (and far fewer forgery experts who could detect a forgery if they saw one), although it was not a major factor within early Christianity.  This was for a simple reason:  Christian books were not, by and large, for sale.”

From this book, you learn a few new words to add to your vocabulary, such as:

• “Orthonymous” (literally, “rightly named”), writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it.  Seven of Paul’s 13 epistles are orthonymous, so he claims.
• “Homonymous” (literally, “same named”) is writing that is written by someone who happens to have the same name as someone else.

• “Anonymous” we know about, literally it means “having no name.”  These are authors who choose not to identify themselves.  Ehrman claims that technically speaking, anonymity is true of 1/3 of the New Testament books, that none of the four gospels actually tell us the name of its author and only later did Christians assign names. He adds that the “anonymous” author of the book of Hebrews would like readers to think it was authored by Paul even if it wasn’t.
• “Pseudonymous” (literally, “falsely named”) refers to any book that appears under the name of someone other than the author.

Ehrman says there are two kinds of pseudonymous writings:  one is that the author simply takes a pen name and he gives the example of Samuel Clemens—who chose the name ‘Mark Twain’ of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn fame.  Think of George Elliott who was actually a woman writing under a man’s name during a time women might not have been published.

In this website, in case you haven’t noticed, contributors have opted to use 3 initials appended to “@S6K” to consistently project that the author is a Sinaite and is identifiable in person only to this small community.  We decided this because we are dealing with unknown visitors on the internet and have resorted to maintaining some privacy, specially since the ‘crusade’ we’ve specifically embraced is, to put it mildly, hardly a popular one.

The second type of pseudonymous writing, explains Ehrman, involves a book that is circulated under the name of someone else, usually some kind of authority figure who is presumed to be well known to the reading audience.  For this type, he uses the technical term “pseudepigraphy” (literally, “written under a false name”). To elaborate, pseudepigraphical writing is one that is claimed to be written by a famous, well-known, or authoritative person who did not in fact write it.

To complicate matters further, there are two kinds of this—one where the readers presume who the author is and ascribe the writing to that person and that is called “mistaken ascription.”  The other pseudonymous pseudepigraphical writing is one where the author himself chooses to fool his readers and ascribes his writing to another famous person.

If this is all getting to be very confusing, it is vital to try to understand because all this is dealing with a book that is probably the most printed and reprinted, the most translated and retranslated, the top-selling book worldwide, but  relegated to private bookshelves and casually read, perhaps not as well understood, but thankfully scrutinized by biblical scholars non-stop over centuries.  The reason for this is only one:  it claims to be authored by God Himself.  Skeptics, atheists and agnostics would challenge that authorship claim, but few believers do.

Who authored the Bible?  If it is “God, “what is His Name?  If ‘pseudephigraphers’ wrote “in God’s Name”, then who could they have been?  In this day and age of information technology and updated research in antiquity and archeology, books are coming out of the woodworks exposing the actual or presumed authors of the books of the Bible, both in the “New” Testament as well as the “Old”.  We will be featuring more such books soon!

NSB@S6K