Jumpstarter 7 of 10

Direct Answer Bercot’s argument implies that God prioritized making Scripture accessible for the Greek-speaking world and the Church’s mission, even if that meant not preserving the precise Hebrew form of the divine name and instead using widely understood titles like “God” and “Lord.”

Support from Transcript:

• He says the Septuagint translators chose not to create a Greek form of YHWH and “simply used the titles ‘God or Lord’ to replace it,” even though YHWH appears “around 6,800 times” in the Masoretic.
• He reasons that if this were merely human tradition, “we would expect… Jesus would have set things straight,” since Jesus opposed human traditions.
• Yet “Jesus never uses the divine name… nor do any of the apostles or New Testament writers,” so Bercot concludes “it must not have been a human decision… and it all began with the Septuagint.”
• He ties this to Koine Greek: God inspired the NT in “coini Greek… following the decision… when he providentially provided the Septuagint for the Greek-speaking world.”
• He argues rejecting providence forces a coincidence: translators “just happened to use the same style of Greek” later used by NT writers.