Professor George Howard, in an article appearing in the Biblical Archaeology Review, March 1978, offered strong arguments for this conclusion. For example, he mentions “a famous rabbinic passage (Talmud Shabbat 13.5)” that “discusses the problem of destroying heretical texts (very probably including books of Jewish-Christians).” What was the problem? “The heretical texts contain the divine name, and their wholesale destruction would include the destruction of the divine name.”

But what of Rosin’s second objection? Would the use of God’s name cause problems for Christendom? Well, consider what happened when the name was removed. After the first century, “Christian” copyists replaced God’s name with words like “God” and “Lord” in both the Septuagint and the Christian Greek Scriptures. According to Professor Howard, this likely contributed to the turmoil that Christendom experienced in later years: “It may be that the removal of the Tetragrammaton [God’s name in Hebrew] contributed significantly to the later Christological and Trinitarian debates which plagued the church of the early Christian centuries.”

Professor Howard said in addition: “The removal of the Tetragrammaton probably created a different theological climate from that which existed during the New Testament period of the first century. The Jewish God who had always been carefully distinguished from all others by the use of his Hebrew name lost some of his distinctiveness with the passing of the Tetragrammaton.”