My wife and I are blessed with two wonderful children, aged 8 and 6, and live just outside Marseille in the south of France. We moved here about 15 years ago to help plant a church.
Until 2018 I worked for the Non-profit Open Doors in favour of persecuted Christians, as a national field coordinator. For several years I have been interested in the Septuagint. My research eventually led me to write a book on translating Kyrios, ’the Lord’, which Wipf & Stock have accepted for publication.
Thank You Lord: After 600 Years of Service, Why Should the Lord Retire and How?
Abstract
Outside of Scripture citation, today’s younger generations seem to use ‘the Lord’ less, especially when engaging the unbelieving world. We simply prefer ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’, and with good reason. According to various metrics, ‘Lord’ usage has significantly decreased since its medieval root and is perceived with a historical and/or religious gloss (besides some sinister exceptions). A second problem compounds the first: the English ‘Lord’ is necessarily ‘arthrous’: ‘the Lord’. We now know κύριος was not.
The importance of the problem should be obvious: we don’t want to perpetuate a usage that is contextually and grammatically at odds with first century κύριος. However, the problem is also delicate. The Church’s love affair with the title ‘Lord’ is a natural outworking of its love and duty to the usual referent, Jesus Christ.
Tackling the problem is possible if we can climb out of the apparent impossibility for a Lord surrogate. The method comprises 3 important stages. Firstly, I want to highlight the factors that have caused ‘Lord’ to sidestep reassessment by biblical translators. Secondly, we can show that the LXX anarthrous κύριος data confirms Peterson’s suitability of ‘GOD’ to translate YHWH. Thirdly, we can now re-establish the landscape in which to communicate κύριος - such that no single English term remains suitable for translating it - and present a summary of options according to a variety of NT contexts.