Jehovah, Yaweh, and the Tetragrammaton

JHVH or JHWH is the "Tetratramagatton," often rendered "Yaweh" in English and appearing in the KJ Bible as LORD or GOD (in ALL CAPS) as opposed to the "God" or "Lord" when the titles appear in the Hebrew text.  This is by far the most commonly appearing name of God in the OT).  In four places in the KJV it is rendered "Jehovah," usually considered an error since it incorporates the vowels of the Greek "Adonai" or God.

As the name of God, "Jehovah" has far better English credentials than "Yahweh" or anything of that sort, the latter being a modern invention trying to reproduce the original sound (and probably getting close).  However, the English translation, as far as the literature of the language is concerned, should be Jehovah.  It is kind of funny that this is the only word in Hebrew where scholars think they have to try to reproduce the original sounds and probably derives from bias against Jehovah's Witnesses.

Interestingly, the word does not appear in the New Testament, nor, to my knowledge, in any early Christian writing, and Jesus is portrayed as completely ignorant of it -- not affirming or denouncing its use, but unaware it exists.  The same applies to all early Christians, including, of course, Paul.

This indicates, to me at least, that the earliest Christians were not very familiar with Judaism, where at this point in time a superstition against saying the name was in place.  Readers of the OT would, when reading aloud, substitute various other words.  Why doesn't Jesus address this?

The thing is, the early Christians were not reading from the Hebrew Bible but from the Greek LXX (the then current Greek translation of the OT) where the Tetratramagatton was also substituted, usually with Adonai (God).  At a minimum, if Jesus approved of the superstition, he should have endorsed it, and its avoidance should have been included in Acts in the Apostolic Decree.  But they are not even aware of the issue.  Given Jesus' more normal antipathy to Jewish superstition, one wonders that he didn't explicitly disapprove of it, since it is obvious the pronunciation of the name had been common in earlier Jewish practice and the avoidance had arisen only in Hellenistic times.

This is but one of a number of lines of evidence cluing us in that the earliest Christians only had a superficial knowledge of Judaism and that they drew this from the LXX.  Of course Paul claims to be a Pharisee, but he is from Asia Minor and claims Roman Citizenship too.  Not impossible but odd indeed, and difficult to credit.

That he seems to know nothing of either the Tetragrammaton nor of the later-evolved Jesus-on-Earth myths tells us that Christianity began in ways very difficult from what we are usually led to think.