Nomina sacra
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Nomina sacra means "Sacred names" in Latin, and can be used to refer to traditions of abbreviated writing of several frequently occurring divine names or titles in early Greek language Holy Scripture. The Bruce Metzger's book Manuscripts of the Greek Bible lists 15 such expressions from Greek papyri: the Greek counterparts of God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Son, Spirit, David, cross, Mary, Father, Israel, Savior, Man Jerusalem, and Heaven. The contractions were written with overlines.
There has been a dispute about the nature of nomina sacra, whether they represent a mere shorthand or these overlined words indeed bear a sacred meaning.[1]
Starting in the third century the nomina sacra were sometimes shortened by contraction in Christian inscriptions, resulting in sequences of Greek letters such as IH (iota-eta), IC (iota-sigma), or IHC (iota-eta-sigma) for Jesus (Greek Iēsous), and XC (chi-sigma), XP (chi-ro) and XPC (chi-rho-sigma) for Christ (Greek Christos). Here "C" represents the medieval "lunate" form of Greek sigma; sigma could also be transcribed into the Latin alphabet by sound, giving IHS and XPS. See Christology#Abbreviations for more.
This tradition is also transferred into Cyrillic manuscripts. See titlo.
[edit] References
- ^ Institute for Religious Research: The Tetragrammaton and the Christian Greek Scriptures, Appendix K: Nomina SacraPDF
- Bruce Metzger. Manuscripts of the Greek Bible (1981)
