By ツイン スモール (Urufu)
“Rulers of the people and elders: If we this day are being interrogated for a good work done to an ailing man, by what means he has been healed, let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, in Him this man stands here before you healthy. This is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.’ And there is not salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
– Acts 4:8-12
So reads the dedication page to a new translation of the Psalms which is due to be released over the weekend. I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this translation work since I first had the privilege to read one of the first translations. I was able to interview the author, and will present this interview in parts over the next few days as his work enters publication.
Since the first generation of Christians, holy and faithful men and women have had to work tirelessly against attempts to remove Jesus from the Gospel. According to Google’s Ngram, the trend of replacing “Christian” with “Judeo-Christian” didn’t exist, except for a small attempt at the peak of the Renaissance in the 1660s, until the 1960s when the rump of the baby boomers were entering Highschool and College. Since then, following multiple sexual revolutions and the total destruction of the family unit it has exploded in use, peaking around 2017. Seeking to reverse this trend, Australian author Thomas Lovell has published a new translation of the Psalms, called the Trinity Translation, which seeks to place the revealed persons of the Great IAM Godhood at the center of Scripture where it belongs.
What follows is the first part of our interview:
Urufu: So, tell me what inspired this translation.
Thomas: Well, it all started with a meme and a song. The meme came at the peak of Trad-Cath around 2018 and it quoted Exodus 15:3 – “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.” To me, this is just absurd. God has a name in the Old Testament Scriptures, and a much more personal name in the New. So this sort of started sitting in the back of my mind about this censoring of God’s Holy Name and then one day I was singing “O Praise the Name” in church and it really hit me that someone needs to let Christians know that God has a name.
Urufu: Why did you choose a translation of the Psalms to do this through?
Thomas: It’s the most egregious example of God’s name being removed from the bible. Almost every Psalm speaks to praising “the name” of God, and then in all our English translations that name is replaced by “The Lord”.
Urufu: How is that a problem though?
Thomas: I think it’s a problem for Christian because, on the one hand, it keeps them from understanding that the Old Testament is a Christian text that belongs to Jesus and Christianity and not the Jews or Judaism, and secondly because, and this is a statement I’ve heard far too often among evangelical Christians particularly, that they think the God of the Old Testament is separate, or a different God to Jesus. It’s been a huge part of the modern Judaising of Christianity.
Urufu: So how does translating YHWH as “LORD” Judaise the bible?
Thomas: So, the origins of removing the name of God from the Scriptures begins with the conversion the Edomite race under John Hyrcanus in the 2nd century BC. Around this period of time the tradition in the Pharisaic and Sadduceeic schools was that because God commands that His name must not be taken in vain, and because man is sinful and unworthy they shouldn’t speak His Holy name because there is no way to say it worthy enough to not be breaking the commandment.
The Talmudic texts inform us that by the time of Christ the Rabbinical priests were barely whispering His name in the Temple and, by the siege of Jerusalem there wasn’t anyone alive who could remember how it was supposed to be pronounced. Over the course of the centuries this ban on speaking God’s name would evolve into a ban on even writing His name. By the time King James instructed his translators to make an English translation of the bible the tradition of censoring the Tetragrammaton of YHWH was an ancient one.
Urufu: So what your work has done has been to translate the Tetragrammaton with the personal names of the trinity of Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Why not just write YHWH?
Thomas: So for a whole lot of years that’s what I thought too. But lately, probably starting around 2020 and covid, there’s been this real push online to Judaise Jesus – particularly in the circles we run in. Whether it’s the “dead kike on a stick” or “retvrn to pagan” slide threads, or people like the late Rob Skirba telling everyone to call Jesus “Yeshua” (a name recorded nowhere in Scripture, even apocryphal), there is this real effort online to divorce Jesus from His people: namely Christians.
Urufu: So this is why…
Thomas: Yeah exactly. My heart’s desire is for Christians, whether new or old, to be able to read the entirety of the Scriptures and see that they all talk about Jesus; that Jesus of Nazareth was not only the one whom all the Scriptures are about but was personally present, keeping His people for Himself from the very beginning.
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This ends Part I of our interview. The Trinity Translation of The Psalms is not yet available for purchase. Part II of our interview will be available on Monday with the much awaited publication.