The earliest Christian communities engaged in bold and imaginative rereadings of their Scriptures—none more astounding and potentially inflammatory than of the passages that focus upon the name and nature of Israel’s God. In this volume, David B. Capes tracks the Apostle Paul’s use of Old Testament texts that directly invoke God’s name, Yahweh, for what they can disclose about the earliest Christian beliefs and practices. Since Paul writes to his churches in Greek and quotes the Old Testament extensively from the Septuagint, Capes focuses upon Old Testament quotations and allusions in which kyrios translates the divine name. He discovers that Paul applies a majority of his quotations of and allusions to Yahweh texts to the Lord Jesus Christ, thus offering to him designations originally reserved for Israel’s God. Given the high regard that Judaism placed upon both Scripture and the divine name in the first century, the application of Yahweh texts to Jesus bea
