In Christian scribal practice, nomina sacra is the abbreviation of several frequently occurring divine names or titles, especially in Greek manuscripts of Holy Scripture. A nomen sacrum consists of two or more letters from the original word spanned by an overline. Metzger lists 15 such expressions from Greek papyri: the Greek counterparts of God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Son, Spirit, David, Cross, Mother, Father, Israel, Savior, Man, Jerusalem, and Heaven. These nomina sacra are all found in Greek manuscripts of the 3rd century and earlier, except Mother, which appears in the 4th. Nomina sacra also occur in some form in Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, Old Nubian, and Cyrillic.
Origin and development
Nomina sacra are consistently observed in even the earliest extant Christian writings, along with the codex form rather than the roll, implying that when these were written, in approximately the second century, the practice had already been established for some time. However, it is not known precisely when and how the nomina sacra first arose. The initial system of nomina sacra apparently consisted of just four or five words, called nomina divina: the Greek words for Jesus, Christ, Lord, God, and possibly Spirit. The practice quickly expanded to a number of other words regarded as sacred. In the system of nomina sacra that came to prevail, abbreviation is by contraction, meaning that the first and last letter of each word are used. In a few early cases, an alternate practice is seen of abbreviation by suspension, meaning that the initial two letters of the word are used; e.g., the opening verses of Revelation in write Ἰησοῦς Χριστός as . Contraction, however, offered the practical advantage of indicating the case of the abbreviated noun. It is evident that the use of nomina sacra was an act of reverence rather than a purely practical space-saving device, as they were employed even where well-established abbreviations of far more frequent words such as and were avoided, and the nomen sacrum itself was written with generous spacing. Furthermore, early scribes often distinguished between mundane and sacred occurrences of the same word, e.g. a spirit vs. the Spirit, and applied nomina sacra only to the latter, although later scribes would mechanically abbreviate all occurrences. Scholars have advanced a number of theories on the origin of the nomina sacra. Larry Hurtado has suggested Greek numerals as the origin of the overline spanning the nomen sacrum, with, the ordinary way of writing "18", being taken as reminiscent of a suspended form of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ. In some Greek Scripture manuscripts the Hebrew tetragrammaton is found unabbreviated in the Greek text. The Septuagint manuscriptPapyrus Oxyrhynchus 1007 even uses an abbreviated form of the tetragrammaton: two Greek zetas with a horizontal line through the middle, imitating two Paleo-Hebrew yodhs. Greek culture also employed a number of ways of abbreviating even proper names, though none in quite the same form as the nomina sacra. Inspiration for the contracted forms has also been seen in Revelation, where Jesus speaks of himself as "the beginning and the end" and "the first and the last" as well "the Alpha and the Omega". George Howard argues that and were the initial nomina sacra, created by non-Jewish Christian scribes who "found no traditional reasons to preserve the tetragrammaton" in copies of the Septuagint. Larry W. Hurtado, following Colin Roberts rejects that claim in favour of the theory that the first was , as suggested in the Epistle of Barnabas, followed by the analogous , and later by and, at about the time when the contracted forms and were adopted for the first two. Cilliers Breytenbach and Christiane Zimmermann report that by the end of the 2nd century nomina sacra occur even in Christian tomb inscriptions in Greek in Lycaonia.
