Did Jesus Ever Use the Name Yahweh?
By W.R. Selvig
I hear this a lot: “If Jesus quoted the Old Testament, then surely He was affirming Yahweh as His Father.” It’s a reasonable thought. After all, He was born into a Jewish world, taught in Jewish synagogues, and spoke to Jewish people who lived and breathed the Hebrew Scriptures. Of course He quoted from them. That part isn’t in question.
But here’s the problem. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and His words were recorded in Greek. The Hebrew version of the New Testament didn’t appear until hundreds of years later, and it wasn’t written by Jesus’ disciples—it was written by Jewish scribes with a vested interest in promoting Yahweh as the one true God. If you actually look at the Greek Gospels—the earliest and most reliable witnesses—we never see Jesus once use the divine name Yahweh. Not once.
Instead, He consistently called God “Pater” (Father) and sometimes “Abba” (a term of intimacy, like “Daddy”). The universal Greek substitute for the divine name YHWH was kurios (“Lord”), but strikingly, Jesus never uses that word to identify His Father. The name Yahweh is absent from His lips.
And look closer at how Jesus related to the law—the very system Yahweh established. He never claimed it as His own. In fact, He referred to it as “your law” — “It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true.”(John 8:17) He never once called it “my Father’s law.”
He went further, directly contradicting it: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.”(Matthew 5:38-39)
When speaking of oaths, He told His listeners to avoid swearing by anything at all: “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.”(Matthew 5:37) But Yahweh had commanded oaths in His name. If Jesus equates oath-making with the work of the evil one, then He’s pointing His finger directly at Yahweh’s system.
And notice His priestly line. Jesus didn’t come from Levi, the priesthood bound to the law and blood sacrifices. He came in the line of Melchizedek, whose priesthood is defined not by law but by relationship—by bread and wine, communion and intimacy. Everything about Him was a contrast. Yahweh demanded blood for forgiveness. Jesus forgave freely, on the spot, long before His own crucifixion. Yahweh struck people dead. Jesus healed and restored. Yahweh commanded genocide. Jesus commanded love for enemies.
Quoting the Old Testament doesn’t mean He was endorsing Yahweh as His Father. It means He was speaking the language of His audience, the Scriptures they knew. But what He revealed was someone entirely different—the Father whom, He said, “You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form.”(John 5:37)
The Father who looks nothing like Yahweh, but everything like Jesus.