Nomina sacra
In Christian scribal practice, nomina sacra (singular: nomen sacrum from Latin sacred name) 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 (indicated by the "pativ"), Gothic, Old Nubian, and Cyrillic (indicated by the "titlo"). 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 (at least) 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 (at least) of the word are used; e.g., the opening verses of Revelation in write ("Jesus Christ") 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 (at times necessarily revealing an exegetical choice), 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 (Jesus). In some Greek Scripture manuscripts the Hebrew tetragrammaton (transliterated as YHWH) is found unabbreviated in the Greek text. The Septuagint manuscript Papyrus 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" (𐤉‬𐤉). 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 (using the first and last letter) 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 (κύριος) and (θεός) 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 (Ἰησοῦς), as suggested in the Epistle of Barnabas, followed by the analogous (Χριστός), 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 (modern central Turkey).