). Detail from an icon at the Troyan Monastery in Bulgaria. [ See complete icon] 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 first arose. The initial system of 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 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 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 . Biblical scholar 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 . 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". Linguist
George Howard argues that (κύριος) and (θεός) were the initial , created by non-Jewish Christian scribes who "found no traditional reasons to preserve the tetragrammaton" in copies of the Septuagint. 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 occur even in Christian tomb inscriptions in Greek in
Lycaonia (modern central Turkey). ==List of Greek ==