Greek Roots · letter 8 of 24
The letter that begins the word “God” — and was also the mark for the dead.
Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC
Phoenician ṭet — a wheel, or a basket seen from above.
Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC
A wheel with its spokes still in it — later worn down to one bar.
The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters
Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.
The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.
Sounds like
In the New Testament era a t with a puff of breath after it — t-h, not the th of “thin.” The English th sound came later, and it is what modern Greek says.
Written th in scholarly books.
Its number
9
it is letter 8 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers
Its name means
wheel (from ṭet)
in Phoenician, not in Greek
Borrowed from
Phoenician ṭet
Well established
Theta carries the heaviest word in the New Testament: theos, God, which appears more than thirteen hundred times. Christian scribes treated it accordingly — from the earliest manuscripts they contracted it to ΘΣ and drew a line over the top, one of a small set of sacred names given that honour.
The same letter carried the opposite freight in the wider Greek world. Theta was the initial of thanatos, death, and it was used as a mark against the names of the dead — the Roman satirist Persius calls it “the black theta.” The letter of God and the letter of death are the same letter, and neither fact tells you anything about the other.
Open any early Christian manuscript and you will find ΘΣ where the text says “God,” ΚΣ for “Lord,” ΙΣ for “Jesus,” ΧΣ for “Christ” — each with a stroke ruled over the top. These are the nomina sacra, the sacred names, and the habit is nearly universal in Christian copies and unknown in the same form outside them.
The important part is the company Jesus keeps. From the earliest copies we have, his name is contracted the same way God's is.
Thelēma is the will as a settled purpose — what someone has determined, not merely what they would prefer. It is the word in the Lord's Prayer and the word in Gethsemane, and the two uses read differently once you know that.
θεός
theos — God
1,312 occurrences, and contracted to ΘΣ in nearly every early manuscript.
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θάνατος
thanatos — death
The other great theta word — and the one that gave the letter its grim second job.
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θέλημα
thelēma — will, purpose
A determined intention, not a wish.
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θρόνος
thronos — throne
Revelation's furniture: the throne appears in that book more than in all the rest of the New Testament together.
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