It's open for him today and Jimmy Aiken is here as our guest you are welcome to call 888-3187-884-8831-Truth lines have stayed pretty full today.

But they will open up as people get their question answered. So if you've got a question, keep giving it a try. Triple-831-Truth.

Jimmy Aiken, of course, senior apologists here at Catholic Answers. Jimmy, thank you for doing another hour with us.

My pleasure, always a pleasure, Sakellet. We'll probably call you five minutes before the show and ask you to do another one tomorrow. I don't know. No, we're booked tomorrow, right?

We do that with Jimmy sometimes. Jimmy help and then he's always always happy to help. I enjoy doing radio. Yeah, and you've always made that clear to us. So we do appreciate it.

We got a call from Father Pat in Columbus, Ohio, listening on Saint Gabriel radio. Father Pat, let me just first of all check if you're there. Are you there, Father?

I am. Have we spoken before? I feel like we made some peace both to you, Sai and to Jimmy.

Oh, thank you, Father. I feel like I've spoken to you before, but know this is the first time.

This is the first time, yeah. Well, we're very glad to have you go. I've listened to you a lot, but you haven't heard me.

Okay, unless I've got one of those psychic powers that people call and ask Jimmy about, Father, go ahead with your question for Jimmy.

50 years ago in my Old Testament class, the professor speaking about the name of God said the rabbis held the view that to speak the name of God would be to speak the whole Torah in one breath.

They're that they held the view that the name was was so holy that like God himself that almost infinite in its capability.

Now, I've repeated that story in Bible studies and I've never sought to validate that the rabbis really think something like that or what, what would they have to say about the name of God?

Okay, well, so I can see off the top of my head two different interpretations of the statement that you reported. One of them would be, would mean that if you say just the name of God, the four letters, the so-called tetragramaton, which in English is commonly pronounced Yahweh, that just by saying the name Yahweh,

you have said the equivalent of everything that's in the Torah, everything that's in the five books of Moses. The other way I could see it be interpreted is in order to say the name of God, it would not be sufficient to say the name Yahweh, you would need to also say all of the other words that are in the Torah in the same breath.

So, Father Pat, can you clarify for me, do you have an insight on which of those two interpretations you were told the rabbis had?

It sounds like that the second one, but that was 50 years ago and I can barely remember the name of the Old Testament professor.

Uh-huh. Well, and that's totally understandable. What I can tell you is I have not encountered this claim before and that doesn't mean it's not an accurate claim because Judaism has a 3000 year history.

Now, the rabbis are only go back to, you know, say the first century, although even then they weren't always called rabbis.

But in rabbinic Judaism alone, it's got a 2000 year history and there have been a lot of opinions in that time frame, some of which seem rather strange to Christian ears.

Um, you know, I've done some study for example in Kabbalah and there's a bunch of weird claims in Kabbalah.

Um, so I couldn't at all rule out that there have been some rabbis who have entertained a view like this.

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