Howard thus bases his hypothesis on the proposition that the Septuagint, the version of the Old Testament in Greek from which the first-century-CE authors of the New Testament drew their Old-Testament quotations, did not at that time contain the term κύριος that is found in the extant manuscripts of the full text of the Septuagint, all of which are of later date, but always had the tetragrammaton itself, written in Hebrew letters (יהוה) or in paleo-Hebrew script (𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄) or represented by the phonetic Greek transliteration ιαω in place of that Greek term.