 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 (Ἰησσῦς), 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.