The OP seems to assume that this is what Paul has, i.e. that the Pauline letters chose to use ambiguous abbreviations. But it could just as well be that it wasn't ambiguous at all to the author of the Pauline letters and anyone first reading Paul because there weren't any abbreviations in the text. The scribes who copied the texts we have would have their own conventions for abbreviations that they would try to follow regardless of their exemplar, which is why we find some manuscripts that more consistently use two letter abbreviations, some that more consistently use three letter abbreviations, or mixing the two, etc. These abbreviation conventions are applied most uniformly by scribes who copied texts, but less uniformly by those who wrote documentary papyri (autographs) or inscriptions. They can thus be understood as part of scribal culture. If the Pauline letters pre-dated this scribal culture, it would be more expected that they didn't originally follow any of these conventions that had not yet formed.There is little, if anything, in the Pauline letters to suggest that Jesus was "the Messiah". What we have is the frequent use of bar ΧΥ, which could be interpreted to mean either "Good" or "Christ"/Messiah.
In which case, when writing about Jesus, either the Pauline letters originally were written with eta here and the scribes shortened those appearances of the word 'kind', or the Pauline letters originally were written with iota here and the scribes shortened those appearances of the word 'Christ'. But in neither of those situations were the Pauline letters written in a way that left it up to interpretation.
If we could safely assume that the Pauline letters originally had these abbreviations, then we might be able to use that to argue that they were originally ambiguous, but the assumption that the abbreviations were original is not secure.
Statistics: Posted by Peter Kirby — Wed May 29, 2024 2:30 pm