The Lord's Prayer

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

As many know, the Bibles used in Christian churches are usually translations of translations of translations. Wouldn't it be interesting if some scholar went back to some of the oldest manuscripts and translated them directly into English?

A scholar named Neil Douglas-Klotz did this around 15 years ago. He studied Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, as well as Hebrew and other ancient languages. His source for the Lord's prayer was a version of the Syriac Aramaic manuscript of the Gospels, also known as the Peshitta Version, which is considered by the church of the East as the oldest and most authoritarian version of the Bible. Some scholars say it could be as old as the second century AD. Neil Douglas-Klotz used this and other scholarly texts to do his work; to find out more, including an exhaustive interpretation of each word and line of the prayer,and the different interpretations of each line, see "Prayers of the Cosmos".

The Lord's Prayer

O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos,

Focus your light within us-make it useful

Create your reign of unity now--

Your one desire then acts with ours, as in all light, so in all forms.

Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.

Loose the cords of mistakes binding us, as we release the strands we hold of others' guilt.

Don't let surface things delude us.

But free us from what holds us back.

From you is born all ruling will, the power and the life to do, the song that beautifies all, from age to age it renews.

Truly--power to these statements--may they be the ground from which all my actions grow; Amen.

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. It's already been done

"Wouldn't it be interesting if some scholar went back to some of the oldest manuscripts and translated them directly into English?"

It's called the Nag Hammadi Library.

http://www.webcom.com/~gnosis/naghamm/nhl.html

Enjoy.

[darkmaestro019]

2. That is fantastic.

And so utterly what I already suspected. Thank you so much for this post.

[sweetheart]

3. beautifull

:0()

[JuniperLea]

4. I like this one much better!

Thanks for the enlightenment. I've always thought the whole thing should be translated from original text as well.


Reminds me of a joke... Catholic priest disappears for hours after going down in the cellar archives to view ancient text he has been asked to translate. A few of his brothers go in search of the missing priest; he's found in the archives, banging his head against a stone wall, muttering over and over again...

The word is "CELEBRATE", not "CELIBATE!!!"


Sorry, couldn't resist:)

[Olney Blue]

5. Beautiful! Thank you....

[Geoff R. Casavant]

6. I like this version very much

I'm curious, though, that Douglas-Klotz is not specifically mentioned as learning ancient Greek, which most Biblical scholars agree is the language used in the original Gospels (or was this your summary, and you omitted Greek?). If D-K was using a version in Aramaic, then he too was using a translation.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

8. If you go to the preface of his book,

he explains why he did this:

Some of the difficulty harkens back to the source of our texts--and our thinking. Most of the English translations of the words of Jesus come from Greek, a language that differes greatly from Aramaic. Aramaic was the common spoken language throughout the Middle East at the time of Jesus and the tongue in which he expressed his teachings. (Hebrew was primarily a temple language at this time.) According to some scholars, Aramaic was a derivative of ancient Hebrew; others say that Aramaic itself is older, and based on still more ancient Middle Eastern roots. Although Greek was introduced into the Middle East after the conquest of Alexander the Great, it never became the language of the native peoples. Aramaic served as the lingua franca until it was replaced by a derivative, tongue, Arabic, during the rise of Islam. Even so, Aramaic continued to be spoken widely in the Middle East into the nineteenth century and is still used in parts of Syria, as well as in the entire church of the East.

Unlike Gree, Aramaic does not draw sharp lines between means and ends. or between and inner quality and an outer action. Both are always prsesnt. When Jesus refers to the "kingdom of heaven", this kingsdom is always both within and among us. Likewise, "neighbor" is both inside and outside, as is the "self"that we are to love to the same degree as our "neighbor". Unlike Greek, Aramaic presents a fluid and holistic view of the cosmos. The arbitrary borders found in Greek between "mind" "body" and "spirit" fall away.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

9. Thanks

Although this is the first reference I've seen to Aramaic being a lingua franca, and also the first reference I've seen to Greek not being a lingua franca. The Lord's Prayer also is found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and there seems pretty broad scholarly agreement that both were originally written in Greek.

Still, whether the version you posted was the original or not, it certainly should have been.

[Odin2005]

10. Aramaic was not deried from Hebrew.

It was another East Semetic language from the area around Damascus that became the lingua fanca of the middle east as a result of the Assyrian policy of scattering conquered peoples across the empire.

You are right, though, the differences between Greek and Aramaic caused major problems.

[Igel]

11. And Arabic is certainly not derived

from Aramaic. Saying that either Hebrew or Aramaic (or Canaanitish) or Arabic is older shows a pretty profound misunderstanding of language change and differentiation.

Extremist Whorfians.

[TheCrankyOne]

7. Interesting

I am still not sure what I believe but that was very interesting. I need to read more on this.