The Lord's Prayer, Updated
Gramps49
Shipmate
in Kerygmania
There has been a new attempt at updating the Lord's Prayer. People who are well versed in Aramaic and Greek have tried to put it in modern English, I post it to see what you think of it.
Source: Holden Village
O Holy One, who calls us beloved,
Your name and all that you have made is beautiful.
Bring forth your Jubilee.
Give life to your dreams in heaven and on earth.
Nourish and sustain our bodies.
Release our debts as we release the debts of others.
Do not let us turn from you.
In hardship and in peril, stay with us. Amen.
Source: Holden Village
Comments
It's a perfectly good prayer, but I find it hard to believe it's an accurate translation. More a commentary on what implications some of the bits of the Lord's Prayer might have, together with some paraphrase. I mean, the very first words in the original Greek are Πάτερ ἡμῶν, which is unambiguously "our Father".
It is a translation. The translators tried to use terms that are more understandable to modern people.
For instance, not every father is loving, and not every one has a father, so the translators chose the term, "the one who calls us beloved."
And the term we know as Thy Kingdom come, in Aramaic is literally Bring forth your Jubilee.
I certainly don’t claim to speak Aramaic, but not according to everything I’m finding online. For example I’m finding that the phrase in Aramaic is tithe malkuthokh, and the online Encyclopædia Britannica says this on “the Kingdom of God”:
Perhaps it would help if you could point us to your source.
Modern people know what "Bring forth your jubilee" means? Pull the other one.
The problem of unloving, cruel or abusive fathers is not (sadly) a purely modern problem, yet Jesus chose to recommend, ‘Our Father…’ to his disciples The underlying Aramaic might even be ‘Abba’.
I think nearly everyone in the UK will have known about the late Queen's Platinum Jubilee last year. But I agree; what does it mean with respect to God? Jesus spoke a lot about The Kingdom of Heaven/God -but what do people think about 'Kingdom' when for most of the world they don't have (or got rid of) a monarchy? Another phrase is needed altogether I think.
To the best of my knowledge we do not have the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic as presumably spoken by Jesus; the earliest texts of it are in the Gospels, composed in Greek, so any Aramaic version we have now is a translation of that Greek.
That is indeed what people in the UK would think "Jubilee" meant but that is not what Jubilee means in this context! Jubilee refers to the fify-year cycle described in Leviticus 25 where all land had to revert to its original owners and all debts had to be forgiven. It is an extremely jargony word to use, one that only a small segment of Christians would understand, let alone non-Christians. I agree with @mousethief that it is totally inapt for a translation purporting to be "more understandable to modern people".
Yes, my instinct is that it's closer to inspired by than a version.
That said it's good to question assumptions and looser translations do that. And it doesn't seem a bad prayer (although haven't looked closely yet)
In this case one question inspired wondering about if it is the caring side of dad (noting the use of abba) or the managerial patriarch (who'd be potentially deciding on the fate of his sons children)
There's the related question of how far from the literal Aramaic the lord's prayer can get and still be the lord's prayer (given the preamble about repetition in one gospel, and the added doxology, I don't think that's necessarily an easy answer).
Making guesses about what the Aramaic may have been and then drawing conclusions from that doesn't strike me as a particularly robust process.
Could you please post a source for any of this? It is very puzzling. I cannot find any reference to this anywhere on the internet. Was it something you saw on Facebook?
https://www.wvchurch.org/2020/12/the-lords-prayer-in-aramaic/
Perhaps it's a first step in this thread's treasure hunt?
The Peshitta New Testament is widely agreed to have been translated from the Greek in about the fifth century AD.
It has been transliterated from Syriac script into Hebrew script (in which Aramaic also can be written).
There is a theory, supported by a small minority of students, that the NT was originally written in Aramaic using Hebrew script and later translated into Greek.
While it is most probable that Jesus’ ‘language of the heart’ was Aramaic, it is overwhelmingly probable that he also freely spoke Greek.
There are well known examples of Aramaic usage in the New Testament, but little or no evidence of it first having been written in Aramaic and then translated into Greek.
A Hebrew script Peshitta with English interlinear is available online which offers a much more familiar translation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Snopes is exceedingly skeptical regarding claims about the authenticity of Douglas-Klotz's work: https://snopes.com/fact-check/lords-prayer-aramaic-english/ .
Having said that, Douglas-Klotz's version differs from the one in the opening post, as it begins, "O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration..." and bears little similarity to the one in the opening post (and indeed the Lord's Prayer, in koine Greek or English.)
The one thing I'd take away first is that it means that it's almost certainly not some sort of syllabbic divine key (contrast 'speak friend and enter' from lord of the rings).
If it were that would be a bit odd, anyway. And it's no direct mainline church position (even positions like the KJV only or Latin mass are a bit more subtle).
I also think Douglas-Klotz, as he is quoted there, is unduly pessimistic about a basic original Lord’s Prayer which is fundamentally the one we’re used to. Aramaic is no harder than Biblical Hebrew to translate. And the text of the Lord’s Prayer is profoundly simple. The version in Luke differs from that in Matthew only because of the absence of parallelism.
Some ages ago, Ben Witherington was a guest on the radio show "The White Horse Inn" and talked about there being a body of knowledge and a vocabulary that goes with being a Christian. There is basic content to know, to learn.
I think there are real issues in taking the text we use and following the line of thinking that translates a very old translation into an interpretive "translation" intended to remove the need for any kind of study or learning.
Can't speak for anywhere else, but there is enough demand for spoon feeding in US evangelicalism. This so-called translation fits in with this long trend, attempting to remove the need for any learning, study, wrestling. And in the process, it changes the original beyond recognition.
I don't really care if it is marketed as a paraphrase or commentary. They are fine to use, but must be identified properly. Like The Living Bible, when I was a kid.
I have no problem therefore with bringing interpretive insights into liturgy, and I have no problem with this version of the Lord's Prayer. What I do have problems with is it being claimed to be a more accurate translation, or derived from the "original Aramaic" when we do not have the original Aramaic - all we have is translations of the Greek into Aramaic. I do dislike bullshit, basically.
Those are good reminders, @KarlLB. Thank you. And I agree with you that what I called "spoon feeding" might be essential explanation for others. My underlying biases are showing like my slip.
But even the severely cognitively disabled adults I have know at churches knew enough biblical content to grasp the Lord's prayer with help from good Bible study and Sunday school teachers.
My frustration is with people of typical intelligence and ability who don't want to be bothered learning basic biblical content. Interpretive insights are helpful. Sometimes great! But it's important to know the difference between the text and the interpretation.
Your point about b.s. is excellent.
(A "good college try" at reading anybody's work is no actual sign of success. I have looked at all the words on the pages many times and think I have an idea what a lot of them mean together. I can argue to support what I think they mean, but that is no guarantee I am right or even close to right.)
Out of curiosity, do you recall what the full service is? (Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Holy Communion, etc.)
But I got to thinking, in a sense, nearly all translations of the Bible contains some amount of paraphrasing.
For instance, from Exodus 19:4 our English translations say, in effect: "I will bear you up on Eagle's wings."
Problem is the idea of an Eagle is not found in the middle east. The word we translate as eagle, נְשָׁרִ֔ים, literally means vulture in Hebrew. How would that sound to us Westerners, God will bear us up on vulture's wings? No, our translators use a more palatable word--sa paraphrase, if you will.
Even our traditional rendition of the Lord's Prayer has evolved over time. Take the petition, "Lead us not into temptation." Sounds like God tempts us to the unfamiliar ear--read millennial. That's why some newer liturgies will render it. "Do not bring us to the test" or "protect us when we are tested." (I like the later version myself). The recent Vatican translation is "Do not let us fall into temptation," which they say is closer to the original.
If you are interested, you can trace the evolution of the English translation of the Lord's prayer in this Wikipedia article.
On a similar basis you have varying things to be forgiven as we forgive.
In English we have guiltes, debts, trespasses, sins.
With different connotations (and probably not the same now as when translated)
I am occasionally a bit sceptical about the motive for that choice (but not at the same time as being able to investigate)
It reminds me of George Orwell's sarcastic paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 9:11 in his essay "Politics and the English Language." (Orwell is poking fun at "the worst of modern English" writing styles.)
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Orwell criticizes the tendency away from concreteness ("Give us this day our daily bread") and toward the abstract and difficult ("Nourish and sustain our bodies"), noting that it would take yet more words to include ideas such as day and bread.
More writers should read and take to heart Orwell's essay. https://orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
Not talking about kosher foods, Bro, talking about how Western readers react to the image of one bird over the other.
In German the word Schuld means both guilt and debt. Sometimes I meditate on the union of these two concepts
There is no mention of Aramaic, nor is there any claim that the “Prayer of Jesus,” as they refer to it, is translated from Aramaic. The primary writer of the text of the prayer speaks at the beginning of going back to the Greek of Matthew and Luke, but after that, all references to “translation” were really to translating from the traditional English—things like “as we considered how to translate ‘Your Kingdom Come.’” Other than the one initial reference to Greek, I didn’t hear any reference to original language(s).
A few other things that caught my attention:
The team that wrote/composed Bless This Night: Vespers ‘23, were very clear—and appropriately so, I think—about their awareness that they were writing primarily for a specific community. While they anticipated that their work might find use outside the Holden Village community, they were writing for and within that specific community. The impetus to write the service came from conversations within the community and needs of the community. The writing was informed by and reflected the life and ethos of that community.
One place this seemed particularly apparent was in the choice to translate (their word) “your kingdom come” as “bring forth your jubilee.” Mention was made that in the years preceding the writing, “jubilee” had been a something already part of conversations in Holden Village, so that when the suggestion of “jubilee” in the context of the Prayer of Jesus was made—“jubilee” was suggested by a mentor of the pastor in Holden Village, the primary writer of the text of the Prayer of Jesus, and it was discussed without any reference to Aramaic, much less to it being a literal translation of the Aramaic—that term already had resonance in the community. And it was linked to the story of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, as described in Luke 4. So in that context, the choice made sense.
Conversely, there were aspects of the conversation that gave me the sense that the writers were less aware of wider contexts. For example, sticking to that same line, they started from the assumption that “kingdom” is a word contemporary people don’t understand. I suspect that’s a faulty assumption, and as noted upthread, more people overall probably understand “kingdom” than “jubilee,” even if “jubilee” makes sense in their context.
There were other parts of the conversation that left me with a sense of lack of understanding of wider or ecumenical contexts. I winced a little each time the Prayer of Jesus was referred to as the “Jesus Prayer,” and as a Presbyterian, I find the “debts” language pretty unremarkable, though they do hear it with a particularly economic meaning (going back to the meaning of “jubilee” again). And there were a few other spots that made me wonder of they really weren’t aware of the practices of other communities of Christians.
All in all, an interesting conversation that provided helpful context. But there was nothing at all about Aramaic or Greek, beyond one reference to the Greek of Matthew and Luke, nor was there any claim that any line in the Prayer of Jesus represented a more literal translation than the traditional English versions of the prayer.
Thank you for your critique, though.
Me too. It's Jesus' after all.