The Lord’s Prayer translated from Aramaic into English, rather than from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English
O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration!
Soften the ground of our being and
carve out a space within us where
Your Presence can abide.
Fill us with your creativity so that we
may be empowered to bear the fruit
of your mission.
Let each of our actions bear fruit in
accordance with our desire.
Endow us with the wisdom to produce
and share what each being needs to grow and flourish.
Untie the tangled threads of destiny that
bind us, as we release others from the
entanglement of past mistakes.
Do not let us be seduced by that which would
divert us from our true purpose, but illuminate
the opportunities of the present moment.
For you are the round and the fruitful vision,
the birth-power and fulfillment,
as all is gathered and made whole once again.
Comment by urthshu on 1/10 @ 7:19 pm #
I don’t see no Hope and Change in there, so I know its teh bogus
Comment by Sticky B on 1/10 @ 7:21 pm #
Thank God for Greek, Latin, and English.
Comment by Great Mencken's Ghost! on 1/10 @ 7:26 pm #
Where are Dan Brown and Tom Hanks when you need them?
Comment by urthshu on 1/10 @ 7:30 pm #
This, BTW:
Untie the tangled threads of destiny that
bind us, as we release others from the
entanglement of past mistakes.
seems rather Essene in outlook, but is unnecessarily flowery in language.
Comment by Dan Collins on 1/10 @ 7:35 pm #
Very much, urthshu
Comment by Pablo on 1/10 @ 8:03 pm #
I sort of like this version, and now I’m concerned that we’ve long been fed a bogus translation. Just what I needed, an existential crisis.
Comment by urthshu on 1/10 @ 8:04 pm #
Well at least it ain’t in Norse! Those Vikings probably didn’t even have a word for ‘birther’
Comment by Barbula on 1/10 @ 8:15 pm #
Now there’s a prayer a Wiccan can get behind!
Comment by Eric Blair on 1/10 @ 8:38 pm #
New testament Greek is much the same. The Romans thought Christianity was a wacky new age cult, and they were right.
Comment by Lt. York on 1/10 @ 8:40 pm #
Ora pro nobis!
Comment by The Sanity Inspector on 1/10 @ 8:48 pm #
Reminds me of the old seminary joke:
Jesus asked them, “Who do you say that I am?”
And they answered, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship.”
And Jesus said, “What?”
Comment by ECM on 1/10 @ 10:00 pm #
“The Romans thought Christianity was a wacky new age cult, and they were right.”
A bunch of guys that worshipped a dude that would turn into animals to bang hot chicks thinks that Christianity sounds like a whacky, new age, cult? If that’s the case, consider me a Christian!
Comment by C. Smith on 1/10 @ 10:26 pm #
Huh? Irrespective of whatever was spoken, the original manuscripts were in koine Greek, no?
Jesus is recorded as having written something on the ground at the scene of the woman taken in adultery, and nowhere else.
Thus, while literate, He can be said to have been literally paperwork-free.
Unless these nmazca folks have a previously unknown Aramaic diary…
Comment by Joe on 1/10 @ 10:33 pm #
Those Aramaics must have smoked a lot of really good dope. Do you know where I can score some?
Comment by Joe on 1/10 @ 10:36 pm #
Closer to what those Vikings prayed
Comment by Bob Reed on 1/10 @ 10:45 pm #
So, what Rosetta stone was this translation derived from..?
Dan, what kinda Shirley MacLaine sheizz is this?
Comment by Brock on 1/10 @ 11:07 pm #
I like this version better. The line about unintended consequences though doesn’t provide much guidance on how to prevent them, does it?
Comment by Ella on 1/10 @ 11:31 pm #
I earnestly believe that God (okay, Jesus) never, at in point, in any language, used the term “empowered.”
Comment by Mastiff on 1/10 @ 11:54 pm #
I call BS. There isn’t a single phrase in there that corresponds to any of the typical tropes of Aramaic prayers that I know. Granted, the prayers I know are Jewish, but it was the same cultural milieu.
There’s another version here that claims to be Galilean Aramaic, but sounds more like Syriac or one of the more Arabicized dialects; at any rate, the word patterns are more similar to what I would expect, and the translation looks pretty good.
Comment by SDN on 1/11 @ 7:21 am #
The Romans thought that Christianity was a whacky, new-age cult”
Until the Christians adopted the Rites of Mithras as the Catholic Mass. Since Mithraism was pretty much the Roman Army religion, that had a whole lot to do with the Emperor’s sudden conversion.
Comment by McGehee on 1/11 @ 7:26 am #
My first reaction was much like Bob Reed’s in #16 — translations are necessarily informed by the sensibilities (or lack thereof) of the translators, often more so than by the text itself.
So Mastiff’s link in #19 makes a lot more sense.
Comment by Dan Collins on 1/11 @ 8:09 am #
I hope you guys realize that I posted this because it’s complete crap. If you think this is how Jesus taught his disciples (fishermen and such) to pray, you’d take economic advice from Deepak Chopra. I’d love to see what these guys come up with for the Sermon on the Mount.
It’d be like #11, only with the multitudes saying, “Where’s our fish?”
Comment by Lost My Cookies on 1/11 @ 8:49 am #
I’m sorry Dan, but you’re wrong.
This is precisely what the third manifestation of Oprah said our Lord Elvis told her at the Sermon of the Race in America Speech.
If it wasn’t true you couldn’t buy it stamped on a genuine gold-clad replica of a Morgan silver dollar. And yet…
Comment by nk on 1/11 @ 9:07 am #
I like Roger Zelazny’s agnostic prayer from “Creatures of Light and Darkness”:
Thou Who may or may not be our Father,
Who may or may not be in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name if a Name Thou hast and any desire to see It hallowed ….
Comment by nk on 1/11 @ 9:10 am #
And from the same book, the agnostic last rites:
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
Comment by McGehee on 1/11 @ 11:09 am #
You? Post complete crap?
That’s never happened! ;-p
Comment by Sdferr on 1/11 @ 11:15 am #
I dunno as to complete crap. I mean, I heard echoes of a pretty funny Monty Python routine in there, for whatever that’s worth.
Comment by Warren Bonesteel on 1/12 @ 4:14 am #
If anyone is truly interested in more about this translation, lemme know. I gots some info that you’ll be interested in.
Let’s just say that the ancient Israelites and the Arameans were two different peoples with two different, but overlapping histories. The people we now call the “Jews” were actually from ancient Babylon. The Hebrew language itself is - and was - was ancient Babylonian. The Arameans were the true ‘remnant.’
If you do the work yourself, you’ll find that the Aramean translation of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ is the more accurate. The ‘Lord’s Prayer’ and many other passages in the Bible are also found in the much older Egyptian and Babylonian and even Sumerian texts.
wrsteel@blackhawke.net
Comment by joseph buzz on 1/12 @ 7:48 am #
I always wondered about the “lead us not into temptation” phrase translation. Why would the true God lead us into temptation….?
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[...] TO SUIT OURSELVES– “Why Nothing Should Ever Be Translated Directly from Aramaic into English” [...]
Comment by Trenchant Commentator on 1/13 @ 7:05 am #
It was a dark and stormy night, and Melanie could not have known that this was the night she would discover her parents and three siblings - Joshua Tree, Sunny Sky and little Wolfgang Starchild - murdered in their beds following ruthless anal probing by space aliens with enormous glowing light sabres/anal-probers upon her return home from a really great party held at her best friend Tanya’s house to celebrate Tanya’s boyfriend Blake’s 24th birthday at which Melanie had been introduced to both cocaine and methadrine which left her really wired, tense, and distinctly not in shape to deal with a genuinely stressful situation like finding your parents and siblings dead in their beds with bleeding bums following their close encounter of the third kind with really mean guys from outer space with ginormous anal-probers and a bad attitude when it comes to human life on planet Earth.
The door creaked open and Melanie stepped in………………
You really don’t want MORE, do you?
Comment by raxal walker on 1/14 @ 6:43 am #
Gurdjeff was right: greeks and romans were wankers… and even more so are their worthy disciples!