Neil Douglas-Klotz Talks to Us About Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus

and here we come to these other influences and why we don't have let's say one agreed upon so to speak literal translation of these texts because these other screens these other influences can include big breath Empire politics um hierarchy consolidations of power in various organizational structures and that leads to a limiting of the meaning let's keep it simple let's try to get a Creed that everyone can sign up to like a mission statement of a corporation and we'll all get behind this one formulation of what the scriptures are going to mean to us now if you look in Acts and I point this out toward the end of the book uh what you find in Acts you don't find any profound complex ideas about Jesus at all you have the early disciples Peter and others offering a an experience of the Sacred breath that they received through Yeshua other Traditions call this a transmission they offer a direct transmission of his Spirit of his breath and they say we got it from this guy Yeshua and we can give it to you and they do and you don't find any you could say theological ideas about uh Jesus at least in the early part of [Music] [Music] Acts hey everybody welcome back to the podcast today we're sitting down with a brand new guest someone whose work I am only uh recently familiar with but but I'm already falling in love with it his name is Neil Douglas clots and he's joining us today from Scotland to talk about his book Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus the hidden teachings on life and death and so Neil welcome to the podcast it's an honor to share this space and this time with you thanks Glen glad to be here thank you so before we jump into the book uh since you're new to the podcast and likely new to some of our listeners can you take a few moments to uh tell us a little bit about yourself who you are what you do some of the highlights of your own Journey briefly briefly pack it all in pack it all in well as as one of the comedians used to say I began as a child but um way back when way back when no but my my folks um were raised Christian uh so my brothers and I were raised Christian um Missouri sen Lutheran actually if some of your new listeners know what that is but they are also into many alternative things Alternative Health my father was an early chiropractor in Illinois which is where I grew up uh they were also very much engaged with Rachel Carson Silent Spring organic gardening all of that we had quite a large organic garden stroke Farm on a property that we just sort of took over next to us before it was built up with homes anyway but long story short and then there were also interested in Edgar Casey in case some of your listeners have heard of him uh the American and psychic so that plus the Bible stories was my upbringing so it was Chiropractic Rachel Carson and Edgar Casey plus Bible um and but I went to Missouri St Lutheran schools and learned the King James Bible large parts of it by heart which one has to do if one goes through these uh schooling and L learned Luther's small Cate catechism by heart so I was steeped in you could say very much uh at that time what was a very different sort of fundamentalist view than what it is now it still had elements that are present today but it didn't have the political Dimension you could say that has taken over some of fundamentalist Christian uh ideology today but be that as it may uh when I be went to University I went as far away from Christianity as I could as you can imagine many people many people of my age do or did this was in the 19 early 1970s not to betray my age uh and I became a journalist I became a writer I wanted to change the world I became an investigative reporter after graduating and worked in New York City and things like that so but I always had a feeling for Jesus I had a feeling in my heart that the Jesus that I was learning about even from Luther was there was something more it wasn't so much that what Luther and the Bible ible said was wrong it was more that there was there was another dimension yeah and later when I came you know sort of in the latter part of my early journalistic career I began to investigate uh various languages uh and you could say why did you do that well I had grown up hearing different languages I had grown up hearing some German I was bilingual already by the time I got to University um English German I heard polish I heard yish I heard some Russian in my family it was an immigrant family uh from Chicago basically on both sides so there there was this background I thought well language you know hard hard can it be so I was I was directed in this direction by uh an editing job I was doing on an American Sufi of all things and he had said two things he wanted to do before he died and one of which was to learn to to pray the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic and he had not done that uh and I be that that struck me that was a moment you know often one has these moments in one's life that you don't think it's going to be a turning point but it turns out to be a turning point sort of things lit up around this particular saying so I began to investigate Aramaic Aramaic who know who what's Aramaic who who knows what that is I I knew from doing brief research that Aramaic was Jesus's native language it was the language he would have spoken in all Scholars agreed on that uh but then it's a question of of texts of sources where does one find an Aramaic version of The Lord's Prayer say yeah and that took some more work but long story short I discovered that there was an existing branch of Christianity that still prayed uh the prayer Jesus's prayer in Aramaic uh with various dialects and then it that's like a rabbit hole so you know I be I began first with my own inner feeling I thought well okay let me just pray this prayer and feel the sounds as best as I can feel them I had learned a bit of Arabic at the time and a bit of Hebrew so I figured well I'll just triangulate those and Aramaic can't be that different so I began to pray the prayer and I had very deep you could say interior experiences inner prayer experiences and um I went to work for a guy by the name of Matthew Fox who some of your listeners may have heard of yeah could say one of the Main Stays if not the founder of creation spirituality and I worked in his university for a while and that encouraged me along this Direction with Aramaic so long story short and I was trying to be brief but you know it's 70 plus years of life experience here Glenn so you know I I researched Aramaic in a scholarly way yeah uh and I found a that even that wasn't enough I researched at the same time What ancient Hebrew ancient Aramaic and also ancient classical Arabic would have sounded like and more importantly what their view of the world was yeah how was their world view of these languages different than our current worldview and I entered the scholarly world uh through the Society of biblical literature the American Academy of religion I became the co-chair of the mysticism group of the American Academy of religion for almost a decade but what I discovered was that Scholars were still looking back at these texts including the Greek text with a modern worldview yeah and that that was the key moment where I discovered okay I'll what I'll do is I'll go get a PhD in hermeneutics which is some if you probably know this if you went through Seminary hermeneutics is the study of interpretation Theory Through the Ages so I took a did my dissertation in uh the ancient the hermeneutics of ancient Semitic languages Semitic meaning those that are root-based in the Semitic stream ancient Hebrew you could say classical Aramaic the and the Aramaic the first centri century Palestinian Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken and then on into the Quran which is sixth Century Arabic which is also quite different and I discovered quite you know quite wide similarities in the way that the roots were rendered or could be rendered but I'll I'll wait for a moment and go into that later so that's that that can form part of some of our later discussion yeah what I love about it seems to me and correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that a lot of what like you grew up in this interesting world with these different angles of of faith and then you talk about going to college and kind of moving away from Christianity but you still had this sense that Jesus was important but perhaps even more important than you were led to believe in your upbringing I feel like for me that's one of the things that has kept me here because I moved away I would say from like the Christian faith of my upbringing for a while because I grew up in a very fundamentalist Evangelical World a lot of the politics was mixed into it that we talked about earlier and I was like I have to get away from this but as I moved away from it I'm like Jesus is still very interesting to me and I feel like there's something about the Bible and there's something about Jesus like there's got to be more to it than all of this stuff than taking all these random verses and piecing together these systematic theologies that I studied over and over again and some just got to be something more and so when I'm turned on to people like like Matthew Fox has been on the show before people even like Elaine pagels has really some really interesting points of view people like Alexander Shia who you know like these people helped unearth something from like ah there is a whole another layer of things here that if I just do a little bit of digging I can find different roots of the Christian faith that might feel more applicable to me where I am in my life definitely yeah all right so your book uh Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus uh let's start with just talking about like an overview of this book somebody goes to the bookstore they pick up this book they bring it home what can they expect who's it for what's it about the the elevator pitch for your book well the elevator pitch is that this collects 40 Years of my work in this area yeah so in in some ways it's uh an encapsulation of all the work that I've done in individual books previously on for instance the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes in Matthew Beatitudes in Luke uh the whole Gospel of John which was subject of a a long audio uh series that I did for sounds true and I did several for them uh and particularly this book The Hidden gospel which picks out okay what were the main key words that Jesus used and if I were going to just learn a half a dozen things of his key words what would I need to know to read the Bible differently uh and hidden gospel I still think is is a very excellent work yeah but you know I'm pushing 72 now and I felt you know okay I need to gather everything together yeah and see it try to see it from a a much wider picture you could take a take a take a step above or take a step wider and look at whole Jesus's whole Ministry yeah from the point of view of the different gospels the different Witnesses and what do they have in common what Jesus do they reveal and I had been convinced of this for quite a while Glenn that uh no matter which gospel you look at and historical Jesus people divide them up well there's the Jesus in Matthew and the Jesus in Gospel of Thomas and the Jesus in John and they're different jesuses well they're not they're from viewed from his native language it's the same Jesus yeah using words differently for different audiences and for different purposes and different people remember things differently go figure right shocker well no I mean really so it's rather than one of the basic presumptions of historical Jesus rearch he said well if he said it more than one time it must be more true right how why is that even logical in the ancient world where memory was much more important than written texts yeah how how is that you know but still you're going to have different communities remember different things because they they got it differently same as if you go to a talker lecture now Although our memory modern memory is much more shoddy but you know in those days uh people took things to Heart differently so you had different branches of what I call the Jesus movement and what other Scholars call the Jesus movement many different branches more than we have gospels now and that is an historical fact yeah so anyway this book it's hopefully it's a long elevator ride but this book collects 40 Years of my work in this area there's a whole chapter on the Lord's Prayer chapter each on the Beatitudes half the book is on the Gospel of John which is extremely important for understanding Yeshua Jesus in Aramaic and then I take up certain problematic passages or what are usually problem passages from various people that I hear in my talks and my Retreats and I decided just to address those that that part of the book could have been much longer but you could say okay well there's all sorts of strange stuff that Jesus seems to say does the Aramaic clarify these and as you can imagine my answer is yes yeah of course yeah I mean one of the things I I want to point out to our listeners is this book is not a fast read Because for me I picked up the book thinking oh I just opened it up and I flipped through I'm like oh yeah I could read this in like a week and a half and I got to like page five or however long I was I was I was already in it for a week I'm like God this is there's so much information here but that makes sense because you said it's 40 years really of research and things you've been pondering and living through your own life into this book and so for our listeners uh you have to take your time with it so for me I'm not even done with it yet I'm just taking like piece by piece maybe like one one a day one every other day just kind of using that to meditate on and things like that because you take apart these pieces like the Lord's Prayer the Beatitudes and you take us into the Aramaic language word by word and kind of show us what these things are and it's fascinating so I am hooked I hooked good well I I try to intersperse at various points to slow people down even more with these contemplations you could call them contemplative prayer or centering prayer if you will I call it body prayer sometimes according to that's what Matt Fox use term uses but it doesn't matter they're contemplations arama only has one word that means contemplation or meditation or prayer it's all the same word there aren't different words so yeah all right so let's begin uh with this word Aramaic because uh I I'll be honest I like I said before I went to Bible College I went to Seminary have a couple of different degrees in seminary and really although Aramaic was was mentioned here and there it was for the most part we were taught you know the New Testament is written in Greek the Old Testament is written in Hebrew so if you can just grasp those two languages a little bit like you're set to go you pretty much understand Jesus and all the different things so Aramaic though like I left Seminary with this idea that some of the New Testament might have been translated from Greek to Aramaic at some point that's that's what I was that's the idea that I left with but we don't really need to know much about it because it wasn't so much original to the text in in very many ways so maybe you can debunk that a little bit for us I think a lot of our listeners probably have that idea as well and you have this quote in the book that I I wanted to read I I have it over here um you say Aramaic Christian Scholars offer evidence that the earliest Greek versions of the four gospels contain various Aramaic words and idioms transcribed into Greek letters the earliest Aramaic versions contain no Greek expression so what does that mean like what were were the original manuscripts written in Aramaic were they written in Greek do we not know uh you said Jesus was speaking Aramaic so why does all this stuff matter at the end of the day in 2023 ah yes well let's start with the point you raised which is that as a translator um if you have a source text that a supposed Source text that has a lot of uh foreign expressions in it then you would have to ask at least two questions uh what was the source of that text that you're using so what was the source of the Greek text where they drew the Aramaic from but the second point is even more important and this and this is this is an elementary translation sort of issue uh scholar should have noticed this before now they have noticed it that the Greek text contains expressions like F when Jesus heals someone it contains the expression tal when he raises the young girl um I think G iris's daughter is who it's described as uh various words the main in particular one of the words on the cross the say sayings on the cross is in Aramaic which is largely mistranslated directly this is the one usually translated as my God my God why have you forsaken me it's one of the the big problem passages actually in Christian theology you have to do all sorts of theological backflips to make sense of that yeah uh and other sayings whereas as I mentioned in the book uh and this is Aramaic Christians Aramaic speaking Christians who there are today there are various branches of them in the world today they point out well look you know you know there's no Greek in the Aramaic text who's speaking Greek here nobody's speaking Greek anyway the the second point is even more important when or if Jesus said it he said it in Aramaic when or if Jesus said it he said it in Aramaic no one that I've come across in the scholarly World questions this and they say but we but we only have the Greek text well recently uh an early early Aramaic text was discovered in the Sin Sin in the last half of a year that moves the oldest physical text closer and closer to the oldest Greek text I mean the one that's sitting in the Smithsonian is maybe the Aramaic text is maybe 100 years newer than the oldest Greek text but if you go to Aramaic Christians and Aramaic Christian Scholars of which there are a number they will say well we did not have a mentality where we needed to keep old texts as relics we would Faithfully recopy the text check it and then ritually burn the old text be before it became too frayed or too old to use so it's not about physical texts uh the aric Christians go on to say well we had these we had Aramaic texts an Aramaic version of the Bible in our homes for a thousand years before you Western Christians were even allowed to own a Bible and if your you know if your audience knows anything about Christian history before the Protestant uh you could say Revolution if you want to call it that uh it was illegal to own a Bible for the for the leoty for the common people only priests could could possess a physical copy of the Bible uh it was actually a in many countries a a crime punishable by death if you were found to have a Bible even if you're a Christian so the Advent of the proning press all the you know protestantism the Reformation this changed all that but when is that happening that's happening in the 1500s friends so the Christians say for over a thousand years before then we were using these texts we were using them in our homes we all had them and when they got too old we had them recopied ritually burned them and and carried on so but you know even more important is the point I raised earlier when or if Jesus said it he said it in Aramaic and Aramaic is a very very different language from the way we look at the world now it's not only different from Greek because there are some similarities with Greek that I found out and I pointed out in the new book yeah but it really has more to do with the worldview of the of the ancient worldview and how certain key points key words are translated yeah all right so let's let's let's dive into that a little bit like somebody listening might be thinking like what is Aramaic and Greek like who who cares that might be their thought is how how do these two things differ because I have an idea of the answer because I read this part of of your book you talk a lot about it in the beginning of the book but for listeners who haven't read the book like why wouldn't think of a question somebody might ask like why wouldn't translations be the same if we're just doing a word by word translation of the text like why does Aramaic bring out these hidden teachings to borrow from the subtitle that we might not clearly see in Greek or obviously in our English Bibles that we have on our shelves well again Glenn there are two factors here um first as I pointed out in all of my books the ancient Semitic languages including Aramaic are built on a root and pattern system system that is each individual letter has a meaning a feeling and according to some each individual letter is like a living being it's like a word spoken by the Creator in Genesis 1 where God speaks the universe into existence so the letters were considered not just as things that sit in our hearing or memory or on a page or a manuscript or a pal you could say a scroll but the words the words themselves are expressions of the Divine when they come through a prophet or when they're given in a prophet prophetic or Visionary sense so these individual letters combine into twos and threes and otherwise and you have various ways to read them that means one word can be read on various levels example the same word that means Spirit also means breath this is the one I usually go to first you know if your listeners want to change their way of looking at uh the Bible at the sayings of Jesus the gospels just you know pencil in the word breath everywhere the translation says spirit because it's the same word in Aramaic there aren't two words now what does that mean which is it Spirit or is it breath is it like Spirit everywhere Holy Spirit or is it my breath well the qu the answer is it's both yeah it's both there is no separation from my breath with you could say the Divine breath sacred breath R the only separation is the separation I make by myself feeling separate from it the only separation is what I the screen I put in front of myself to think only I exist and only I am important now that's the difference yeah so this is these things are reemphasized all the way down if you drill down into the Aramaic there's only one preposition you know a preposition is like uh between you and me the word between MH or inside of me I feel this inside of me well in Aramaic it's the same word for inside within me and between you and me Among Us you could say it's the same the within and the among are is the same same preposition so when Yeshua Jesus is said to have said the Kingdom of Heaven is within you or the Kingdom of Heaven is among you and Scholar historical Jesus people make all sorts of hash about that um he said the same thing both times he had to say the same thing both times he only had one preposition he could have used yeah now how do we know Yeshua Jesus spoke Aramaic because all of his listeners only understood Aramaic or 99% of them only understood Aramaic Greek would have been understood by only a few people at his time mostly those who collaborated with the upper class with the Romans with the people that the Romans had placed in charge of the temple or the various you know the courts of the various herds in the different provinces uh and Latin even less so 90% of his Jesus's listeners were all poor underclass people they only would have understood things in Aramaic yeah wow it seems like I mean it seems to me like the Aramaic language then has like an endless amount of nuance to it right because I mean depending on that you said like the sound because every every letter has its own meaning and the sound but then if you start merging different letters together create different sounds with other words to create different sounds like you can just the meanings can just expand and evolve from there yeah is that a good way to put it or yeah no that's a perfect way to put it Glenn the Hebrew the Jewish tradition knows this quite well and it's the basis of midrash if you studied any of this Seminary midrash or midrash um different the different ways of interpreting the scriptures and of course you know you can interpret them in a more outer way sure and you can interpret them in a more inner way or you can do a both and yeah and different Jewish groups Scholars do different things there's of course the formal midrash with a capital M which was written down you know the early rabbis have their have their midrashim on various uh you know elements of the scriptures but then there's also this informal the small M midrash which continues today as a tradition also in the Arabic language tradition of the Quran uh sufis interpret the Arabic of the Quran quite differently than say fundamentalist Muslims do it allows for both it depends on what other influences are there and here we come to these other influences and why we don't have let's say one agreed upon so to speak literal translation of these texts because these other screens these other influences can include big breath um Empire politics um hierarchy uh consolidation of power in various organizational structures whether they're church or Empire or other sorts of things and that leads to a limiting of the meaning let's keep it simple let's try to get a Creed that everyone can sign up to like a mission statement of a corporation and we'll all get behind this one formulation of what the scriptures are going to mean to us now if you look in Acts and I'm sure some of your listeners have and I point this out toward the end of the book uh what you find in Acts you don't find any profound complex ideas about Jesus at all you have the early disciples Peter and others offering a an experience of the rucha that is the sacred breath that they received through Yeshua other Traditions call this a transmission they offer a direct transmission of his Spirit of his breath and they say we got it from this guy Yeshua and we can give it to you yeah and they do and you don't find any you could say theological ideas about uh Jesus at least in the early part of Acts none of this comes about so it really can flip the whole way of looking at the scriptures on its head if you I guess it really I would think it really like flips how we would understand the like the gospel El on on its head too right because one of the things I I remember reading in the in the book is that um Aramaic like you said being a Semitic language sort of and I could be using the wrong terminology here so correct me if I am wrong but it almost erases dualities and brings things together right like you talked about I think in the book about how past present and future are often molded into one being as opposed to separate yeah and same kind of thing with light and darkness ass as as one and the same so like I'm wondering what does that elimination of dualities do in regards to the gospel because way I was raised to read the scriptures what I was told about the gospel is that it's you know it's truth against lies it's good against bad it's light against Darkness flesh against spirit and Jesus came to kind of squash all of those really bad things and hold up the positive things so like if we erase those dualities if we start bringing things together more like unity and unifying what does that do to the gospel in particular because that's the gospel in a lot of churches in North America is you know it's victory over the darkness kind of thing sure whereas this Aramaic language is really bringing those things together so what are your thoughts on that if you have any no it's a great question Glenn it's a very good question and let me give you could this the considered answer it really requires um it does not erase all dualities but it views them differently yes instead of two poles over here separated good and evil what you have are polarities MH which means that there's a field in between them and I go into some of this the beginning of the book which sort of goes over people's heads but it's it's very important and I reaffirm this throughout the book so you have instead of Good and Evil you have ripeness and unrip tub and bisha tub is the word that's usually translated good or forms of it as blessed and bisha forgot which hand I'm on anyway I'm getting confused with the zoo the bisha is unrip that which is not ripe or that which is overly ripe so we we still have choices in life we have choices to do that which is ripe appropriate for our heart for our soul for our connection to the Divine or we have choices not to do that yeah as a human as an individual as a human species we have choices to make and Jesus you know mentions this throughout the gospels this is is why you can't say it eliminates all dualities or all choices or just new says well it's all relative this is not moral relativism not at all but it it re-empower breath the and then make choices from there this is very important so again another word your your listeners can look at again is the word these ripe these good and evil words in the bi in the gospels and just write ripe and unripe over them it doesn't say there isn't unrip there is and some things are still growing they're still becoming ripe at the right time at the right place and some things are way past it we could say they're past their cell by date using British language you know it's like hey time for the compost for this behavior in my life or in our life as a community as a culture whatever yeah so the so the dualities then still exist but they they exist in a certain they exist in a field where there is a you could say there's a middle point where one can feel them both okay and where is this Middle Point it's right here in the heart in what Jesus calls leha this is what mediates between our life here and now in this Dimension I'm trying to do a circle here and our life you could say connecting above and beneath us to that which is much bigger than us this bigger breath Soul uh you could say the the part of us that is that is infinite Soul if you will and and those both of those polarities both of those sides are contained within the breath correct and so it's our job as human beings according to Yeshua to sort of to live in the middle and to always be checking in with our soul I'm using the word Soul here just for ease of use it's what I use in the book you some people translate it as capital S self MH we won't I won't argue about the English words Jesus calls it RHA it's the big breath of which my smaller breath in this body and this flesh is a part it is a part of that so we cannot exclude our individual life our individual choices that we make here from this breath it's just that we need to come from a different place and you know clear some of the blinders that we have to the fact that we are really an infinite soul and a body clear some of the blinders to that so that we can live appropriately yeah yeah okay so can we look at can we look at maybe uh maybe a piece of the Lord's Prayer as an example to all of this that was one of the first scriptures I memorized as a kid Our Father who art in heaven Hallowed be the name etc etc and I used to recite it every night you know before bed and I I say it throughout the day when we were in school and things like that so can you take us into that prayer um a little bit give our listeners like a taste of of what they're going to find in this book because assuming the prayer was first spoken by Jesus in Aramaic or written in Aramaic much of what we see in our English language is barely going to scratch the surface like we've been talking about of of really the depth of that prayer because we've gone from Aramaic to Greek to English I'm sure there's lots of other stops and things like that in between so I'm sure there's some important things Lost in Translation so I give you the mic whatever part of the prayer you'd like to take us into to uh go for it yeah know I was I was considering that because I knew we were going to talk about this but yeah I I was the same I learned the that was the first thing I learned by heart uh was was the Lord's Prayer King James King James English all that yeah I still know it quite very well but now I know the AR make better well let me say first as just what readers will find of all of my books is that some some things there are more things where we have the king James is a limited a very limited translation the Aramaic offers a wider spectrum of meaning that includes our individual life and our communal life at the same time there are some things that are clear mistranslations according to Aramaic Christian Scholars according to my research as well um Our Father which art in Heaven aashay aashay this a is more of a process it's more of an activity than a being sitting somewhere I'll just say I'll leave it at that since we have limited time this uh wound is this process of the breath coming into me every moment just as the breath comes into Humanity in Genesis 1 it's this is happening now creation is not a long time ago at the so-called Big Bang or whatever the newest theory is it's happening now now now now and then this spreads out around us when we connect that way we can see the universe around us nature each other with we could say a different view with new eyes we can see it as unfolding Realms of light of Shem Hallowed be thy name uh nit kades make space let there be space for this Shem for this vibration you could say this feeling of connection connecting to the bigger breath connecting to Allah which is what Jesus calls God T Mal usually translated thy kingdom come T is come it's more of an emphatic form it's like come come and maluta is feminine gendered in Aramaic as it is in Greek actually you might wonder how they got Kingdom out of all of that um I'll leave that question aside it's probably addressed in some of your other podcasts um but yeah a lot of feminine gendered words even in Greek end up masculine in translations yeah enough said uh let your I can your vision and empowerment come now so open my eyes open my ears open my senses so that I I feel not I feel not only a different vision of my life or my surroundings but I'm able to act on it and then you could see the the breath speaking of breath although the breath is not mentioned so far is gradually coming more deeply into life and finally it enters the heart let thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven well you know let's just say Sian is more like heart let your desire of your heart your meaning Allah meaning God the Aramaic word for God is Allah let your desire come through me and unite my individual life so not just the Earth or some objective Earth somewhere but the Earth in me the earthiness in me my individual let it unite that with my at least with my community with my communal life and hopefully with much more than that with my world you could say with my surroundings so this Dimension again and this Dimension again we find this in aashay aashay so this is repeated here second half of the prayer is all about how we live this life how we live our lives here and now so it mentions bread LMA um give us just enough LMA which can also mean food doesn't have to be wheat bread or any other non-wheat bread or anything like that so it's you know let us have enough food for our body mind Soul and Spirit again I've I've just used words that Aramaic wouldn't use because Aramaic doesn't even have a word for mind it only has a word for the heart and the surface of the heart which is where the thoughts are residing so let us have enough food for body could say for our flesh for our heart for our inner life or our outer life enough for this illuminated moment that is this day wow wow where are we up to forgiveness yeah you know different forms of Letting Go very dense sounds I won't even unpack these in the Aramaic but the sounds will tell [Music] you so you hear all this AR the Semitic languages are strong in these sounds it means that the breath is trying to work through something often trying to release something trying to enter more deeply it's like digging it's like a digging sound it's a digging it's a it's like there's some effort there yeah but you know and then the forgiveness is not like I forgive first and then everybody then I get forgiven no every it all happens simultaneously as you led to earlier Glenn past present future these are sort of all at the same time time not collapsed exactly but one can feel them all at the same time and then the the lines that have caused people the most problems and this brings us back to a theme I mentioned uh the ones translated lead us not into temptation but Deliver Us from Evil why would God lead us into into temptation I forget how Luther goes into this but it has to do with hardening Pharaoh's heart and things like that and yada y y well the AR say that jic actually says let us not enter Temptation and here the word for Temptation means forgetfulness that's what the word for that's translated as transation means forgetfulness meaning forgetfulness of who we are and what we're here to do and that we are RHA we are these big infinite breath Souls that are temporarily living in the flesh yeah don't let us forget that bit but also set us free from I didn't give you the Aramaic for the first bit that's the don't let us enter forgetfulness don't let us enter bisha unrip help us make right decisions at the right time in the right place from this from everything that has gone before in the prayer let us live from there and make proper decisions and then there's the dedication which I know some people think wasn't in the prayer originally but it's traditional in in Semitic language prayers to have this sort of dedication we find Jesus doing a long dedication at the end of the Gospel of John when after the Lord's after the Last Supper he turns and he dedicates all of his work you could say with his students with his disciples so Matthew has this line Luke does it you know he may have said one thing one time one thing another time doesn't mean he didn't say it so to you belongs ah King James for thine is the Kingdom power and Glory forever and ever to you is this I can this Vision this empowerment and the energy the Life Energy throughout the gospels one of the main key words in Hebrew and Aramaic also comes into Arabic in a certain form that is Life Energy Life Energy here and now and everywhere all the time it's not just life somewhere else above us in some Penthouse we're going to get later you have the yours is the vision that gives us the empowerment to feel this life energy and then so beautiful the word translated as Glory also can mean song It's a form of Jesus uses that quite a bit it's a song that is returning to the singer the one singer not me but the the one who sang the universe into existence and is singing now so it's in some ways a musical a beautiful musical image it can mean Glory it can mean return because it's also we finded in a certain form in the word for Shabbat or Sabbath uh but it can also mean song or Harmony so let us let all of my actions be part of this song could say that that harmonizes harmonizes my own life with the my life of my surroundings where I came from before birth where I'm going after death wow amen wow so an amen just means let me live from here let me live from this Earth from this ground yeah wow and our listeners this is why I said earlier you can't read this book in five minutes you can't read it slow you have to rewind this whole bit that's right you can go book line by line it's or you can go to my website and you can hear me say the words in Aramaic you can learn them in about a month actually many people have children too so there's a free there's a page where you can just click on buttons and you hear me saying the lines of the prayer and yeah all good there's so much in there that I would love to comment on if we had time but the thing that jumps out at me is the the piece about lead us not into temptation because sure that Twist on things that you just shared is really how I've come to understand the gospel in my own personal life is it's just that we we forget who we are and that the purpose of Jesus is to remind us of who we are I feel like Jesus is like God's mirror saying this this right here if you would just stare at this for a while you'll remember who you are and that that's the whole thing is we we go through life we pick up our baggage whatever it is we we forget who we've been created to be and then we come across a Jesus figure we come across Jesus and we remember like oh yes this is where I'm supposed to live from and I think that what you just brought out in the Aramaic in that prayer it's such a beautiful synopsis of what is really at the heart of the Gospel everything's in the prayer I mean this is why I recommend if people want to start with the Aramaic uh learn the prayer yeah in Aramaic and you don't have to learn my translations or anybody just just pray the prayer in Aramaic it will teach you yeah uh getting into Aramaic is more difficult so well just go to your website and copy we'll copy you yeah well you know use my words as a as a jumping off point for your own experience that's why I write all these books that's why I bother to do all the scholarly work is to sort of make excuses to Scholars who basically need scholarly excuses to look into something more deeply yeah yeah all right so we're just about out of time but two really quick questions number one sure um is there is there even anything out there that is a a Bible that is from Aramaic to English that might even bring out a smidgen of the little bit of things that you're sharing with us that's question number one and then number two I know you have a website I think you have a community group things like that that I'm sure our listeners would love to may be part of if you want to share about that sure in brief uh given what I said earlier uh the ancient Semitic languages do not really allow for a literal only one meaning word for word translation yeah so literal translation is in oxymoron for the ancient Semitic languages when a prophet is speaking when a and a clear when a person who is collected to God to the Divine is speaking now doesn't mean you know they couldn't say you know go down to the corner and meet me there at you know half past the sun because they didn't have o'clocks at that time but but when a a person like Yeshua Jesus is speaking yes this is always meant to be interpreted in all these different ways some people start with the Bible of George lamsa which will correct some things uh like this lead us not into temptation part lamsa early Aramaic Christian came to America 1940s 1930s actually was funded by then fundamentalists because fundamentalists at that time wanted to know how Jesus actually spoke um so you can go go for that also my current favorite one-word translation just a gloss is that of George kirats k i r a zed uh if you go to gorgia press g o r g i a s gorgus press uh his Aramaic to English Bible good one to have if you want to get into this at all but again remember there is no one literal translation that's going to give you all these years doing all this stuff but yeah you can go to my website there's all sorts of stuff to download There's documents there's free audios and yeah of course and what is the uh Community about on your website I spent a little bit of time looking I think the Aon commun Community well right now it's mostly online and you know different people connect when when I'm online uh you know during Co we we all sort of everything moved online really basically and now we're just starting to you know join in different different places but it's still mostly online okay so you'll have news of where I'm appearing uh there's a group that meets every quarter I think uh where we meet online and I offer some things and then we all do some practice together like that great well I will put all of those things in the show notes but like I said we're just about out of time but thank you so much for taking time for me for listeners it's been a lot of fun thank you for the work you do and maybe we can do that again sometime because you have more books I have more questions just just shoot me an email excellent thank [Music] you [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] n [Music] [Music] [Music] I

Channel: What If Project

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Length: 54min 18sec (3258 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024