The "Our Father" and What It Can Tell Us about the Gospels - Part II

 

The image above is a modification of one that I found on the internet, and I do not own any rights in it. It contains a descendant of the oldest Hebrew text of the Avinu ("Our Father") that we have, It corresponds to my Matthew IIb, and is from a text similar to that of Shem Tob's Hebrew Matthew, also preserved for us by the Jewish Rabbis. It is here written in Dead Sea Scrolls script, which is much the way it would have been written in the time of Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus).

In concluding Part I of this article, I indicated that there was much more that could be said on this subject. Indeed, there is, and I'll try to say it, or at least some of it, in this part.

Some of what remains to be said concerns the Aramaic version of this prayer, known as the "Abun," "Abwoon," or "Awoon," depending upon the dialect. It is important to remember, though, that Jewish Aramaic and Christian Aramaic (Syriac) are rather different. It is quite misleading to call Syriac (the language that Jesus spoke," as is often done by speakers and proponents of that language. Jesus (Rabbi Yeshua) was a Jew, and it is therefore logical to assume that he spoke Jewish Aramaic. It is also a fact that the Peshitta, the official Syriac text of the Bible, has been intentionally modified to bring it into closer harmony with the Greek textual tradition. In fact, an effort was made to suppress and destroy all earlier Biblical texts in Syriac. As usual though, they couldn't quite get all of them, and a couple of texts (Syr-s and Syr-c) did survive, and were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. For the purposes of this article, the relevant version is the version in standard Jewish Aramaic, covered in the previous part.

Some of the salient points are these:

1) The Aramaic version is the oldest. As a poet, I am certain that it is original and not a translation, since it employs literary devices such as rhyme and plays on words. It also reveals a structure that was partially lost in all succeeding versions.

2) The Aramaic version makes clear several points that were doubtful. For example, we needn't worry about whether "sins" or "debts" is correct: it should simply depend on the context, because in Aramaic the same word has both meanings.

3) What in Greek was "daily bread" was "our bread, which is from the earth" (give it to us day by day). This is part of an internal structure of the prayer, which contrasts the heavenly kingdom with life here on earth. The idiom used for "day by day" is literally "today and tomorrow," which is why St. Jerome, who apparently didn't know much Aramaic, thought the sense was "give us our bread of the morrow today."

4)The Aramaic original was translated into Hebrew in at least two different versions. In the earlier (Matthew IIb) one, the last line read "keep us (shomrenu) from all evil." But a later Hebrew version (Matthew III) read "deliver us (hatsilenu) from evil." It was from this later, fuller Hebrew text that our Greek Matthew was translated. This is proven by a misreading in the Greek text, a confusion between two very similar-appearing Hebrew words: hatsilenu "deliver us" and chaltsenu "draw us." The word that appears in our Greek text, "rhusai" is a translation of the latter, not the former.

(to be continued)

Text Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.