New Latest Real Jesus[TM] Just Dropped!

Every once in a while, this crap New Age “translation” of the Our Father makes the rounds, claiming to be the “original” Aramaic and (by some fantastic coincidence) to say exactly what contemporary New Age imaginings of the Latest Real Jesus say.

This is, in fact, paradoxically traditional (in a way) in that it reflects the century-long tradition of discovering Latest Real Jesuses who always say what the mood of the times wants him to have said instead of what he actually said.

Here’s the thing: we have no “original” Aramaic Our Father. The gospels were written in Greek. Period. End of Story.

Reconstructed imaginings of how the Our Father might have been said in Aramaic are just that: reconstructed imaginings. And renderings of that into even more highly reconstructed imaginings of how New Age Jesus might say the fictionalized Aramaic in English are even more remote from the actual sources, which are, I repeat, Greek and which are very accurately translated, again and again, directly from that tongue into English and a thousand other languages countless times century after century. None of them say anything like this quack New Age reimagining, because it’s not what the eye-and-earwitnesses of Jesus report in the New Testament.

Here is an absolutely sure thing to understand: Latest Real Jesuses always, always, always tell you what the obsessions of his discoverers are. They never ever ever reveal anything about the actual Jesus of history, whose story is told by eyewitnesses and people extremely close to eyewitnesses in the New Testament. The people who perpetually insist that those whose shared his language, table, trials, and culture had no grasp of what he was “really” saying, but that clever suburbanites with Google Fu have penetrated the very pith and marrow of his thought and heart are, depend upon it, cranks.