The Lord's Prayer in Aramaic yet again

The new academic year seems to be bringing forth a crop of newish webpages on the Aramaic Lord's prayer. And here's another one. It actually starts off quite well, but then we start getting things that seem increasingly dodgy.
First there's something that's a bit out of date.

Biblical scholars disagree about Jesus' meaning in the Lord's Prayer. Some view it as "existential," referring to man's present experience on earth, while others interpret it as "eschatological," referring to the coming Kingdom of God. The prayer itself lends to both interpretations,

I think that nowadays most scholars are more or less convinced by the idea that this is not an either/or thing but a both/and because the Kingdom is both 'now and not yet'- for a good exposition of the thesis I still feel that George Eldon-Ladd's 'The Presence of the Future' is hard to beat. And I have to say that I think that this is exagerrated,

many different interpretations of the various aspects of what is offered as foundational information about Jesus the Nazarene, what he said and taught, and how translations over the centuries have changed dramatically sometimes even altering the original meaning of a particular text

and I think that I would like to see more support for that assertion. I suspect that is is hearsay repeated and exagerrated over the course of a number of lectures, writings etc where references to original sources and arguments have been absent.

And that seems to apply here too:

Aramaic manuscripts have been uncovered over the years which provide us with original source documents that can be fairly well authenticated. Beginning with Constantine around 325 AD, dramatic changes began to be infused into interpretations as texts were translated from Aramaic into Greek and then into Latin. In later years there was then translations into old English, and later, more translations into modern English.

I keep seeing these two things asserted without evidence. I actually wrote something about this yesterday on the Abbey Nous blog. Where basically I question the idea that original Aramaic source documents have been found, and placing that in the context of the linguistic realities of the Eastern mediterranean at the time. Then it points out the realities of the way that translations have been made particularly showing that we can do without the Chinese whispers implications of the chain of translations assertion. In short our contemporary English translations since the reformation have been based on the Greek texts, and it is likely that the Aramaic versions are also translations of the Greek text.

The next paragraph is an interesting mixture of some more or less correct assertions but for the wrong reasons.

The Aramaic Language, the language of Jesus, doesn't distinguish between means and purpose, inside quality or outside acting. Both are given simultaneously as in "what you've sown, so you'll harvest." When Jesus relates to the "Kingdom of Heaven" he means the Kingdom inside as well as the Kingdom in the middle or "amongst" us. Also "the next one" is inside and outside as in the whole or Self. The arbitrary borders between spirit, body and soul are nonexistent.

So it is right that the 'arbitrary borders between spirit, body and soul' are, if not non-existent, nowhere near as defined or as significant as they have tended to be in the history of Western philosophy since Plato. This is because Hebrew thought has a wholistic view of the human person. A view which has tended to be picked up by orthodox Christianity at its best, by the way. But it is hitching your cart to a fairly strong [and ultimately untenable] form of linguistic determinism to say that 'the language doesn't distinguish ...'. I would want to see examples of precisely what is meant here, but I suspect that it is a quasi anthropological comment on some grammatical features. What these kinds of comments tend to forget is that syntax and morphology are only part of the picture of conveying meaning. To cut to the chase on the matter: just think about English and how many different views of life the universe and everything are happily conveyed in the medium of English; despite the fact that we have a verb 'have' doesn't mean that it is impossible to think socialistically, and the fact the Welsh/Cymraeg doesn't have such a verb has not prevented the existence of feudal and then capitalist modes of thought and social organisation in Wales. Nor has the absence of gender-specific pronouns in Hungarian and Turkish resulted in non-sexist societies. So let's leave aside the attempted short cuts represented by this lazy anthropological linguistic determinism. It only serves to give spurious authority to ideological statments. As ever, the meaning of things in worked out in the whole discourse in social context which is the work that biblical scholarship is engaged in.

Now we come to another interesting but misleading thought.

The Aramaic Language has (like the Hebrew and Arabic) different levels of meaning. The words are organized and defined by a poetical system where different meanings of every word are possible. So, every line of the Lords Prayer could be translated into English in many different versions.

In fact this is true of any language. Translation is about conveying meanings into another language based on a shrewd reading of the context. Commentary can then lay bare further nuances and open up implicatory and conotative meanings for the readers who want a fuller understanding. However, this is where the issue of exegesis vs eisegesis comes in. Sometimes, if we are not careful, we can import meanings that really were not there [eisegesis]. I fear that is a lot of what happens in the 'translations' that follow. Admittedly some of the expanded meanings given are probably fair explications of the way that some of the implications of a word or phrase might play out in contemporary western culture, but not if these are then detached from the core meanings and presented as the original meaning. They really are poetic amplified renderings of some conotative meanings. In fact, in this case, using a mystical methodology of interpertation which had way of making meaning from texts in conformity with a prior worldview which may not be that of the original speaker. That's okay when it is understood what is happening. But it's not something we tend to do in western hermeneutics and to pass off the resulting 'meditations' as if they are on a par with or superior to basic translations is misleading and unethical. I say 'unethical' because it functions to use the apparent authority of a well-respected spiritual teacher to purvey ideas that were and are not his.

Brad Stevens then says;

In the latter part of the second century, Matthew translates the Lord's Prayer in rather crude Greek,

Well, I think we can safely place Matthew as writing in the first century, it's been some time since scholars have tried to make the case for such a late date; the evidence just won't support it. It is also a moot point as to whether it is a translation, the multilingual situation may well mean it was taught in two or three languages to people who could understand two or three languages and who would be able to produce their own accurate-for-working-purposes translations in any case since they regularly had to do it. This hang up about translation is perhaps a product of our own relatively monolingual culture. Now we come to some interesting stuff.

The commonly accepted version of the Lord's Prayer is the version of Matthew. This version however is admitted to be grossly inaccurate. It contains sixty-six words. The Revised Version of Matthew contains but fifty-five. Twenty-four words either do not belong to the prayer, or have been misplaced;

Well, most of those 'extra' words are from the doxology which may have been customary as an ending to many prayers and so not quoted in Luke and some manuscripts of Matthew. The rest is not explained. I wonder whether it is by comparison with Luke that gives rise to those allegations. But that of course is to make an assumption that Luke's shorter version is original. if we had a situation where the prayer was taught on several occasions and with slightly different wording but a common structure [which is my assertion in Praying the Pattern, see right margin] then this is not really a very significant observation, at least not with the significance claimed here. In fact it's rather useful to know that absolute verbal accuracy is not required but a gist. For one thing it means that some of the fluster about translation can be lightened up and the words that are quoted after are hardly relevant in this case. And the possibility that the prayer can be constructed from the Talmud makes it more likely that what we have is substantially accurate and would have been easy to remember -assuming that the Talmud was available at that time, I seem to recall that there is some doubt about that.

Later on we are reminded that

The English wording of the Our Father ... was based on the English version of the Bible produced by Tyndale (1525)

Tyndale used the original Greek based on the manuscripts available at the time, not particularly the Vulgate. That was part of the reason that the Roman Catholic authorities were unhappy about it. The Ben Witherington article just referenced, puts this somewhat misleading statement into perspective;

The rather curious English translation we have today is due to Henry VIII's efforts to impose a standard English version.

This seems to imply that both the Henrician translation is not accurate but was politically motivated. While the desire to have an English version did have a political dimension, the fact remains that the 'curiosity' of the version is that the English is somewhat poetic, however it is based on translations using the then-best available Greek manuscripts. The aim of the translators was to produce a good translation from Greek into an English of the day because they believed that everybody should be able to read the scriptures in their own tongue. They were undemining the church order of the day which was cagey about letting ordinary people have access to the scriptures.

The articles' author concludes by restating some of the inaccuracies from earlier and this:

For interpreting otherwise would lead followers to believe that 'heaven' is here and now ... is in each one of us ... only if we align ourselves with the Spirit of God.

Which is well wide of the mark, certainly in 'my' churches that statement of perspectives the author appears to believe is problematic to latter day orthodox Christians simply is not. And we arrive at interpretations consonant with what he writes without the historically dubious and outdated scholarship cited and used. It re-emphasises the strange paradox that many people have an understandable beef with a lot of institutional Christianity and their animus leads them to miss the way that many or most of the things they wish to find and/or assert spiritually are actually part of the deal in new testament Christianity. It's sad to see so many babies getting thrown out with the bathwater.

So I'll state it clearly: I am happy that the Gospels and Paul's letters work with the idea that God's just and gentle rule is begun in Christ and the here-and-now of human history. It is not the whole deal; there is more to come when God will be all in all in a way that is clearly not the case now. It is part of the standard package to assert that Christians are even now citizens of God's Reign called to begin to live now in the power and goodness of it and to further the agenda of God's Love, joy, peace and wholeness in the here-and-now world empowered and led by the Holy Spirit who is the marker and effective power-source for God-living as he was in Christ. The Eldon-Ladd book makes it fairly clear.

Article being commented upon: The Lord's Prayer in Aramaic
See also previous posts on the Lord's prayer in Aramaic:
http://abbeynous.blogspot.com/2006/09/errors-in-lords-prayer.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-on-so-called-translation-of-lords.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2006/06/lords-prayer-paraphrases-on-squidoo.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2006/05/lords-prayer-midrash.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2006/04/aramaic-lords-prayer.html
http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2005/11/lords-prayer-in-aramaic.html
Filed in: abwun, paternoster, Lord's_prayer, Aramaic, history, text