Neil Douglas-Klotz on The Aramaic Jesus

"This is, what I would say, the beauty of the approach that I have used is common in looking at the Semitic language teachings of various prophets. It's common among the Sufis today, it's common among the Jewish mystics, that when you look at the words of a prophet or a mystic or a teacher in the Semitic languages, the language itself allows you to look at it in a number of different ways, from a number of different viewpoints, a number of different levels... And I think that's the richness of it, that there doesn't have to be fixed as one particular translation, or one particular meaning. It doesn't have to be the be-all and end-all or the only meaning. 

So that's what I've attempted to really do in my work--for instance, in my very first book, Prayers of the Cosmos, [I translated] each line of the Lord's Prayer, of Jesus' prayer, five or six different ways. So these are possibilities. No one translation is the definitive translation. But there's a richness. There's a breadth there. There's a depth there in which people can hear what they need to hear and still connect, you could say, through breath, through spirit to the person who said the words." 

Tami Simon speaks with Neil Douglas-Klotz, a world-renowned scholar in religious studies, spirituality, and psychology, and the author of 'Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus's Words,' and 'The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus.' 

In this episode, Tami speaks with Neil about body prayers and how to appreciate multiple interpretations of scriptural text.

Read Article