Avinu Avoon Our Father
14 March 2008 - 8 אדר ב' 5768 by Huw
The RE:Jesus blog makes a post that mixes common Christian piety with just a little bit of Triumphalism and lack of knowledge of Hebrew and Judaism. (I’m torn as to how to classify this because while RE:Jesus is an emergent blog, the claim they make has been heard by me in Orthodox, Catholic, Methodist and Anglican circles).
The argument being that, basically, Jesus taught something radically revolutionary in opening his prayers with, “Our Father”. It’s comforting for us to think the entire world was in darkness and then *boom* here was something new. My reply (not yet released from moderation over there):
Jesus wasn’t as revolutionary as you’re making him out to be:
The synagogue liturgy addresses God as Father several times and the “18 Blessings” has the devout Jew addressing God as Father three times a day in his personal prayers as well as in the public gathering. And on the Day of Atonement (and other penitential days) the Jewish tradition addresses God as “Avinu Malkenu” “Our Father and Our King”.
Also, in *Hebrew* “Abba” is Daddy, but I’ve been taught that in Aramaic it’s a very formal “Father”. But beyond that, in Hebrew and Aramaic, both “Av” and “Avva”, with the suffix for “our”, get shortened to the same word: “Avinu” “Our Father”. So we have no way of knowing if it’s “Our Daddy” or “Our Father” at all, but given the Synagogue tradition of “Avinu Malkainu” it’s likely he was going for the Formal Style rather than the other way.
Correction to my comment: the “Our Av” in Aramaic is “Avoon”. Again it’s not evident if the prayer is addressed to “our avva” or “our av”.
The problem is that we (Christians) attempt to make claims that are clearly hogwash - easily disproven or, at best, impossible to prove. Then we grow “theology” on top of that. While that is ok in the areas of Faith or Theology (none of the items on the Creed or Liturgy can be proven or disproven) it doesn’t work in the areas of liturgical history, language or social science where we have actual facts and actual events work against us.
When you hear “Jesus was the first to teach about God as Father therefore…” it’s time to wonder what you’re there for at all.
Equally a problem is that we want to be so very right all that time, that we sometimes seem willing to ignore evidence that other people might, at least, be a *little* right as well. (This is not the way the early Church was, see St Justin calling Socrates a Christian!)
Neither we nor the rabbi we claim to follow invented the term “Our Father” as a way to address the deity. We can’t even claim to be the first religion to address deity with a parental title: history shows a lot of cultures with “Our Father” and/or “Our Mother” present before us and while our different theology may have evolved to include a lot or familial references - we didn’t invent them.
Christianity was, I think, a very logical evolution from the strain of religions present in the Roman Empire: the Initiatic Mystery traditions, the philosophy Stoicism and the ethical monotheism of Judaism and Socrates. From the first we get the idea of salvation (missing, as we understand it, from Judaism) from the second we get much of our mystical ideas and from the third we get our focus on both one God and right action. From the blending of the first and the last we get the idea of an intimate relationship to deity, from the second and third we evolved our (Eastern) ideas of “passionlessness” and disordered emotions. There is nothing in this paragraph that denies the ultimate truth of the Christian revelation, but equally this graph affirms that there is not much unique in it save the combination of all the elements. In fact, if there were much unique, I would find it highly suspect: Christianity (and Judaism) promises us that God has revealed himself to many folks. It follows clearly that there must be something of the Truth in everything True.
“The argument being that, basically, Jesus taught something radically revolutionary in opening his prayers with, “Our Father”.”
I am one of the bloggers for reJesus (the person who wrote the ‘Our Father’ post) and that is not what I said. In fact, I did my best to make it quite clear that Jesus was enhancing the traditional Jewish understanding of God rather than rejecting it or revolutionizing it. I also didn’t say that the concept of God as father was alien in Judaism - just that it was unusual. Which it was. I’m a student of biblical Hebrew and a regular at my local Orthodox shul. While I’m no theologian by any stretch of the imagination, I don’t pull my claims out of thin air.
reJesus isn’t an emergent blog. (As proof of my theological ignorance, I had no idea what ‘emergent’ even meant until a few weeks ago.) Only one of the five reJesus bloggers is emergent. I’m not. Originally we had eight bloggers, drawn from all over the Christian spectrum, as the idea was to write about Jesus from many and varied perspectives. Even though three people have had to drop out, we retain that eclectic character - one of us is an Anglican ordinand, one a Roman Catholic who is aspiring to be a nun, and another a member of a small non-denominational church. Our target audience is people who have had little or no exposure to Jesus or Christianity, which is why you might not find my standards of Hebrew translation as exacting as you would like.
Pax Christi,
Vicky
Hi Vicky and welcome:
Regarding “emergent” you’ve pretty much described it (at least as I’ve experienced it… YMMV, as they say)
Your target audience does deserve the best you can offer - regardless of how much they’ve been exposed to in the past. Work on improved scholarship - there is still “wrong” and “right” in translation. Yours was wrong.
If you are a regular attendee at a shul you’ll know that “Father” is not an unusual form of address in Judaism - being used twice in the 18 benedictions recited 3 times a day in Judaism.
Shabbat Shalom and I hope Holy Week is a good one for you!
Hello Huw,
My understanding of the emergent church is that it is a very fluid Protestant movement that encourages people to incorporate any elements from other Christian traditions that they find helpful into their worship, with reference to the tastes and preferences of the surrounding community. I’m a Catholic who is cut from traditional dough, and I disagree with this approach quite vigorously. I don’t disagree with ecumenism, which is why I’m quite happy to write alongside Christians from other churches - especially as it does something practical to help people whose knowledge of Christianity is limited. When I was invited to write for reJesus, I was told that we weren’t to push a particular theological standpoint. That goes for the emergent church as well.
Thanks to my concordance, I have always thought that ‘Abba’ is an informal way of saying father, and as my Aramaic is very weak I have nothing to check it against. I do believe you when you say that it can have a much more formal overtone, but my own experience of translation work tells me that one word often has different shades of meaning, so I don’t think that it is always possible to say that one translation is totally wrong and another totally right.
Proceeding from this, I think that Jesus’ mode of address was unusual for two reasons. The phrase that you quote (’Avinu Malkainu’) does not separate the image of God as father from the image of God as king - the construction ties them together. That doesn’t happen in Jesus’ prayer. But as I wrote in my blog entry, this doesn’t mean that the majesty of God is denied by Jesus and replaced by a ‘new’ take on God - His omnipotence and ‘otherness’ were common knowledge, knowledge that could only be enhanced by the intimate approach offered by the carpenter from Nazareth.
As I see it, Jesus’ very person increases the level of intimacy: He was the word made flesh, ‘the image of the invisible God’. God’s transcendence is emphasised throughout the Old Testament - He is referred to as ‘Father’ less than a dozen times in there, if I remember rightly. By contrast, Jesus embodies God’s immanence. That’s enough to make His way of prayer different.
This is not to say that before Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer “the entire world was in darkness and then *boom* here was something new”. I would never claim that Jesus was trying to give a makeover to a fusty-dusty old religion that had no meaning or relevance to everyone. I have always seen Christianity is a progression from Judaism, not a radical new reintepretation of God, and I’m sorry if my post came across that way.
Pax Christi,
Vicky
You’re very right about the shades of meaning! Of course we’re both guessing a bit because we have no record of what (assumedly polyglot) Jesus said or what language he used. Some scholars are quite certain the lord’s prayer looked nothing like what we have - the Jesus Seminar, for example, is only certain of the first two words of the koine!
If he did teach these words, did he use the Koine? The Aramaic? or the Hebrew? or even the Latin? Why would a devout Jew pray in anything other than Hebrew? Why would a Rabbi teaching use anything but one of the Holy Tongues (Aramaic or Hebrew)? Why would a teacher trying to reach Gentiles not use the Koine?
And without regard to any of that, we have only the NT text - which can not be 100% Jesus for it records the liturgical tradition of the various communities.
So as you and I debate the meaning of the Root ‘av’ plus the plural possessive… we’re only projecting what we guess to be the meaning on a text that is not authentic.
My main objection (my snobbishness about language aside) is that we can’t use *any* of that to make doctrinal assertions about what Jesus actually taught based on one or two words of text. And yet most of us do, all the time.
RE: Emergent, I think it’s the combination of all your traditions into one blog that makes the comparison for me rather than where each of you are, personally. You come across the web (and in my case the UK/US language barrier ;-) ) as emergent.