The ancient Greek word for sin, hamartia, is an archery term that refers to missing the mark. It evokes an image of someone who tries to hit the bullseye, who has the intention of hitting it dead on, but who fails.
As pure as our intentions may have been, what if our past interpretations of Jesus' message have created a gospel that was never meant to be? Wouldn't that mean that we have sinned against the gospel?
It is important to remember that Jesus spoke Aramaic better than he spoke Greek and Latin, and that most of the people with whom he interacted likely spoke Aramaic as well. It was the common language spoken by most of the locals. Given this fact, wouldn't it make more sense if we bypassed the intermediate translations and tried to find out what his message was in his own idiom? Thinking that we can only find truth in Jesus' words in our own language makes no more sense than accepting at face value a Spanish text translated into English via Russian.
That's what a new movement of Aramaic linguistic study is all about: discovering the words of Jesus in his spoken tongue.
The ancient Greek word for gospel was euangelion, which meant, literally, "good news." It was a term employed by messengers to announce to a ruler that his armies had won a battle. For delivering euangelion, the messenger would receive a reward from the people, which was also referred to as euangelion; thus, euangelion referred to politically charged good news and the subsequent reward for that news.
Applying the word euangelion to Jesus' message, then, implies that it was laced with political treason. This is definitely a possibility, but what if euangelion is not what he called it? In Aramaic, the word for gospel was sevartha, which means, simply, "hope." It was not a politically charged word; it had no connection to a government in place. It just meant hope.
Some circles within Christianity define the gospel as a verbal message that should end with the listener's conversion. This is not what the words for gospel meant in either ancient Greek or Aramaic. Maybe if we look at the original words in context, we might get a better picture of what Jesus meant.
Matthew 4:23 reads, "Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people." In this context the gospel of Jesus is about healing people. In a society where diseases got people kicked out of town and isolated from human interaction, the act of healing such outcasts, of dealing directly with them, had political, social, economic, and spiritual ramifications. The gospel then becomes about inclusion.
Could the gospel of Jesus be hope in the form of healing? Healing governments. Healing homelessness. Healing indifference, intolerance, and injustice. If the gospel of Jesus is about hope, then to prescribe a formula to it (i.e., you must say this prayer to be saved) is to introduce caveats that Jesus never intended. If we accept that the gospel is some determined mechanistic formula that excludes rather than includes, than we deny the very gospel that Jesus came to bring.
Out of either fear or an inadequate spatial awareness, we have for centuries perpetuated a gospel of exclusion. Christianity needs to be healed from the oppression it might have helped create by treating the gospel as a tool for exclusion. In seeking to find ways to create exclusion rather than inclusion and thus subverting the grace of God, we have sinned against the gospel. Even if we had good intentions behind our need to define who's in and who's out, we ultimately chose a different gospel from the one Jesus sought to impart.
What about the Kingdom of God? In context, Jesus seems to talk about the Kingdom of God in terms of whom it interacts with. He treats the Kingdom of God as dynamic and alive. It empowers. It inspires. It doesn't constrain or confine. If anything, it opens up possibilities. In ancient Greek the word can mean "realm." We might think of the word "realm" literally, as a geographical space, but it may have meant something more like "reality."
If the Kingdom of God is a reality, then everyone everywhere can participate in living it out together. There are no denominations, no religions, and no labels. It's people working together to live out heaven here. Now.
The Aramaic word that is rendered as "Kingdom of God" is melak, which meant "counsel" or "advice" and typically had a divine connotation. (It was related to the Aramaic word for angelic messenger.) In this light, the Kingdom of God is better understood as the Divine Counsel of God. Does that change how we see the message of Jesus? When Jesus begins parables saying, "The Kingdom of God is like...," he is essentially saying that God wants to interact with his creation, not be separated from it. This is why believing that we are separated from God cheapens the desire that God has to be with all of his creation and unintentionally alters Jesus' message.
A child who is learning to walk might bump into the same object over and over while he is learning to adjust to his surroundings. What he doesn't understand is that he is only bumping into a corner of that object, all the while missing the rest of that object. I think that's what has happened over hundreds of years. We've somehow touched only a corner of the gospel, and in recent years we are discovering the rest of it. I think it's safe to say that the gospel is bigger than you or I or even one religion. I want to make it clear, though, that I am not an enemy of Christianity, and that I do not want to dissolve it. I am simply looking for a new kind of Christianity that exists beyond our presumptions. The gospel as we know it is one of the presumptions I am dealing with.
Looking at the gospel in its original Aramaic reminds us that it isn't ours to claim, that everyone can join in it, and that it should compel us to bring hope in its many forms. It opens us up to the realization that preaching the gospel means looking for arenas where we can heal others. It doesn't mean that we should colonize; it simply means that we should participate in the creative, subversive application of extreme hope to all of the contexts in which we found ourselves. It means that we should believe in hope over religion. It means that love has the last word.
Perhaps we shouldn't call it "gospel" but "hope." Hope against all hope. The sort of hope that transforms governments. The sort of hope that ardently views humanity as healed rather than broken. The sort of hope that lives and embraces the reality of hope having the last word. When we start living in that kind of reality, we are already perpetuating the gospel.
Follow George Elerick on Twitter: www.twitter.com/atravelersnote
Really? Who says? Certainly no author or chronicler of Jesus' time.
Matthew must be confusing this Jesus with someone else since there is no written record from 1 to 33 AD of anything like this happening.
Perhaps Matthew and his bunch were referring to Dr. Bernie Swartz, a faith healer at the time who used leeches and magic potions to "heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people." Bernie is mentioned several times by lots of Augustan-age writers who were amazed by his powers. Of course, these same writers were known to be very sarcastic and cynical.
"Matthew must be confusing this Jesus with someone else since there is no written record from 1 to 33 AD of anything like this happening."
There are very scant records written in that time saying anything at all about Judea and Galilee. Hell, there's not a superabundance of things written about Rome in that time. A lot of things were written about Rome in that period which have been lost. The later books of Livy, for example. Many other Romans writing at that time are known only by their names or from brief quotes by later writers.
And that's Rome, the center of the Empire, and a) Jerusalem was out in the sticks, and b) there was a big freakin' war in and around Jerusalem from AD 66-70, in which the Temple was burned and sacked and in which, presumably, a lot of written material was also destroyed.
I'm just trying to see the historical record as impartially and realistically as I can. No matter what conclusions I draw as an historian, religious nuts will be able to twist it or ignore it to suit their needs.
It seems you are implying it is possible for everyone to live the life of a Buddhist monk in a monastery, a priest in a rectory, a rabbi, an imam, a nun in a convent, a televangelist, or a common preacher. The one thing they all have in common with their existence is that they perform little if any physical labor. You will need to clarify how one attains "the sort of hope that lives and embraces the reality of hope having the last word. When we start living in that kind of reality, we are already perpetuating the gospel." Maybe I'm just being too narrow-minded or stubborn because I realize that trying to make a living requires intense competition for one to choose between wants and needs, facts over beliefs, reason over hope or faith. These are inescapable choices since we live in the physical realm. The ethics of hope is not the same as morality.
i see them not as mutually exclusive. i seem them either as being one in the same or synonymous, which is entirely possible. we have look beyond our logic ('narrow') to see the wider picture. and i am being intentionally vague, because if hope is circumstantial than it depends upon each circumstance and so depending upon what we feel passionate about will help determine what needs to be done. i think if there is any competition it is that hope speaks louder than all the things in our life and helps us make decisions based on the words of einstein, that a life well-lived is a life lived for others.
George's distorted view of inclusion tells us that the spared are the oppressed - all the non-Christians.
Apparently, Christians can decide who's in and who's out, and thereby subvert the grace of god. This proxy power gives them the final say over god.
Inherently, by its defining dogma, religion is all about inclusion and exclusion. Regardless of the proselytizers' earnest effort, if I lack the requisite faith, I'm excluded and forfeit god's grace. I know that this may chagrin many Christians who are looking out for my soul.
Want to find freedom from OPPRESSION, simply reject it.
Christians have been become impotent really in their ability to do much of anything but "damn you to Hell" or fight it out in the political world with everyone else.
The whole idea of creating a "New Christianity" is really nothing more than an attempt to replace Old Christianity. Sadly, what all that remains is some of it's more unsavory elements (feelings of superiority, the desire to influence others, the belief that the world would could be better if only others behaved differently). The parts of Christianity that can be objectively be proven to be good (community involvement and social interaction, the ability to translate values from generation to generation, the requirements for giving, the desire to create a reasoned approach to faith (systematic theology) and general acts of discipline have gone missing.
Exclusion means that I don't force my views on you. I am in the group. You aren't. My rules apply to me and not you. You can opt out. Inclusion means that my rules apply to everyone. This kind of inclusion is not good for anybody. No one should desire the type of Christianity that lacks boundaries. If anything, Christianity needs more of them.
We are products of our experiences. My experience with religion has not served me well. Those objective socially-desirable actions that you describe can be achieved in an appropriate religious or secular setting. You may prefer the former, while I prefer the later. If contained in its proper boundaries and collared (like a ferocious pit-butt, not a priest - although at times they may be indistinguishable), I may find religion tolerable or perhaps palatable. I have dealt with some wonderful religious people -- praise-worthy -- passionate, caring, etc... Other religious ones, well . . . I wish I had smothered them with a pillow.
I dont see them as mutually exclusive. or enemies. i see them as things that can be synonymous. i am a hopeful person. and this is why i don't agree with the last paragraph. because inclusion doesn't have to mean what youre defining it as; it can include everyone. hope hasn't converted to any one religion. hope is for everyone. the only way we can exclude it is by not bringing it those who need it. hope is beyond religiou affiliation. i am hopeful idealist. i believe these things are always possible, thats inclusive. we all can believe or not believe. and so our choice not to believe that hope can have the last word is the exclusion. our choice not anyone else's. and so its an opportunity to see the world as it could be, as diverse as that is, it can happen. but we can't allow cynicism or past experiences have the last word, hope has to.
I was thinking of a way to create inclusion - a jingle: "Please remember me, my name is the Holy Ghost, and I wanna be a friend to you; I'll be back again, and if you're present, this is what I'd like you all to do: ... Come along now and join the party,Come along now and have some fun; We are a lot of friendly people, And the fun has just begun!"
Opps.. I guess I'm "out" - made fun of the Holy Spook. But I look at the bright side: I am relieved of the oppression created by the treating the gospel as a tool for exclusion.
And for being so active in the comments explaining your position.
As futile as it may seem at times.
What are you looking at? I don't see anything.
I also think you'd like it because it always proceeds by way of the kind of linguistic examinations that seem to interest you. The Talmud masters seemed to understand that part of scholarship is creativity--the scholar listens with one ear to the text, and with the other to his own intuitions of the divine. Thus it is allowable to make linguistic connections that were not necessarily in the mind of the writer of the text. Nevertheless the Talmudic myth is that every new interpretation was already anticipated at Mt. Sinai. This is analogous to the statement found in Mahayana Buddhism: whatever is well-said was said by the Buddha. In other words contemporary interpretation can itself have the authority of a holy text.
Some chapters of my book on Talmud interpretation from a modern perspective can be found at
http://cascadeaccess.com/~gabe/
Check out the "Thomas Jefferson's Bible". He understood the truth about Jesus' teaching as well as any human in modern history. His conlusion . . . "Nature's God", and a Jesus that was a great philosopher and terrific human being.
Should have been "His conclusion . . ."
And, here's the more precise title and a link. . .
"The Jefferson Bible: the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth".
http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/
Now, I read this as a treatise on language. If the Bible's meanings change when by using the Aramaic AND the end result is HOPE and INCLUSIVENESS where is the harm, the wrong in Hope and Inclusiveness?
I, for one, am weary of fearing 'the others' and can't wait 'til LOST resolves the issue once & for all. Maybe, TV programming will dump some of the Other-Based reality shows. Maybe, kids will stop torchering each other at school. Maybe, countries will find how their commonalities will benefit both a go about improving the world, and humanity by extension. Maybe? Hoping.
All of this is fine at this point.
But you entered your study with an already determined position and then most likely found support for that position only (confirmation bias), while filtering out information that might be at odds with that interpretation.
You throw this statement out as though it is undisputed fact. However the Aramaic Primacy Theory is far from being universally accepted.
So perhaps you are speaking of the Aramaic source normally referred to as "Q" which is believed to be a source of some of Jesus' individual sayings. However again this is little agreement on if this document even existed or even what it was if it did. Personally I believe that if we had a primary source of quotations of Jesus written in his native tongue then it would have been highly treasured by the early church and would certainly not have been lost. Or at least we would find some reference to it in the extensive church catalogs that we have from that early church.