do certain people have a more direct conection to God? I am seeing proof some do., page 2

Hi CSRB --

I think the so-called 'Lord's Prayer's original 'contents' (i.e. subject matter) are not fully known from the Greek texts that have been handed down to us in the so-called canonically approved 'Greek Gospels' and we certainly do not have any recrords of what other prayers this R. Yehoshua bar Yosef person used or condoned for usage by his disciples during his lifetime in Roman Occupied Palestine.

The 'Prayer' seems to have had originally a larger focus on the COMING OF THE KINGDOM (which seems for political reasons (can you say ROMAN EMPIRE and the RULING DIVINE EMPERORS?) was excised down to a nub in the versions in the Greek canonical Gospels) to basically a single explicit phrase:

('May your kingdom come') -

Jews of all stripes even today often pray along similar lines with a 'fuller' version of the idea: "May the Holy One of Yisro'el, Blessed be He, establish his KINGDOM in your lifetime and my lifetime...').

You seemed to have missed any reference to the KINGDOM in your post when mentioning the elements of the 'Prayer' but it seems to have been a 'core' message which also was partially-retained by the mangled ending tacked on to it in the 1st canonical Greek Gospel - and these Kingdom references which are crucial to a fuller understanding of the earliest Kerygma proclamations of the Bar Enasha and 'the Kingdom of Heaven /Kingdom of God' which allegedly formed the core of the teaching of the 'Good Rebbe' .

The reference is clearly from one of the 'key' Aramaic Sections of the Book of the Scroll of the Prophet Daniel chapter 7:13-14 :

“And in my Visions of the Night, I looked and behold I saw: lo, one like a Bar-Enasha ('Son of Man') - and he was moving towards me riding on the clouds of Heaven, and as began to approach The Ancient of Days, and they brought him before his face(s). And there was given him POWER and GLORY and a KINGDOM in order that all the goyim, even all people and languages should bow down before his face(s) : and his POWER is EVERLASTING, and his KINGDOM shall never be overthrown.”

Being a Daviddic pretender 'in the last days' awaiting the restoration of the 'tabernacle of David which has fallen' to replace 'that Cowering-Jackal Herod' the idea of Kingship ('the Vine of YHWH') was central to the original message of Nazorean Christianity, though curiously missing from most of Pauline doctrine in terms of actual focus.

The larger problem with using the 'Lord's Prayer' as an exemplar of anything a Christain should believ is that the text is mangled and truncated from what appears to have been a much longer prayer.

If you read the two versions of the 'Prayer' that can be partially found in the 2 canonical Greek gospels that bother to retain the 'prayer' at all, you will see that both versions in the Greek are slightly different from each other i.e. by comparing the version in the 1st Greek canonical gospel ('according to Matthew', whoever he was) and the 3rd ('according to Luke' whoever he was)...

In BOTH cases the endings seem to have been doctored to remove any reference to YHWH the clan god of Israel--retaining only references to Abba (or Father).

Have a quick dekko at the 2 contradictory endings to the 'Prayer':

'And Lead Us NOT into the Time of Trial [which is to come] but DELIVER us from BELIAL'

(the 3rd gospel ends here; the 1st canonical Greek Gospel adds:

"FOR Thine in the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory for ever..." &tc.

One should be able to see at once that the 'ending' tacked on to the version in the 1st canonical Greek Gospel hs been slightly doctored gramatically (by ommission) since it opens with a PREPOSITION without an ANTECEDENT:

One cannot begin a whole NEW sentence in Aramaic or Greek with the concept of 'FOR' or 'BECAUSE' - only FOLLOW UP on a PREVIOUS phrase with FOR or BECAUSE ('I like him BECAUSE he has wavy black hair...').

If you read e.g. the parallel ending in the Prayer of Solomon in 1 Chronicles 29:10-13 you can see immediately what part is actually being excised :

BLESSED ART THOU O YHWH THE CLAN GOD OF ISRAEL, FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER AND THE GLORY etc.

The same thing happens in a garbled mis-translation quotation from 'The Scroll of the Book of the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs being the Sons of Yirsro'el to all the Sons of Light in the Last Days' found amongst the garbled fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls we manage still to possess (that the bat dung didn't eat through in their caves ! )and written about 160 BCE, specifically the Testament of Naphtali, 9:13

'In that Day the Salvation of Israel shall come from the Judaeans' which is garbled in the 4th canonical gospel ('according to John,' whoever he was)

Note how deliberately the reference specifically to ISRAEL is ommitted from the quotation placed into the mouth of the Greek Speaking Iesous in the 4th gospel : the editors were VERY CAREFUL about making sure their Greek Speaking Saviour was UNIVERSAL.

John 4:21: "And Iesous said to her...You Samaratim are used to worshipping that which you do not understand: we (Judaeans) worship what we do understand, for Salvation is of the Jews."

He was clearly using the citation (introduced by "for") of the Testament of Naphtali as a proof-text to back up his assertion that the salvation of the north (Yisroel) shall come from the south (Judaea)...

The same procedure is at work in BOTH versions of the 'garbled' Lord's Prayer in the 2 Greek gospels that quote it (differently).

So you can see from these small examples that we do not have a lot of hard information about the original teaching of the 'Aramaic speaking founder of Christianity' since all we seem to have document wise are Greek translations from originally oral (and highly coded) Aramaic streams of traditions which morphed over time into different 'Christianities', (e.g. the Ebionim, founded by some of the actual disciples) many of whom were diametrically opposed to Pauline Gentile Loving 'Greek speaking' Christianities scattered in Greek port cities in the Empire which more or less survived intact the 1st (failed) Jewish War against Rome (AD 66-72) being as it were safely tucked away in the Diaspora.

Just thought I point a few things out this AM...

[edit on 9-2-2010 by Sigismundus]