Quote Originally Posted by DavidC View Post
From the Aramaic New Testament (NT) that the Syrian Orthodox church has always had, Yeshua's (Jesus') final words on the cross are translated 'So this is my destiny.' The scholar George Lamsa of Syria translated the Bible from Aramaic and gives evidence that one or more specific Apostles wrote the NT in Aramaic. No matter what one's religion is if you read the sacred texts in a language that they were not spoken in you get some wrong ideas.
Thank you for the information, DavidC.

A couple of years ago, a French scholar, Eric Edelman, wrote a book based on a translation into Aramaic of the Greek Gospels. To the best of my knowledge, this book, "Jésus parlait Araméen" (Jesus spoke Aramaic) does not exist in English. For his translation into Aramaic, he used an Aramaic gospel he calls the Peshita or Peshitta. Perhaps it is the text you refer to. This attempt to re-translate into the original language results in a number of discoveries of a deeper meaning of the texts that confirm what you say. Moreover, Edelman uses the teachings of modern Hindu sages in order to interpret the reconstructed "words of Jesus", and what he finds is striking similarities! Whether Jesus is partly a historical person or not (to a large extent, he is certainly a fiction), these similarities are of course only possible if there is some common wisdom shared by Hindu sages and the tradition that was partly at the origin of Christianity. I was thinking of that book when I wrote my latest post.

I also had Erich Fromm's "You shall be as Gods" in mind, in which he points out that Jews had the habit of quoting the first line of a psalm when they wanted to imply the entire meaning of the whole psalm. The words "Why hast thou forsaken me" are the first line of psalm 22 of the Jewish Bible (unfortunately called Old Testament by Christians). This psalm describes its author's shift in attitude from utter despair to hope and enthusiasm. Its last words are the words by which the gospel of John replaces this "Why hast thou forsaken me": "It is accomplished" (I am translating from my mother tongue, perhaps you say it differently in English). The reason will be that by the time this gospel was written, most Christians no longer understood this Jewish tradition. The bottom line is that Jesus is enthusiastic, not desperate when he utters his last words.

Finally, I have also read an article about the meaning of "El(o)i, el(o)i, lama sabakhtani" on a Dutch website, in which it is argued that this sentence is not Aramaic, but Hebrew influenced by Aramaic, which means that Jesus was definitely quoting the Bible. For our Hindu friends: the relationship between Hebrew and Aramaic for Jesus can be compared to the relationship between Sanskrit and Pali for Gautama Buddha. If the Buddha had spoken Sanskrit to his disciples, he would have been quoting Hindu scriptures.

The last words in the Aramaic text you refer to may be an adaptation to the needs of a non-Jewish audience, like the gospel of John. For the purpose of HDF, I would observe once more that apparently, Christian tradition has been unable to conserve the original spiritual meaning. We have to reconstruct it, whereas our Hindu friends are surrounded by living gurus giving a living example.

Superficially imitating these examples of a living tradition instead of retrieving true religion (like Sanskrit "yoga", this Latin word means "connection") is certainly cheapness and an aggression rather than a message of peace. Let us hope the ashram referred to in the first post of this thread is not only that. But of course, Christianity and its churches have a bad record, so Hindu distrust regarding Christian acculturation seems justified.