While doing some research about the Lord's Prayer in various languages, I stumbled across an example of what I call the "stupidest word in Wikipedia." The word is original, and by extension its adverbial form, originally. If not the stupidest, it is certainly the most misused.
I used to see it all the time when I was an active Wikipedia editor, during the years 2004-2006 when I wrote over a thousand new articles, and contributed to thousands more. Many of my articles were about American history and geography. When writing about some place in the United States, I would often see a sentence like "eastern Oregon was originally inhabited by..." followed a mention of a Native American tribe who had lived in the area at the time of the first white settlement.
Most of the time it's used innocently, when editors using the colloquial way of writing historical articles on autopilot, but in other cases it is used with the baggage of anti-colonialist critical theory, as a way of emphasizing that white people steal other people's lands.
Whatever the case may be in that regard, the idea that we can ever know who originally inhabited a given piece of land on earth is ridiculous. This notion is itself controversial on the left, and among some Native Americans, and can be a sensitive topic. For example, everyone knows that Anasazi people once lived in the Four Corners area. But who were they? The word Anasazi means "ancestors of our enemies" in the Navajo language. That sort of cuts the legs out from the "we are the original inhabitants of this area" idea in this case. One can find this kind of example all over the map of North America. The tribes that inhabited a given area at the time of white settlement are generally known not to be the first known inhabitants of that area. In a place like the Colorado eastern plains, the tribes that were there arrived only a few decades before the white people in some cases.
And what about the Clovis People? Were they original? Some folks think that even they were later arrivals in North America?
But we all know would happen if we started to emphasize the fact that most Native American peoples are not the original inhabitants of any area. It would cause political chaos and would be considered rrrrrrrraaaaaacciiiiist, since it would be seen as "excusing" the fact that white people came and "took" the land from its "original owners." And let's not even get into the Solutrean hypothesis. If you're a Leftist who is obsessed with race, you might say that it's only important that the original inhabitants were racially kin to the Native Americans of today in some form. But aren't we all? No, white people aren't close enough kin to them. We all know how it works for the race-obsessed left.
We know it is never really about helping dark-skinned people. It's about tearing down western civilization in all its traditional forms and foundations, so it can be rebuilt into a glorious new Global Reset paradise. This includes destroying Christianity, above all else. It is very important to the Leftist that we learn that traditional forms of Christianity and assumptions about Jesus were wrong and stem from ignorance and bigotry. We Christians must be reeducated to accept a "better" interpretation that is inline with techoglobalist neopaganist dogma.
Yesterday when I came across the "original" usage in the context of the Lord's Prayer, I was reading the Italian-language Wikipedia article and saw that the editors had included the "original Aramaic" version of the Lord's Prayer alongside the Greek and Italian version. I almost burst out laughing.
The idea that anyone can know the "original" version that Jesus spoke in his sermon about prayer in Matthew 6 is, of course ludicrous. Even if we accept that the sermon was delivered in the Aramaic of the time (by no means a given), we still have little knowledge of the Galilean version of Aramaic that was current in that area. Many of the "original Aramaic" versions of the Lord's Prayer that one sees on line (Aboon d'beshmayo) are in classical or modern Syriac, which is related to, but not identical to the version that would have been spoken by most common folk in the Levant at the time.
Moreover, despite what you read in many articles online, it is by no means certain that Jesus delivered that sermon in Aramaic. There is a school of thought that he may have delivered it in exactly the language in which was written down, namely Greek.
Absurd! Jesus didn't speak Greek! Of course he spoke Greek. First off, all educated Jews spoke Greek at the time. It was the lingua franca of the area at the time during the Hellenistic period. It would be like someone in Israel choosing to give a speech in English instead of Hebrew, in order to reach a wider audience, something that happens all the time.
Moreover, Jesus was not only educated, he was a child prodigy who skillfully argued the Torah with rabbis in the temple at age twelve.
And this of course is leaving aside the extremely important point that Jesus is, according to his own words in scripture, God. I'm pretty sure God can speak all languages.
If you find someone who insists that the original Lord's prayer definitely had to be in colloquial Aramaic of the time, it is likely that person is the same kind of person who insists they also know that Jesus was a dark-skinned person of color, because, well, that's the color of Palestinian Arabs today, and we all know that Jesus was an oppressed person and the racial composition of places is fixed and never changes (unless we are talking about northern Europe). By that reasoning, we could assert that the people who lived in Arizona have always been white.
The fact is we don't know what color skin Jesus had, nor what language he spoke with his disciples, nor what language he used in the Lord's Prayer. It's a fascinating question on some level. We can guess the answer, but anyone who says that they know for certain probably has a political axe to grind. Jesus was a brown-skinned socialist, don't you know? These are the same people who reject the idea that Jesus was God while using the same Scripture where Jesus says himself that he is God. What Jesus are they talking about? The answer is that they are making up a character of Jesus for their own purposes, that is not the Jesus of the Bible (our only source for Jesus) but fits in with narrative they have created, in which they want Jesus to be a modernist John-Lennon-Imagine "cool with who you are" Jesus.
Personally I think the idea of Jesus being a socialist is about as far away from the truth as possible, whatever his skin color was, which itself is not important to me. I hope to find out someday when I meet him face to face.
I do intend to learn some form of the Syriac/Aramaic Lord's Prayer at some point. I have nothing at all against people learning such versions. I could learn one of the popular versions today in a couple hours, I suppose, but for the moment it would be only syllables to me, as I have not studied the language at all. When learning a version of the prayer I prefer to wait until I know the language a little, so that that all the words have meaning to me when I pronounce them. I want the prayer to be a manifestation of logos.
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