The Lord's Prayer is utterly, totally, fully
Jewish - there's nothing in it that is particularly Christian," an
American theologian argues in a new book, reports The Jerusalem Post.
In traditional Christian
thinking, the Our Father is seen as establishing a relationship between
the individual petitioner and God, but former priest John Dominic
Crossan takes a different view in his book released last week, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord's Prayer, and in recent media interviews.
Within the context of Judaism in the 1st century CE, the term
"Father," or "Abba" in Aramaic, would connote a householder who must
provide equally for all members of his family, according to Crossan.
In that sense, God is "The Big Householder in the Sky" who exercises
"distributive justice" and who would be appalled by the huge discrepancy
between rich and poor, Crossan argues.
That concept "reflects the radical vision of justice that is the core
of Israel's biblical tradition," Crossan writes.
"The Lord's Prayer
comes from the heart of Judaism to the lips of Christianity."
There is "a huge discrepancy between what most people think
Christianity is really about and what Jesus thinks Christianity is
really about," Crossan said in an interview with the Religion News
Service.
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