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In early August 2022, readers asked us via email to look into Facebook posts that made a very striking claim about what is known as the Lord's Prayer in the Christian religion. The posts claimed that archaeologists uncovered a scroll in 1892 that contained a version of the Lord's Prayer, which, when translated directly from Aramaic to English, did not begin with the familiar words, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Instead, the posts claimed, the prayer began with, O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration, soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide. In our initial research, we found that a search of Google Books showed that the O cosmic Birther translation wasn't printed in any literature before the year 2000. The translation doesn't appear in any results for newspaper archives on Newspapers.com. The oldest online mention of these exact words that we could find was from thenazareneway.com, which was first archived in 2003. We contacted two people who appeared to be key figures tied to this subject. We will first present the purported Aramaic translation of the Lord's Prayer from the Facebook posts and then delve into the correspondence. The full text of the Lord's Prayer post shared on Facebook went like this: Multiple postings of this same text were found with a simple search on Facebook. Steve Caruso, MLIS, is a professor in computer science at Raritan Valley Community College. He's also worked in the past for more than 15 years as a professional Aramaic translator. We reached out to Caruso about the Facebook post after we found that he published an article in 2007 about the O cosmic Birther translation (and other translations) of the Lord's Prayer. We first asked him about the mention of archaeologists discovering a scroll in 1892. In his answer, he mentioned the Sinaitic Palimpsest, which referred to the discovery in Sinai of an early translation of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: More details on the scroll discovery in 1892 can be found in Margaret Dunlop Gibson's book published in the same year, which was titled, How the Codex Was Found. The book is available to be read online for free on openlibrary.org. Next, we asked Caruso about the translation included in the Facebook posts. Aye, the whole 'O cosmic Birther' theme, Caruso said. He told us that, to his knowledge, the translation originated with mystic, author, and scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz. He also said that it's been re-hashed numerous times by numerous modern gnostics and mystics since, often unprovenanced, calling that a major red flag: In Douglas-Klotz's 1990 book, Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus, the author opens with a disclaimer of sorts, apparently the same one referenced by Caruso. It reads, The transcription of the Aramaic words into English characters is not meant to be a formal, scholarly transliteration. The latter would have required the reader to learn yet another alphabet with special characters, and this book is meant to be used by lay persons. In our email correspondence with Douglas-Klotz, we soon learned what appeared to be happening with the O cosmic Birther translation that was being shared on Facebook. He told us that there have been no shortage of what he termed paraphrases of his previous translations: He also said that the idea that there's one true and original translation of the Lord's Prayer just doesn't square with reality: According to Douglas-Klotz's work, the O cosmic Birther variation on Facebook appears to simply be a paraphrased version of the translations he published in his book in 1990, meaning that it is not, in fact, any sort of an original, definitive, or literal translation of the Lord's Prayer. I have nothing against people improvising on what I’ve done for their own use, or composing their own prayers from scratch, Douglas-Klotz said. It’s when they begin to post that something is the 'one, true' translation from Aramaic that I start getting a lot of email (or doing multiple posts on Facebook, which is what’s happening now). Caruso added, I fear that this old canard will never die but is fated to live forever on the internet. Note: Douglas-Klotz was also the former chair of the Mysticism Group of the American Academy of Religion and is the author of, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death.
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