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Who Reigns in the Heavens

The next clause in the Lord's Prayer
Who Reigns in the Heavens

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWho is in the heavens.

Matthew 6:9
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Everything for the disciple of Jesus
begins with God.

The Lord's Prayer is some of the most precise Greek in the New Testament.

When you read it in the Greek,
you discover that there are a number of surprising
differences
between the original
and the traditional text we recite.

This of course begs the question:
did Jesus teach this in Greek or Aramaic?
The answer is probably "yes."
I have seen religious people freak out over this,
but Jesus and his disciples were business people in a cosmopolitan world.
This is before the Jewish diaspora,
and Jesus and the disciples lived in a crossroad of cultures.
Jesus spoke to non-Jews at times,
and the common language
they used was probably greek.
And even if Jesus prayed this prayer in Aramaic,
there is an indication that he explained it in Greek.
There is more than one place where the Greek is so refined
and indicates so much more than the known Aramaic version
that we have to suspect that the early teaching was in Greek.
Matthew would have been fluent in Greek
because he worked for the Romans.
All the record keeping and correspondence he did would have been in Greek.
Like many places in the world today,
Aramaic was a spoken language in the home,
but Greek was the language of business, literature,
and correspondence.
The world of the New Testament

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