When it comes to interesting hobbies, Chelsea, Michigan's Jim Stacey has most of us beat. For twelve years, the ex-minister, author and theology expert has been studying Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke during his time on earth. Stacey believes that through Aramaic, people today can uncover layers of meaning in the New Testament that have been lost in translation over the centuries. His June 21 lecture at the ToledoFAVS coffee talk will be a must-listen for believers as well as those interested in the ancient world. In anticipation of his talk, The City Paper sat down with Stacey to talk about the beauty of Aramaic.
So you’re going to be leading a discussion in Toledo this Saturday. Can you give me a brief overview of what’s going on there?
There’s so many ways I can go with the Aramaic with all the things that Jesus said, but I’m going to pick from the favorite phrases of the leaders of the church, like “you must be born again.” I’m going to tell people, children exactly, what Jesus said about that. I’m going to be taking the phrase ”take the log out of your own eye, instead of focusing on the splinter in someone else’s eye,” and deal with what he said about that. I’ll be talking about the greatest commandment according to what Jesus said, which is, “Love your neighbor, yourself and your enemies.” Then, one of the concepts that the church just totally doesn’t understand is the concept of the human shadow. It’s been called sin and wickedness and blah blah blah. But I will be dealing with what Jesus said about those issues, but, number one, he never mentioned sin as something that separates us from the divine and causes us to deserve punishment. There is no word for hell in the Aramaic language. Jesus never said the word and couldn’t have ever said the word. And there is no Satan because the word in Aramaic is not a person, or an external being; the word is Satana, which means the ego, the little self that causes all the problems. I’ll be dealing with Jacob’s Well and what Jesus said about the practice of his words, that “what will spring up from within a person unto eternal life” has nothing to do with theology. So, that’s where I am going to start.
I read your translation of the Lord’s Prayer. I was raised Catholic, so I know the words perfectly. But your translation was very different. It was more gender neutral, can you talk to me about that?
I’m going to have copies of that to hand out on Saturday. My first connection with the Aramaic started when I, for the first time in my life, read an Aramaic translation of the Lord’s Prayer. I remember the day as clear as if it was five minutes ago. I stood there. I said, “Holy Cow, I think I have just heard what Jesus said for the very first time.” I met with the scholar that I followed when I started the doctoral program. He had conferences in Columbus for like six or seven years in a row and I went down there every year. We used to sing and dance to the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. What it says in Aramaic is not some male God up in the sky that’s separate and angry. He said, “Oh birthing one, mother and father of all that is, focus the light of divinity within us and help us to make use of it.” Then he went on to say, “Grant us each day what we need with both bread and insight. Loosen the cords of mistakes that are wrapped around us in the same way we have loosened the cords that have wrapped around others and hold them guilty. Let not surface things dilute us, but free us from everything that holds us back. May these words be the ground from which all of our actions grow. Amen” And there’s various different ways to say that because Aramaic is never translated in one way and one way only.
What do you mean by that? That it is translated in one way and one way only. Does every word have multiple meanings?
Yes. Exactly. That is the beauty of the Aramaic language. I’ve studied this for a long time and the books I first read, by Neil Douglas-Klotz the Aramaic scholar, he lists in his book seven different ways to translate each phrase in the Lord’s Prayer. Everything that Jesus said. It could be that it was purposely done. I think because of the nature of it, if ten people heard him, then ten people could hear different ways of what he said and make that application in their own lives and the next time they heard him, they might hear something else and something deeper inside. So, the church has been saying forever, there is only one translation and application. So the problem is you have to find the one church which has the one translation, and they’ve been fighting about that for decades, centuries, right?
There’s no single translation which would be more accurate than any other?
As far as the Aramaic, no. And that’s really clear because if he said it to you and you heard something that was really important to you, and I heard something that was really important to me, we’d both take that, apply it to our lives, and grow and learn from it, and then we’d come back and hear more. There’s always more because of what is called the trans-personal psychology of the Aramaic language; it doesn’t just refer to male or female, it doesn’t just refer to one part of ourselves. The best way I can say it is when you look at Latin, Greek and English, we look at languages that are masculine and that are rational, cerebral, pragmatic, exclusive, but that’s all wrapped around a psychology that distinguishes itself by saying we only know the truth and we compartmentalize everything and take it all apart. The opposite is true with the Aramaic, which is not a masculine language at all. It’s feminine, it’s intuitive, visionary, poetic, spiritually based. It never separates; the Aramaic always includes and it’s a beauty with the difference. The history of the Aramaic language goes way back. Most people don’t have a clue about this, but if you ask the Assyrians today they would know exactly what it’s about because the Aramaic language goes back to 1400 BC at least, and the language was spoken, people say, all the way from China to Egypt, until about a hundred years after Jesus lived. Jesus founded the rules to follow him, but they were all Aramaic. Again, what the church has no clue is two of the disciples Thomas and Thaddeus—we never hear much about them because the Gospel of Thomas was thrown into the heap to be villainized. Thomas and Thaddeus founded the Aramaic church and it remains to this very day.
So, what you’re saying is that Aramaic is not a dead language.
It’s dead as far as most of the world is concerned, but no it’s not dead at all; it’s just been pushed aside. When men are weak, the first thing they do is try to control other people to try to overcome their weakness.
Men, meaning human beings or men meaning the masculine?
The shadow masculine I call it. What we have from the beginning, from St. Paul to the early church followers totally tried to destroy everything that Jesus taught. What they wanted was theology and a belief system. Then in 325 AD, Constantine called forth the Roman bishops and others and he ended up kicking out a whole bunch of people that he didn’t like. Then they started burning people at the stake. Then, in the Roman Catholic Church began a systematic destruction of humanity, burning people at the stake, slaughtering tens of thousands of people, all because people didn’t want to buy into this new creed that they had formed, 325 years after Jesus had ended it. I’ve written about that in my first book.
That’s super interesting, because in a way it seems as though that’s the same way, if I remember my history correctly, the Pagan Romans dealt with their problems as well.
Yep. They followed suit to what the Roman Empire had been doing to destroy anything and anyone who that didn’t agree with them. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church had to follow suit; all masculine, all male and destructive.
So, here’s a new thing. You’ve characterized these languages. How would you characterize English? Is English a masculine language?
Oh, absolutely.
Why is that?
Because there is no distinction. In this language we’ve created the masculine and feminine energies that are in any word. Like look at Spanish, there’s feminine and masculine nouns. For example, in Aramaic the word for kingdom is a feminine noun. So, literally what Jesus said is, “The Queendom of heaven is within you.” What he meant by that was Jesus embodied the feminine energies of an inclusion, he included everybody. He healed, he nurtured, he cared for, he healed the sick, raised the dead. All the things he did were nurturing and loving. He embodied the masculine things too, but he embodied a beautiful balance of both the maLe and the female. But the feminine noun is the issue. I have four questions that I ask preachers all over the place. I’ve been doing this for many years and I’ve interviewed preachers from coast to coast. I ask them four basic questions: What is the kingdom? Where is it? What did Jesus say it was? Who was he taLking to when he said that? And then their whole ministry is about who will enter the kingdom and who won’t. So, I say, how do you enter then what’s already within you? Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is within you and preachers look at me and I say, you don’t know where it’s at in your Bible, do you? And they say, is that so? And then I say, who was he talking to, when he said the kingdom of heaven is within you? It’s not the church, it’s not the Messiah, it’s not up in the sky, it’s not coming later, it’s here and now, it is among you and is within you. I say look it up and give them the verse again, he was taking to the Pharisees. Luke 17:20-21. This is the one when he said you’re hypocrites, you’re full of dead man’s bones, you follow the law, but you’re keeping people from entering this kingdom. The same ones he said that too, he also said you just need to wake up.
What is your religious background?
I was raised in a Christian church, the fundamentalist part of the church. I was deeply wounded by my mother, my father, and many preachers along the way. When I carried the pain for fifty something years, there was no healing for me, no healing at all, until I started reading, applying and understanding the Aramaic language. Then, I could heal all the old pain. And I could tell you a long story about that.
Can you make it short?
When I started reading the Aramaic and I understood this thing that is within me. The key Aramaic word for the divine is oneness, it means I am one with the divine. The divine is within me. You can’t have a kingdom within you without having the presence of the king or the queen. So, I began to read and study and I began to own my own shadow parts, which is what Jesus talked about. I owned that and then I began to choose for myself who I wanted to be. As I did that, the pain left me because I realized I’d been lied to and I had been believing lies and this all comes out of Luke 11:35, where Jesus said, “The lamp of the body is the eye,” which absolutely doesn’t mean a darn thing. So to understand it in Aramaic, he says the light within you is your divinity. You’re divine nature, and that is your essence. He said be careful that your light doesn’t become darkened. When I saw that and realized that, I began to practice love, unconditional love. I began to practice the connection of the divine within me, knowing who I really am and everything was healed. Today I walk with integrity, with delight, with celebration, I walk with absolute beauty with who I am, rather than the old stuff because I know better than that now. That’s the short version.
Saturday, June 21, 10am. Barry Bagels, 302 W. Dussel Dr., Maumee. toledofavs.com Free
