We Have Not Only Misunderstood Jesus… We Have Misunderstood Our Own Humanity

Scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz on the weight of mistranslations and misinterpretations.

Neil Douglas-Klotz, PhD, is a renowned scholar in the fields of Middle Eastern spirituality and the translation and interpretation of the ancient Semitic languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. His extensive writings about native Middle Eastern spirituality, Sufi spirituality, and the Aramaic spirituality of Jesus include Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death (Wisdom of the Aramaic Jesus), and The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus.

Describe the moment when you decided you were ready to commit to this path.

I’m not sure I would call it committing to a path, since the path didn’t exist. To reach the spirituality and spiritual practice of a “Jesus before Christianity,” I had to blaze a trail, or “bushwhack” one, through all sorts of strange theological and scholarly ideas about him over the past two thousand years. Once you clear away the brush, I found a clear, open vista.

So how did you start?

From my childhood, really. I was raised in the Midwest near Chicago, and my father was one of the early chiropractors in Illinois. My two brothers and I were raised on the “doctrine” of chiropractic — the body healing itself — plus Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, the early environmental and organic farming movement. My parents were also into Edgar Cayce, one of the early American psychics, who channeled many wholistic remedies. So we did not have a traditional upbringing. Since my father had to work in a small town in Illinois, we needed to appear more normal and I was sent to a rather conservative Protestant grammar school, where I had to learn large swaths of the King James Bible by heart, and all of Luther’s small catechism — what Luther said about all sorts of things that seemed strange to me as a child, like the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” the unforgivable sin that is never actually defined by theologians. I don’t regret any of that, because it allowed me to train my memory as a child. It was an upbringing that had this sort of inner-outer aspect.

The inner-outer thing has been a theme in my life: finding out things beneath the surface, investigating things. After I’d gone as far away from Christian religion as I could, I became an investigative reporter out of university. In those pre-internet days, you learned how to research government institutions, develop sources, and do all the things the internet has made almost obsolete now for most journalists. In my late twenties, I discovered that people did not make changes in their lives just by you telling them facts — which is what most young, alternative journalists of my generation believed. It seemed that didn’t actually happen based even on statistics, much less observation. So I went on my own inner search about how I made decisions.

And what did you find?

As part of that search, I looked into what was available in the 1970s as spirituality and humanistic psychology. Long story short, I ended up editing the diaries and letters of the American Sufi-Buddhist Samuel L. Lewis. He was interested in Jesus in his native Aramaic language, his prayer, the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” in Aramaic, and how different that would be. But he didn’t have time to pursue it in his lifetime. For one reason or another, I followed up on this. Probably because I was raised hearing different languages in childhood — German, Russian, Polish — in addition to English, I thought “how hard can it be?” It was hard, because one is not only dealing with language but with entering into the consciousness of a time very different from our own.

If you’re at a dinner party, how do you describe what you do and why it matters?

It depends on who’s in front of me. For some people, I just say I’m a writer and scholar of ancient Middle Eastern languages, psychology, and religion. If they’re really interested and want to know more, which is rare, I tell them I’m exploring the roots of human consciousness and how it has evolved over the ages to be what it mostly is now, enslaved by a hypnosis with Western techno-materialism.

What are the essential things you’d like people to understand about your work and your mission?

Mainly what I just said. We have not only misunderstood Jesus, the Yeshua who was pointing his listeners toward a new type of human consciousness, but we have misunderstood our own humanity. We have not asked the questions: What is the purpose of a human being? And what is my purpose in life? Certainly not just to be a cog in a techno-industrial-consumer machine. That was clear even in the 1970s, before the internet gave us the illusion of connection with others but with the reality of feeling even more isolated.

What do people in your life, your family and friends, think about what you’re doing?

Fortunately, the people closest to me are very supportive. My wife and I live in Scotland and love it a lot. A very deep Scottish traditional culture still exists, which carries its own spirituality. It was suppressed even up to the early twentieth century, in that everyone was expected to be more or less British. That meant submerging the inspired art and spirituality. There is a wonderful tradition of Scottish Celtic spirituality, from the minister-storyteller George MacDonald to Scottish music and folklore, all of which carries its own unique atmosphere.

How does your work change people’s perceptions?

Once you clear away the mistranslations and misinterpretations laid over what I call “Jesus before Christianity,” people begin to release all of the guilt- and shame-based ideas many of us were raised with. I’ve seen this change lives many times.

Jesus, “Yeshua” in Aramaic, didn’t ask us to believe in him, but to share his faith in a larger Reality, which he called “Alaha.” He didn’t ask us to save our souls but to let our souls save us, to show us our purpose in living, both individually and collectively. In Aramaic, “soul” is our larger breath Self, “ruha.”

His word that is often translated as “kingdom,” is actually “queendom,” feminine gendered in both Aramaic and the Greek text. It’s about finding the larger vision that empowers us as human beings in time and space, before we return to where we came from, an unseen world.

What are the differences between how you and how most other people look at the world?

I tend to look at things not as separated opposites, but as connected polarities, like the magnetic fields emanating from the North and South Poles. If you could stand in the middle — maybe at the equator — and were sensitive enough, you could feel both fields. For Yeshua, that middle place within us that allows us to feel both seeming opposites is what he calls “leba,” the deeper heart underneath our usual thoughts and emotions. It’s the meeting place between our ruha and our “naphsha,” the breath that lives in our bodies for the time we have here.

Jesus’s Aramaic is full of this betweenness: no separation between the past, present, and future. No separation between the inner and outer. We think we can separate the inner and the outer, or the past, present, and future, but these are simply the changed perceptions of human consciousness as it gradually evolves over millennia and begins to experience itself as a sense of self, separate from others and its environment. This has brought us a relative sense of freedom, but also isolation.

Ancient nomadic and Indigenous peoples are all telling us in their own ways, trying to remind us, “Look, there is this larger Reality, beyond our limited ideas of space and time. Everything arises from and everything returns to that one shared Reality.”

When does your path bring you the most comfort?

When I dive into the depths of my heart and ask, “What is mine to do?” And when an answer comes with a sense of joy, because I’m following a deeper guidance than just my past memories or limited, sometimes fearful, expectations of the future.

Also when I realize that I am only one among many people working toward a new type of human consciousness, one that will allow us to survive and thrive with each other and our ecology.

When does it challenge you the most?

When I look around, I see that there is a weight of history — and false history — that has been internalized by people.

Yeshua’s prophetic, visionary impulse gets colonized and institutionalized into the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. This pattern repeats in most religious and spiritual traditions until today, from what I can tell. For at least a millennium, it’s been our human tendency to want to make visions into products, artifacts, systems, methodologies, and then to brand them. But a thousand years is a short time in human history.

Are you sometimes in awe of what you receive and know, and of the insights and awareness you’ve developed?

Not really. I just wake up each day and ask Reality, in Yeshua’s Aramaic, “Let your heart-desire be done in and through me in my individual life and my communal life, in form and light, in earth and heaven.” Nehwy sebyanach aykana d’bashmaya aph b’ar’ah.

Neil explores the Aramaic Jesus within us in his exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

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Neil Douglas-Klotz, PhD, is a scholar, meditation teacher, musician, and author of Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus, Prayers of the Cosmos, and many other books on Native Middle Eastern Spirituality and “Jesus before Christianity.”