Tom Verenna has posted a response to my blog entry about Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. For the moment, all I’ll say is that Tom seems to treat addressing God as “abba” as though it were the most natural thing in the world. In fact, it seems to have been uncommon, to say the least – not because it meant “daddy” as some have claimed, but because even Aramaic-speaking Jews in this period appear to have used Hebrew as the language of prayer. Our earliest evidence for the addressing of God in this way in the Aramaic vernacular is Paul’s letter, but Paul is writing to non-Aramaic-speaking converts, and I can think of no obvious reason for him to have done so, apart from the seemingly obvious reason that Jesus himself had used this language, with the corollary that other children of God who share in the same Spirit ought to use it to.
Once again, my point is not that it is entirely impossible that Paul, or someone prior to Paul, made all this up. But the question I keep coming back to is whether that “conspiracy theory” scenario makes does better justice to the evidence, and treats it in a more straightforward way, than one in which an actual historical figure, Jesus from Nazareth, addressed God as abba and was remembered to have done so by the movement focused on him, led at least initially by those who knew him.
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