Hampton Roads October 2022, 272 pages
Jesus Before Christianity
Holy Spirit means sacred breath….
Prayer means meditation….
Redemption means fulfilling our human purpose…
and “the truth that sets us free”
is found in the heart’s inner GPS
Jesus’ spirituality, prayer and life disclose their secrets when viewed through the eyes of his native language–Aramaic
Outstanding book of 2022–Paradigm Explorer. Read the review
Now available worldwide
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Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus
is a guide to living an authentic interior life,
a spiritual message without dogma that can make you more comfortable in your own path,
providing a sense of meaning and purpose.
Commission earned for Abwoon.
Neil Douglas-Klotz, award-winning author of Prayers of the Cosmos and The Hidden Gospel
brings together forty years of research to update his pioneering work on the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes and take readers further into Jesus’s healings and inner transmission.
Through expansions of Aramaic’s multiple meanings as well as guided contemplations, Douglas-Klotz’s new book provides a guide to transformation through the way of the prophet of Nazareth. It shows how Jesus’s deepest teachings address contemporary challenges, such as our relationships with nature and each other, as well as the purpose of life itself.
From the Introduction
“The challenges we face today are not in essence different from those of our ancestors: relationship, love, knowledge, work, and purpose still claim our main attention. Yet the implications of these challenges for the survival of humanity and the planet seem more acute. We seem to know more, yet our consciousness has evolved in such a way that makes it difficult to see what the purpose of life really is. How do we live more fully in the moment, solving the problems before us?
“Jesus’s teachings have been used historically to fuel what became modern Western culture, with all its pluses and minuses. At the same time, viewed through his native language, the same teachings provide a solution to our culture’s greatest challenges, pointing the way toward a proper use of our human individuality and will.”
Much too much of religious language has become rote. Religion easily dies when it succumbs to rote. The Aramaic translations of Neil Douglas-Klotz cut through the rote and bring us to the deeper meanings of Jesus’s teaching that can still touch our hearts, move our souls, and ignite our action. This book displaces rote with profound discourse and insight. It can open our hearts anew.
My original foreword to Prayers of the Cosmos thirty-two years ago began with these words: “Reader beware: though this book is brief, it contains the seeds of a revolution.”
I do not think history has proven me mistaken.
—Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing from the forword to Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus
For more than 40 years, Neil Douglas-Klotz has been exploring the mysteries of the Syriac and Aramaic languages to better understand what Yeshua wanted and still wants to tell us. This patient work is not in vain, it is necessary to bring us closer to this presence and this teaching, which enlighten us, awaken us, heal us and save us.
Neil Douglas-Klotz is not only a scholar but also a man of the desert, where the breath and energy of the words join the prayer of the sands to trace a path in the heart of what remains without path.
Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus takes us step by step towards the promised Beatitude, already everywhere and always there, if we have eyes to see it, ears to hear it, a heart to know it and to love it.
— Prof. Jean-Yves Leloup, author of The Gospel of Thomas: the Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (translation and commentary)
Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus returns us to the original Aramaic of Jesus’s words, where the breath, the body, and the soul are part of a living wholeness in which nature and the divine are not separate. Here language is a part of the creative flow of the seasons and our inner being, awakening us to the Holy Wisdom that is within. Neil Douglas Klotz’s depth of study gives new life to these great teachings, helping us to be in harmony with our original nature, our own connection to Sacred Unity. An invaluable book.”
—Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, author of Prayer of the Heart in Christian and Sufi Mysticism
In this luminous offering, we discover the wisdom teacher this burning world is yearning for: a native Jesus, deeply connected to the earth and her wisdom, a Jesus long-ago silenced by the religion founded in his name, a Jesus who speaks directly to the heart of people of all faiths, and maybe especially to those of us who cannot fit ourselves into the confines of a single tradition. Neil Douglas-Klotz has distilled his decades of rigorous scholarship, deep practice, and revolutionary insight into a potent elixir for our times.
—Mirabai Starr, Translator of Julian of Norwich and Author of Wild Mercy
Find out what Jesus actually meant
and what it means for your life today
Striking insights into Jesus’ chronicled words are revealed through Dr. Douglas-Klotz’s years of research into the ancient Aramaic texts that recorded them, exceeding the limitations of academia. Included here is the wisdom gleaned from experiences of embodying the sounds and movements evoked by Jesus’s Aramaic words. In this book one discovers a synthesis and expansion of Neil Douglas-Klotz’s work and considers what has been relinquished by the practice of dismissing the power of the deeper meanings to be discovered. It is a joy to couple further revelations with what we already know and love in the Bible.
— Br. Joseph Kilikevice, OP, Founder and Director, Shem Center for Interfaith Spirituality, Illinois, USA.
Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus is a wake-up call for our time. It reveals through Neil’s remarkable life-story and spiritual mentorship, how access to the perennial wisdom teachings of Yeshua – sourced from the spirit of sound and the sacred word – can ignite a direct experience of what it means to be fully alive. I couldn’t put this book down, as it inspires us to dive deep into the core questions of our existence, with the support of simple and accessible, conscious core practices, breath and bodywork, initiating a new language of interconnectedness with a compelling vision of what human life can be NOW.”
—Chloe Goodchild, author of The Naked Voice—Transform Your Life Through the Power of Sound
I have followed Douglas-Klotz’ work for over 30 years and it has profoundly influenced my own spiritual emergence and teachings. He never fails to deliver, offering both depth and accessibility, scholarliness and practical application. In previous works Neil’s unique and integrative approach has always opened up new possibilities and left us desiring more. With Revelations so many of those wishes are fulfilled. In fearful times, where faith and spiritual exploration are often reduced to rigid beliefs, this book and indeed Douglas-Klotz’s whole body of work come as a fearless breath of fresh air –a liberating voice in the wilderness. Whether the reader is a Jesus follower or not, this work feeds the soul.
— Rev. Prof. Stephen G Wright, director of the Sacred Space Foundation, England, author of Coming Home and Heartfulness.
What people say about
Neil’s Aramaic Jesus work
Without this work, I would have missed the opening for a spiritual life which I had given up and the sense for inner guidance which I did not know in my life before. And I found Jesus as a friend, being with me, very alive. I love the breathing practices in the books. They are guiding me beyond the understanding of the words and help me to find that place of ´simple presence´ that I have missed in my life before.
Two major realizations have been grounding the teachings of Yeshua in the socio-political setting of occupation and oppression at the time in his homeland and experiencing his transmission as both inner and outer. The healing continues to be in the relief I feel in how each text from Aramaic makes so much sense!
In a world of selfies and Facebook, fake news and plenty of vanities talking, wars all over the planet and hate speech, I am very grateful that there are still a few really authentic scholars and teachers like Neil Douglas-Klotz, who share their knowledge and wisdom, their love and light about the divine. This awakens the most holy part in everyone being touched by it.
Even though I’m not a practicing Christian or Jew, I’m aware that the Judeo-Christian ethos shapes the culture in which I live and has shaped Western civilization as a whole. Neil reveals the cultural distortion that mistranslating Yeshua’s words from Aramaic into Greek and then English has generated. This distortion has justified the imbalances in our social and economic relations and in our relationship with the natural world.
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