Many Questions on ‘A Prayer to Our Father’ – Book Review
Part of my commitment with theOoze is to review the books I sign up for and they send me! They are nice enough to give the option but I choose to generally review the ones I request. Kind of like an all you can eat buffet.... Anyways, I was going to skip the review for this book but it was short enough that when I found time I cracked it open and took a read.
A Prayer to Our Father. Hebrew Origins of the Lord’s Prayer by Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson is a 171 page large print narrative adventure about an African American pastor and Jewish academic combining to investigate the Hebrew origins of the Lord's Prayer.
What I enjoyed about this book was the concept of investigating the 'original' text of Matthew which is purported to be a Hebrew text, not Greek. The con of the book is the fact only 1/2 of the pages were devoted to the investigation of the actual prayer component. The other issue I have is the lack of corroborating evidence for the conclusions they make. It is dangerous to make claims implicitly or explicitly and passing them on to t he masses as fact (or not framing them as mere ideas so that people won't treat them by default as 'fact' because they show up in a printed book).
The book opens with the introduction of the union between to the two unlikely characters. I thought it would have made a great blog post to follow.... Perhaps I don't resonate with the racial and religious distinctions, to fully appreciate the combination of African American Christian w/ Jewish academic/scholar, but for me that's not a compelling enough reason to make me read the book.
The introductory components, or half the book, dealt with their travels and anticipation discovering the Hebraic origins of the Matthean account and how it might impact our interpretations today. That is, as I suggested earlier, is an interesting premise. But half the book doesn't deal with the question it poses.
The first half is introduction and then six chapters searching for the physical location where Jesus may have spoken the Beatitudes. How this was relevant to the question escaped me, and spending time in Israel for three weeks taught me one thing--everyone claims to have something, but the original never exists. They pretty much concluded the same thing, and at the end of the day, it was six chapters wasted (although would have made a nice blog series 
)
I also didn't appreciate the pro-Israeli stance of the book, albeit I should have expected it.
Half-way through I met the discussion about the actual prayer broken down into each section. This was interesting to dive into some of the Jewish traditions that impact how we interpret the Lord's Prayer (Prayer to Our Father) today.
What I did not jive with, however, was the lack of scholarship. Mind you, this wasn't an exegesis of Matthew 5, (although perhaps it should have been thus giving the academy a chance to respond). More work to substantiate claims would have propelled the book to the level of 'resource' rather than a simple recollection of two men's journey of discovery.
One particular issue I had in the investigation was the treatment of the name of God. Johnson seems to ignore the fact that the consensus on the origins of the term Jehovah is a result of a mistranslation by English scholars unfamiliar with Jewish traditions. Do a Google search on it.
I could not find any corroborating evidence in my quick search, not suggesting there isn't any, to substantiate his claim that the English variant of the proper name of God--Jehovah--is merely a translation from the guess of what the proper name of God may have sounded like 2000+ years ago: Yehovah and not Yahweh.
Again, to me this is a startling claim, and I'm surprised a reference to the issue was never made. IT makes me wonder to what extent I can trust their conclusions on this particular topic. More insight and scholarship is needed (post some links or resources if you know of any.)
All in all, half of the book was interesting, the other half unnecessary. Of the half that was interesting, there were more questions raised than answers. I appreciate exposure to the initial question, but thought they could have done a much better job laying out the historical/textual evidence.
if this book, as it's being promoted, is about two unlikely collaborators coming together, then it's not worth picking up, 1 star out of 5. If it's about exposing the reader to the Hebraic roots and interpretation of t he Matthean account (specifically the Lord's Prayer), then it did a half job, so 2.5 stars our of 5.
