What Yeshua Actually Said
Ten teachings of Yeshua restored from the original Aramaic and Greek. What the translation buried. What he was actually saying.
Something happened to me the first time I read the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.
I had read it a hundred times in English. Our Father who art in heaven. The words were familiar the way old furniture is familiar. Present. Unremarkable. Something you walk past without looking at.
Then I read the Aramaic underneath.
The first word is Abwoon. Not Father. Not the patriarchal figure sitting on a throne somewhere above the clouds. Abwoon is a compound. Ab, the generative creative source. Woon, a suffix describing something continuous, breathing, ongoing. The word describes a breathing creative intelligence that is continuously bringing all existence into being.
He was not addressing a king. He was addressing the breath that was keeping him alive in that moment.
I sat with that for a long time.
Yeshua spoke Aramaic. This is not a controversial claim. It is what every serious New Testament scholar agrees on. The language of first-century Galilee was Aramaic. The language of the poor, the fishermen, the farmers, the occupied people he spent his life among was Aramaic.
What reached us was Greek. Then Latin. Then English. Three translations across fifteen centuries, each one made by people with specific institutional interests in what the text was allowed to say.
I am not saying the translation was malicious. I am saying that every translation is a choice. And every choice is made by a person inside a framework. The framework shapes what the translator can hear. What they cannot hear does not make it into the translation.
What did not make it into the translation is the reason I am writing this piece.
I grew up in Baghdad, Iraq. I moved to California when I was nine years old. I was not raised Christian. I grew up between one tradition and the wider searching that eventually led me here. I did not encounter Yeshua seriously until I was an adult. Not the institutional version. Not the figure on the stained glass. The actual man. The Aramaic-speaking mystic from Galilee who walked into the wilderness, emerged with something burning in him, and spent three years trying to give it away to anyone who would receive it.
When I started reading his actual words in the original language, something happened that I still do not have a clean word for. Recognition. Like reading something I had always known but forgotten I knew.
In Aramaic, the word for heaven is shmaya. It does not mean a physical location above the clouds. It means the realm of light, vibration, and sound. The dimension from which physical reality continuously emerges. The Lord’s Prayer does not address a distant king in a faraway place. It addresses the breathing source of all life that dwells in the realm from which everything that exists continuously pours forth.
That is a different prayer from the one most people were taught.
In Aramaic, the word translated as kingdom is malkuthakh. It comes from the same root the Kabbalah uses for the tenth sephirot. The divine feminine principle through which the infinite becomes the finite. The creative queendom. Not a political kingdom ruled by a patriarchal sovereign. The feminine creative intelligence through which consciousness becomes manifest reality.
When Yeshua said thy kingdom come, he was not describing a political event in the future. He was asking for the recognition of a creative feminine principle that was already present inside every human being and inside all of manifest reality.
That is a different teaching from the one most people inherited.
Let me walk through ten of his most famous sayings and show you what was underneath the English.
The first. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The Aramaic word for blessed is tubwayhon. It does not mean approved by God or rewarded for virtue. It means ripe. Flourishing. In the state of genuine aliveness that comes from alignment with reality. The poor in spirit are not the self-deprecating. The Aramaic word for poor here describes someone who has emptied themselves of the constructed ego. Created internal space. The kind of space that can receive something larger than the self.
The teaching is not about humility as a performance. It is about what becomes possible when the constructed self stops filling every available space.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
Fully alive and flourishing are those who have emptied themselves of the ego. Who have created space inside themselves rather than filling every moment with the constructed self. The divine creative reality already belongs to them because they have stopped blocking it with who they think they are.
The second. You are the light of the world.
The Aramaic word for light is nuhra. It means the same thing in Aramaic that light means in physics. The fundamental medium through which reality becomes visible. He was not giving his disciples a compliment. He was making a cosmological statement about what human beings actually are at the deepest level of their nature.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
You are not a small, limited, temporary creature trying to find God from the outside. At the deepest level of what you are, you are the same substance as the light that makes reality visible. Stop hiding what you are. The world needs to see it.
The third. I am the way, the truth, and the life.
The Aramaic word for way is urha. A path. A practice. A way of walking. Not a membership card. Not a theological position. A way of moving through existence. The early community that formed around his teaching called themselves the Way. Not Christians. Not believers. People who were walking a specific path.
The Aramaic word for truth is shrara. It means that which is firm, established, rooted in reality. Not doctrinal correctness. Not propositional truth. The kind of truth that holds when everything else has been stripped away.
The Aramaic word for life is khaye. It means the aliveness that flows from the divine source. Not biological existence. The quality of being fully awake inside your own life.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
The way I am walking is the path. The contact with reality I am demonstrating is the truth. The quality of aliveness flowing through me is what life actually is. I am not asking you to believe something about me. I am showing you a way of walking and inviting you to walk it.
The fourth. Before Abraham was, I am.
This is one of the most misunderstood statements in the New Testament. The Greek is ego eimi. The present tense. Not I was. Not I existed before Abraham. I am. Present. Now. Always now.
The Jewish audience he was speaking to would have recognized the reference immediately. The divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush was I am that I am. Ehyeh asher ehyeh. The eternal present. The consciousness that exists outside of time.
He was not making a claim about his personal biography. He was pointing at the nature of the awareness that was speaking. The I am that he was describing was not the personal self. It was the consciousness that underlies all personal selves.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
The awareness speaking through me right now is the same eternal presence that existed before Abraham. Before time began. It is not my personal self making this claim. It is the consciousness that underlies all selves, speaking through the form you see in front of you. This is what I am at the deepest level. And it is what you are too.
The fifth. The kingdom of God is within you.
The Greek word used in Luke 17:21 is entos. It means within or among. Most modern translations choose among because within suggests something the institution has spent two thousand years denying. The kingdom is not a place you go. It is a state you recognize.
In the Aramaic tradition this teaching is unambiguous. The Malkuth of Alaha is inside you. The divine creative principle is present within every human being. Not as a metaphor. As a structural claim about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the source from which it came.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
Stop looking outside yourself. Stop waiting for the divine reality to arrive from somewhere else. The creative intelligence of God is not in the sky or in the future or locked behind the doors of an institution. It is inside you right now. It has always been inside you. The work is not to find it. The work is to recognize what is already there.
The sixth. Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened.
The Aramaic grammar here is continuous. Ask and keep asking. Seek and keep seeking. Knock and keep knocking. Not a single transaction. A sustained orientation. A way of holding the attention in a specific direction across time.
The teaching is about the quality of sustained attention and what it does to reality. The door is not opened by a single request. It is opened by a persistent, deliberate, sustained movement toward it.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
This is not about one prayer or one request. This is about the sustained orientation of your whole life. Keep asking. Keep seeking. Keep moving toward the door. The response to sustained sincere attention is not random. The door opens to whoever keeps knocking long enough to mean it.
The seventh. Love your neighbor as yourself.
The Aramaic word for love here is hub. It does not mean affection or sentiment. It means a specific quality of awareness in which the boundary between the self and the other becomes permeable. To love the neighbor as the self is to recognize that the consciousness looking out through your eyes and the consciousness looking out through theirs is the same consciousness expressing itself in different forms.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
The person in front of you is not separate from you in the way you think. The same awareness that lives in you lives in them. Treat them the way you treat yourself not because it is a moral rule but because at the deepest level there is no difference between you. The boundary you feel between yourself and others is real at the surface. It is not real at the root.
The eighth. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
The Greek word for know here is ginōskō. It does not mean intellectual knowledge. It means the same kind of knowing used to describe the most intimate human relationship. Direct. Experiential. Contact knowledge. The truth that sets free is not a proposition you assent to. It is a reality you come into direct contact with.
The Greek word for free is eleutheroo. In the ancient world a free person was specifically contrasted with a slave. Not political slavery. Slavery to whatever had governance over the inner life. The fears. The compulsions. The patterns you could see clearly and still could not stop repeating.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
There is a direct contact with reality available to you that is deeper than anything the mind can think about reality. When you actually touch this reality instead of just thinking about it, something in you that has been enslaved to fear, compulsion, and unconscious pattern will be released. Not because you believed the right thing. Because you came into direct contact with what is actually real. That contact is what frees you.
The ninth. Be still and know that I am God.
This is a Psalm rather than a teaching of Yeshua, but the Aramaic tradition treats it as part of the same body of wisdom. The Hebrew word for be still is harpu. It means to let go, to release the grip, to stop fighting. The kind of stillness it describes is not passive. It is the active choice to release control and allow a different kind of knowing to surface.
The knowing that surfaces in that stillness is not intellectual. It is the direct recognition of the presence that the constructed mind had been too busy to notice.
What it was actually saying:
Stop. Not as a suggestion. As an instruction. Release the grip on your thoughts, your plans, your need to control what happens next. In the space that opens when you stop fighting reality, a recognition becomes available that no amount of thinking can produce. The presence you have been looking for has been here the whole time. The noise was covering it. Stop making noise and notice what has always been underneath.
The tenth. It is finished.
His last recorded words from the cross. The Greek is tetelestai. It does not mean it is over. It means it is complete. Brought to fullness. The same word was used in Greek when a piece of art was finished. When a work had been taken to its full expression.
He was not announcing defeat. He was announcing completion. Whatever he had come to demonstrate had been demonstrated in full.
What Yeshua was actually saying:
Everything I came to show has been shown. The demonstration is complete. The path has been walked to its end. What I came to reveal about what a human being can be, about how fully the divine can move through a human life, about what becomes possible when fear is fully surrendered, has been fully revealed. The work is done. Now it is yours to receive.
if it is in your power, please subscribe to my substack, it will help me on my mission and journey. and you will also get access to the full archive of all the articles I have published. thank you kind soul 🙏
If this piece opened something for you and you want to go deeper into what the original Hebrew and Aramaic actually say, the full breakdown is inside The Hebrew Bible Decoded. Word by word. What the translation buried and what the original was actually pointing at.
Get The Hebrew Bible Decoded here → https://adhdmastery.gumroad.com/l/czsmsi
And if you want the complete map of the traditions that preserved these teachings when the institution tried to erase them, the full teaching is inside The Mystery Schools Guide. The Hermetic tradition. The Kabbalistic map. The Sufi inner path. The Egyptian mystery school. All of it in one place, showing how every serious tradition was pointing at the same territory Yeshua was pointing at in first-century Galilee.
Get The Mystery Schools Guide here → https://adhdmastery.gumroad.com/l/xfqwts
Nabu, Thank you for excellent work.
A question:
There are three gospel renditions of the Last Supper, Matthew 26:26-28, Mark 14:22-24, and Luke 22:19-20, at which Yeshua certainly spoke in Aramaic to his disciples (women and men present at that Seder) when he blessed bread and the cup of wine. Can you enlighten us about the meaning of the words in Aramaic that he spoke in blessing?
Leaves me with the feeling of ‘Home’. So much I’ve felt but never could express or explain to others. So wonderFULL🙏🏻