'Abba, Father' 173

this magazine, George Woods called it the plain virtue, and like a
plain face, not given the recognition it deserves. Prudence is the
virtue of a stable world, not a mad one. It brings together both the
religious and the irreligious in recognizing that some aspects of the
future can be foreseen. Anyone can now foresee the consequences of
catching HIV as they could once see the dangers of extra-marital
sex. To a strongly religious mind, however, Prudence may seem to
conflict with Providence; the future is given, not arranged. And the
Christian moralist is wary of rules derived from consequences. The
good should be pursued for its own sake, not for fear of hell. But
plain and practical Prudence may yet protect us from an AIDS
epidemic, as we have similarly argued that it should protect us from
an excessive manufacture of nuclear weapons.
We need not, however, despair of higher virtue in our new
moralizing, nor need we abandon all that is contained within the
biblical warning that porneia is in fact a deadly enemy of loving
human relationships. In his latest book, the psychiatrist Jack Domi-
nian surveys the scene with AIDS much in mind and argues for a
new language in Christian teaching about sexuality. Nothing of the
old language with its restrictive connotations will serve. The new
word is integriry"that abiding hunger we have from infancy onwards
to be bonded in trust and confidence with another person, and
which most of us hope to satisfy in the developing strengths of a
loving and stable marriage. Can such language cut through the iron
curtain between restraint and libertarianism? Let Thomas Traherne
set us a target for our reformed morality:
I do not speak much of vice which is far the more easy theme,
because I am entirely taken up with the abundance of worth and
beauty in virtue and have so much to say of the positive and
intrinsic goodness of its nature. But besides, since a straight line is
the measure both of itself and of a crooked one, I conclude that
the very glory of virtue, well understood, will make all vice
appear like dirt before ajewel, when they are compared together.
PETER COLEMAN

'Abba, Father' and the Familiarity of

Jesus'Speech
JAMES BARR
To many people it is important that God should not be felt to be
remote and out of reach. Although transcendent, he is our Father,
and we can approach him with openness and confidence as little

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174 James Barr

children do. To those who wish to emphasize this point, the phrase
'Abba, Father' comes as a welcome piece of evidence. 'Abba' was
Jesus' term in talking to his Father; but equally, 'Abba' is children's
language. Saying 'Abba' is like saying 'Daddy'. In using this term
Jesus avoided the ceremonious terminology of traditional Jewish
prayer, and moved into the familiar and informal diction of the
ordinary family. This train of thought has been welcomed, adopted
and used by a large number of students, preachers and other
expounders of the Bible. Few of those who listen to sermons have not
heard it.
The scholar who, more than any other, is responsible for the
popularity of this idea is Joachim Jeremias. One of his books was
actually entitled Abba in the original German edition. In English, the
most familiar and accessible of his works that are relevant are: The
Central Message ofthe New Testament (1965); The Prayers ofJesus (1967);
and New Testament Theology (1971). In all of these the interpretation
of 'Abba' is emphasized and insisted on as a cornerstone of the
author's general approach to the understanding ofJesus.
Jeremias was not concerned only with the familiar intimacy of
Jesus' speech. Rather, it was a nodal point in a complex of
arguments, as follows. The expression 'Abba' came from the diction
of children and this fitted with the command that Jesus' followers
should be as little children. Being in the vernacular Aramaic, it
belonged to popular language and thus differed from the higher
style of liturgical Hebrew. To call God 'Father' at all was quite rare
in the Old Testament and in pre-Christian Jewish sources, and to
address him, individually, as 'Father' was unknown, or practically
so. Even less would any Jew have addressed God personally as
'Abba'; there is evidence thatJews avoided using 'Abba' in reference
to God. Moreover, although the word 'Abba' appears on Jesus' lips
at only one point in one of the four gospels (Mark 14.36, in the
Garden of Gethsemane), we can be sure that all cases in the Gospels
where Jesus addresses God as 'Father' in Greek were originally
expressed with 'Abba'. Thus, while there is not a single instance of
God being addressed as 'Abba' in the language of Jewish prayer,
Jesus always so addressed him. This fact demonstrates that we are on
the track of the very words of Jesus himself. Being a sign of his
originality and difference as against his environment, it forms an
essential starting-point for a New Testament theology based upon
this kind of information.
This complex of arguments thus validates the general approach of
Jeremias to New Testament theology. The point about the childish
informality of 'Abba' is only one element within this total complex,
but it is an element that is probably necessary for the coherence of
the whole. For, asJeremias expounds his argument, it all depends on
the specific form, 'Abba': a different word meaning 'Father' would,
by his argument, not have the same effect. In what way, then, is
'Abba' different? Because of its connection with the diction of

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 'Abba, Father' 175

children; and also, naturally, because it is thrice quoted, in the

Semitic form, in the New Testament text (Mark 14.36; Rom. 8.15;
Gal. 4.6).
Now the linguistic arguments advanced by Jeremias are complic-
ated, and any criticism of them must be in part technical. I have set
out my counter-arguments in full in an article entitled'>Abba isn't
"Daddy" , in the Journal of Theological Studies, 39 (I g88), pp. 28-47;
they will be stated here in a more popular and less technical fashion
and in a different order.
(I) 'Abba' did not really belong to the speech of children.
Jeremias himself makes it clear that by the time ofJesus 'Abba' had
largely displaced the older Hebrew and Aramaic forms of address to
a father. Adults used it. The Mishnah (B. Bathra 9.3) discusses what
happens when a father dies leaving property to his sons and the elder
sons improve the property. They might then discuss, saying 'See
what Father [Abba] has left us ... ' These were no longer mere
children. 'Abba' was thus in normal use among adults. Jeremias in
fact presses this point if anything too far for his own case: it is
doubtful if older locutions had been so completely displaced.
Undoubtedly 'Abba' would belong especially to the speech of
children, simply because a child would use the address 'Father!'
more often; but this would be true of any word meaning 'father', in
any language, and says nothing about 'Abba' specifically.
Since 'Abba' was actually normal usage of adults, Jeremias has to
resort to derivation to make it into a specially childish word: it came
from childish babbling, like 'Da-da' and such expressions. But this is
no explanation. The form 'Abba' is built upon the ancient Semitic
stem lab, 'father', and there are several ways in which we may
understand the way in which 'Abba' specifically became so domin-
ant, but none of them require the hypothesis of infantile babbling as
the point of origin.
Thus the most striking examples put forward by Jeremias prove
the opposite of what he thinks. The words quoted as used by
children are the same words as those used by adults. Thus the Targum of
Isaiah 8.4 has 'Abba' where the original Hebrew had 'my father'.
The context is about a child learning to speak. But what he learns to
speak are the words of adult Aramaic, corresponding to the adult
Hebrew of the original. And similarly with other examples. It was
not a case ofJesus, or of other ad ul ts, using a childish form like our
'Daddy'; on the contrary, children used the adult form, like our
'Father' .
This is supported by the usage of the Targums. Where the Hebrew
has 'my father', the Aramaic commonly has 'Abba'. But this
happens in contexts in which it is impossible to see it as other than
solemn adult style. Thus: 'And he [Esau] said to his father, "Let
Abba arise, and eat from his son's food'" (Gen. 27.31), and 'the
God of Abba, the God of Abraham' (Gen. 31.42). These are solemn
utterances, made by adult or even elderly men; note in the former

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175 James Barr
one the collocation with the formal third-person style. In chapter 3 I
of Genesis Jacob, the speaker, has already been working for Laban
for twenty years and is hardly a mere child (Gen. 31.41). In these
and other similar cases, 'Abba' clearly has the nuance of 'my father'
in adult speech, and not that of 'Daddy' in childish speech.
(2) The Greek word used in the New Testament is always the
adult word pa{er and never a diminutive or a word that particularly
belongs to the speech of children.
Such words were available, and the most likely would have been
papas or pappas. This is found in writers of the relevant period such as
Epicurus and Cornutus, and in papyri. It would thus have been
possible to express the nuance of childish speech, as in 'Daddy', but
no attempt was made to do so. In the three cases where 'Abba'
appears it is uniformly translated as hopater, '(the) father'. There is
no evidence that any New Testament writer understood the terms to
have a childish nuance as in 'Daddy'.
(3) It is not clear that all cases of 'Abba' in the New Testament
came from Jesus' speech, or that Jesus in addressing his Father
always used 'Abba'. The evidence suggests otherwise. The phrase
'Abba, Father' occurs twice in the Pauline letters, and Jeremias
argues that the use of 'Abba' there must go back to the actual
example ofJesus: the Church used the unusual Aramaic expression
because Jesus had used it earlier. This is not a necessary conclusion,
however. Where Paul quotes the expression 'Abba' he gives no
indication that this rests upon the speech of Jesus, and in view of
Paul's very limited reference to details of the pre-crucifixion life of
Christ it might be a little surprising if he had done so. What Paul
makes clear is that the use of 'Abba' rests upon the practice of the
contemporary Church: 'we cry, "Abba'" (Rom. 8.15); the Spirit
cries it (Gal. 4.6). This is the utterance of the contemporary
experience of prayer. The most natural parallel is with the expres-
sion 'Maranatha', certainly a survival of the Aramaic speech of an
early stage of the Church. But 'Maranatha', 'Lord, come!', was not
something that Jesus had said: it was what the Church said in
prayer. 'Abba' may well have been an expression of the same kind.
Readers do not require to be reminded that Mark contains a
number of other Aramaic or Hebrew expressions used by Jesus, such
as talitha cum and ephphatha, 'maid, arise' and 'be opened'; but the
preservation of these Semitic expressions cannot be plausibly con-
nected with later liturgical usage of them in the Church. 'Abba' may
well have been the same. A reminiscence ofJesus' speech, and used
only once, it was dropped by both Matthew and Luke. There is no
particular reason why we should suppose that the use of 'Abba' in
the prayers of the early Church motivated the mention of it in
Mark's Gospel.
Jesus is recorded only once as having used the expression 'Abba'.
Jeremias nevertheless argues that he always, or practically always,
used this expression when addressing God as 'Father'. This is

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 'Abba, Father' 177
theoretically possible but remains rather unlikely for several reasons.
The opposite would be equally possible: the moment in the Garden
of Gethsemane was a very special moment, and its special and
intimate character caused the actual word, 'Abba', to be noted here.
Moreover, Jesus spoke alone with God, no one else was there to hear
what word he had used.
In all three places where the term 'Abba' is quoted, it is accom-
panied by the Greek ho pater, nominative with article, which
indicates a strict literalist translation technique at this point: the -a
termination of 'Abba' was analysed as the mark of definiteness.
(Aramaic does not, like Hebrew, have a definite article which
precedes the noun, but an 'emphatic' or 'definite' termination in -a.)
A uniform translation analysed 'Abba' as 'the' plus 'father' and
represented this exactly so in Greek, using the nominative case.
In the various other places, however, where Jesus addresses God
as 'Father', this pattern is not followed. The identical phrase, ho
pater, nominative in vocative function, is found only at Matthew
I 1.26/Luke 10.21, and in both of these the expression is preceded,
within the same speech, by the normal grammatical vocative pater,
without article, which is in fact the commonest form of such address.
We also have vocative with genitive, patermou (Matt. 26.39, 42); and
there may be some cases of the nominative without article. InJesus'
address to God as 'Father', therefore, there is a considerable variety
of Greek expression, and the form which is uniformly found where
'Abba' is present is found only in a smallish minority.
Now Jeremias tries to argue from this variety that all the different
forms go back to the one 'Abba'. This, though not absolutely
impossible, is a very precarious argument. It runs as follows. There is
a standard Greek rendering at every point where 'Abba' is actually
used; where 'Abba' is not used, other Greek expressions are much
commoner; therefore all these Greek expressions are renderings of
the one 'Abba'. This must imply that the sort of translation
technique that was used where 'Abba' was present was abandoned
in almost all the other cases where there had been an original 'Abba'
but it was not retained in the Greek text. It is much more natural to
say: either some of these addresses to God began with a Semitic
expression other than 'Abba', or else some of the differences are
variations that arose within the Greek Gospel tradition and thus
cannot be directly tied to anyone precise Semitic original. In other
words, Greek writers, knowing perfectly well that Jesus addressed
God as 'Father', simply expressed this in Greek in whatever way
they wished, neither knowing nor caring whether 'Abba' had or had
not been present in the earlier stages. It is certainly wrong to claim
that 'Abba' was present, on this evidence, in all cases where Jesus
addressed God as 'Father'.
(4) Other expressions than 'Abba' were very probably available.
Given the variety of Greek expression that hasjust been noticed, but
wishing to show that all the variants go back to the one expression

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175 James Barr

'Abba', Jeremias adds the further argument that there was no other
term than 'Abba' that could have been used. 'Abba' could mean
'Father!' (vocative), it could mean 'the Father', it could be 'my
father', perhaps also 'our father': for all these there was only the one
Semitic expression 'Abba' that could be used in Palestine in the time
ofJesus. Thus the displacement of older forms by the rise of 'Abba'
to prominence is pushed by Jeremias to the point where all forms
other than 'Abba' had disappeared from use altogether. This,
however, is very unlikely.
In the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, for instance, we have 'my
father' three times, as in 'I, Lamech, ran to Methuselah my father',
and everyone of these is written 'by, that is, not 'Abba' but the
traditional Aramaic form with possessive suffix, to be read >bz.
Another fragment has 'Barakiel my father was with me', with the
same Aramaic form. I have not seen any sign of 'Abba', by contrast,
in any fragments published thus far. The date of these documents is,
of course, not known exactly, but it would be very rash to suppose
that they were too early to be relevant for the time ofJesus. They
would certainly be intelligible in his time. Jesus very probably had
other forms than 'Abba' at his disposal for his address to God.
'Abba' apparently did not specify: it would, of course, commonly
mean 'my father', but it did not say so quite expressly. In older stages
of language, for example in biblical Hebrew, this was otherwise: one
could not say 'Father!' without including the suffix which specified
'my'. For Jesus, God was not only 'my Father' but also 'the Father'
and were in that respect originally non-specific. But phrases like pater
said in the Garden ofGethsemane was 'Father' and not 'my Father'.
There is a difference here.
Jeremias, on the other hand, presses too far the multiplicity of
meanings that could attach to 'Abba'. If he is right, then a
considerable variety of Greek expressions all went back to 'Abba'
and were in that respect originally non-specific. But phrases like pater
mou, with specification of 'my', occur in important places (Matt.
26.39, 4 2, the first of these being in parallel with the 'Abba' of
Mark), and it seems unnatural to dissociate these from the many
places which have 'my father', 'your father', etc. in indicative
sentences if not in prayers. Now it is theoretically possible that the
specification 'my', 'your', etc. was added in the Greek tradition to
what had been an Aramaic 'Abba' that did not specify. It seems
more likely, however, that the Greek in some cases at least goes back
to a Semitic form that specified 'my', 'your', 'our', etc. If this is so,
then that form was not 'Abba'. That forms existed that specified, as
in 'my father', has been shown above. It is hardly possible to doubt
that they must have been used in the Aramaic or Hebrew forms of
Jesus' sentences of teaching; ifso, it is hard to say that they could not
have been used in the addresses to God in prayers.
This is particularly important for one important passage, the
exordium of the Lord's Prayer in the Matthaean form. While Luke

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 'Abba, Father' 179

11.2 begins with the single word pater (vocative), Matthew 6.9 has
the much fuller address 'Our Father who art in heaven'. In
Jeremias' opinion, the Lucan form is the original and represents an
earlier 'Abba'. The longer Matthaean form is an expansion which
assimilates the phrase to Palestinian liturgical style. And in fact the
phrase is very like the Hebrew "abinu 'se-ha-samayim; so much so that it
proves this familiar Jewish phrase to have existed in the first century
AD. All this is argued by Jeremias himself. But with this he begins to
reverse some of the arguments he has hitherto insisted on. For, if this
is right, it suggests the availability of a form that specifies 'our
father', as distinct from the unspecific 'Abba', and the possibility
that Jesus may have used such forms, too, whether in Hebrew or in
Aramaic. I do not dispute that the Lucan form looks earlier and
more original at this point; I only point out that this account of the
Matthaean form opens the way to a larger variety of Semitic forms
than was allowed by the insistence that 'Abba' must always be the
original expression. And if this form of exordium existed already in
the first century it seems to make vain all the strenuous effort
deployed in order to show that God was never, or only very rarely,
addressed as 'Father' before 'Abba' was so used by Jesus.
(5) Conclusion. The importance of the fatherhood of God for
Jesus is amply evidenced in many places and is not in question here;
the only question is the degree of its connection with the sole term
'Abba', and the nuance that is imparted to it through that connec-
tion. Jeremias' interpretation has been popular and influential
because it brought together a number of features that appealed. It
gave what appeared to be a conservative view of the historicity of
details in the Gospels; it sketched out what seemed to be a straight
line linking the 'Abba' of the prayers of the early Church with the
'Abba' ofJesus' own speech with his Father; while emphasizing the
divine fatherhood, it gave a cosy twist to it, the feeling of children in
a family setting, through the insistence on the derivation of 'Abba'
from childish speech; and it brought all these together in one single
word, a word that was in itself simple, and yet contained the nucleus
of the theology of the New Testament.
Some of these points may continue to be affirmed in part, but the
cement which binds them together into a single complex of ideas has
broken down. There is no evidence that the 'Abba' of Paul is
dependent on the 'Abba' of Jesus; it cannot be proved that Jesus
used 'Abba' only and always in all his addresses to his Father; it is
likely that he used other terms which specified 'my' or 'our' Father;
and, above all, the nuance of 'Abba' was not at all the nuance of
childish prattle, but the nuance of solemn and responsible adult
speech. Once again, attempts to build theology upon a particular
word prove to be a failure.

James Barr is Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford.

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