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All links to today's guest's books and official site - click below:
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Book: The Aramaic Jesus Book of Days: Forty Days of Contemplation and Revelation
👉 https://amzn.to/4hZj4d6
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There’s something profoundly liberating about peeling back the layers of history and finding the raw, untamed wisdom beneath. On today’s episode, we welcome Neil Douglas Klotz, a scholar and mystic whose journey into the Aramaic roots of Jesus’s teachings unveils a radically different understanding of the man, his message, and the world he lived in.
The Jesus many of us have encountered is a product of centuries of translation, political maneuvering, and cultural adaptation. The blue-eyed, English-speaking figure who stands at the center of Western Christianity is a far cry from the Aramaic-speaking mystic who roamed the hills of ancient Palestine. Neil Douglas Klotz takes us back to the beginning, to the words that Jesus actually spoke, words that vibrate with an entirely different rhythm than those found in the King James Bible. “If you read ‘spirit’ in the New Testament,” he says, “just put ‘breath’ over that word, because that’s what the Aramaic also means.”
It is in this forgotten wisdom that we find a Jesus who wasn’t simply demanding belief but rather inviting participation. One of the most profound mistranslations, according to Klotz, is the oft-quoted phrase “believe in me.” In Aramaic, the more accurate translation is “believe like me.” This shifts the message entirely—Jesus wasn’t asking for blind devotion but instead urging people to embody faith in the way he did, to step into the divine flow as he had.
The Aramaic worldview, Klotz explains, did not divide existence into rigid dualities. There was no separation between body and soul, breath and spirit, heaven and earth. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, is not some far-off celestial domain but something “within and among” us. The words for “within” and “among” are the same in Aramaic—suggesting that the divine is not a place to go but a way to be, something alive in the interconnected web of existence.
And what of hell? Another grand misunderstanding, says Klotz. Jesus never spoke of a fiery pit of eternal torment but rather referred to Gehenna, a literal burning trash heap outside of Jerusalem. The idea of an eternal damnation was a much later addition, a political tool used to control through fear. The Jesus of Aramaic tradition wasn’t threatening souls with punishment—he was urging people to purify their burdens, to release what weighs them down, to transform their suffering rather than be consumed by it.
Please enjoy my conversation with Neil Douglas Klotz.
Timecodes:
0:00 - Episode Teaser
9:25 - Are Sufis separate from Islam?
12:54 - What does Aramaic reveal about Jesus?
15:15 - Is hell a mistranslation?
19:01 - How did Constantine change Christianity?
23:54 - Was Paul misunderstood?
29:09 - What language did Jesus speak?
34:55 - Where was Jesus for 18 years?
39:12 - Is the resurrection mistranslated?
45:49 - Was Mary Magdalene Jesus’s closest disciple?
50:56 - Did Jesus visit India and Tibet?
54:11 - Did Jesus survive the crucifixion?
1:01:21 - Was Jesus’s message non-dualistic?
1:05:34 - Did Jesus predict the future?
1:09:28 - Are we rediscovering the real Jesus?
1:10:33 - Who were the Gnostics?
1:13:06 - Should we explore Jesus beyond the Bible?
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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Next Level Soul, its subsidiaries, or any entities they represent.
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