I’ve gotten numerous links from readers (CHTs all round!) about the Tomb of Jesus nonsense that is being peddled by James Cameron and The Discovery Channel.
I plan to have a response to this soon, but I just wanted to let y’all know it’s coming.
Till then . . .
A reader writes:
I’m on the RCIA team for my parish, and this past week, a gentleman asked me if I could find out something for him about the Our Father. His mother says the line above as "in earth as it is in heaven" and he said she told him that’s how it used to be or that was how her translation of the Bible had it. I asked him what denomination she was, and he said just a regular Protestant, non-denominational.
I’ve tried checking out a few sites with different Bible translations and have not found any that say "in" earth. Wondered if you had any historical information as to this question.
This man is very very interested and knowledgeable about the Faith and is very much looking forward to the Easter Vigil and coming into the Church. I suspect he may be getting a little grief from his family, and the poor man is aggravated by, as he puts it, "a one letter difference," so I told him I would try to find out for him.
Your friend may be right that his mother is getting this from her ordinary translation of the New Testament. Many groups of Protestants still use the King James Version of Scripture as their ordinary translation, and in this translation it does read "in earth as it is in heaven" (SOURCE). So that’s likely where this is coming from.
As to the reasonability of the "on"/"in" translation, this comes from the Greek of the text. In the Greek New Testament, there is a difference in the prepositions that are present in the two phrases. The "earth" phrase is introduced by the preposition epi, which would naturally be rendered by "on," "upon" or something like that, while the "heaven" phrase is introduced by the preposition en, which would naturally be rendered by "in." So there is a distinction in the Greek between the two phrases.
The image that is conveyed by the Greek prepositions seems to be one in which the person saying the prayer is located on earth, which is below the heaven where God’s will is performed perfectly. We’re thus asking that his will be done on earth (i.e., down here) the way it is up there (i.e., in heaven).
This seems to be what the Greek translator has in mind, informing the English language translation, though if we want to trace this all the way back to its rootes, we have to go into the Aramaic.
Here we find something different.
It’s always hard to translate prepositions from one language to another, because prepositions can mean a variety of things, and their meanings don’t perfectly overlap from one language to another. That’s a problem that happens with all words, but it particularly happens with prepositions.
If we look at common Aramaic versions of the Our Father (LIKE THIS ONE), we find that the preposition introducing both the "earth" phrase and the "heaven" phrase is b-, giving us bish-maya ("in/on heaven") and b’ar-ah ("in/on earth").
The distinction between the two thus likely wasn’t there in the original Aramaic of this prayer. Jesus probably said b-heaven and b-earth, which could be translated "in heaven" or "on heaven" and "in earth" or "on earth." It was up to the translator to decide what was best.
The Greek translator decided that–in Greek–it sounded more natural to say "in (en) heaven" and "on (epi) earth," and many English translators looking at the Greek have decided similarly, leading to the standard English translation of the Lord’s Prayer. The translators of the King James Version seem to have decided differently, rendering the preposition as "in" in both cases.
But this is not an essential point. It’s a matter of translation (specifically, a matter of English translation that does not apply to other languages), and I suspect that your friend’s difficulties with his family may involve weightier matters in the end.
Still, let’s keep him–and them–in prayer.
A reader writes:
I have a very important question about God and right now my faith is at stake. I doubt you will be able to provide a satisfying answer but please try your best.
In the Exodus and several other instances God ordered the Israelites to perform what I think we can all agree is genocide. Samuel told Solomon to go forth and kill and kill every man, woman, child and beast. Making no distinction between age, sex or whether or not they were innocent.
These were real people living real lives. They were not wicked evil doers in some cases, they were just in a land that was supposedly promised. The people God ordered executed had been living there for generations and the Israelites came and murdered them for their land.
I now know two men who will be dead soon from cancer. A girl that was in my kindergarten class was hit and killed by a bus in first grade. I have experienced death first hand and will soon do so again. Nobody deserves to die and what God did was a despicable, disgusting and unjustifiable crime.
God said every man, woman, and child. Put yourself in the shoes of the murdered. Maybe you have a son/daughter, perhaps a nephew or a co-worker has a child. Imagine any child that you regularly come in contact with and then imagine some terrorist coming in and killing him/her. "They say, oh our God ordered it. You see, even though you own this land it really belongs to us because our God told us it was ours so we have to kill you." You don’t believe in their God but that doesn’t matter to them. You are just in their way and you happened to worship a different God, therefore you deserve to die.
How could a God that supposedly loves us perform genocide on us at the same time?
I am sorry to hear that your faith is currently being challenged, and will certainly pray for you. I encourage my readers to do likewise.
It is understandable that, if anything were to challenge your faith, this kind of thing would. Not only are the passages in the Old Testament difficult to understand, but the reality of suffering and death in our lives is the hardest thing for many people to endure. I have had to endure it myself, and I sympathize entirely with your situation.
Let me do what I can to see about answering your questions. I hope you’ll bear with me as I lay some principles that will become relevant later in the discussion. I want to give you as thorough an answer as I can.
First, regarding the commands to exterminate particular populations, these are, indeed, horriffic from a modern-day point of view. Such commands are incompatible with the Christian age, and anyone today who would claim to have received such commands–such as the terrorists you mention–is wrong. God does not work that way today.
The question is whether he ever worked that way, and the answer to this question must be either yes or no. We will look at both possibilities.
A reader writes:
I was hoping you could discuss St. Paul’s teaching on the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12-14. In particular, I’m wondering about the emphasis St. Paul places on prophecy. He tells the Corinthians to be especially eager for prophesying, indicating its superiority over the gift of tongues. In chapter 14 verse 31, he says that all can prophesy, though they should do it one at a time. He warns against pride (Ch 14 v 36) and disorder (v 40).
Now I am wondering what he means by prophesying in this case; are we to assume that all the men (women are excluded in verse 34-35) are receiving messages from the Lord, to be spoken to the community, one at a time?
No. When Paul says you can all prophecy, he’s restricted his universe of discourse to those people who are able to prophecy. He’s giving an assurance that those who have the prophetic gift will all be able to just it, but they must do so in an orderly manner. He is not saying that all have the prophetic gift, as is clear from his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 12:29, which in context has the implied answer "No, not all are prophets." This is also implied by the fact that he encourages the Corinthians to desire this gift.
Also, women are not excluded from prophesying. They are excluded from teaching in church, but they can prohesy, as illustrated by his reference a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians 11:5 to women praying or prophesying with their heads covered.
And why is it that women are to stay silent?
They didn’t have to be absolutely silent. They could pray or prophesy in Church. They couldn’t then teach or interrogate teachers (hence the reference to them asking their husbands at home if they want to know something). The reason for this had to do to a considerable extent with the culture of the early Christian community and was to a considerable extent of disciplinary rather than doctrinal force. It does, however, have a doctrinal nucleus that is reflected in the fact that the Magisterium is capable of being composed only by men (who have been ordained to the episcopacy). Today women can teach in religious settings (though they cannot give the homily) but they cannot teach magisterially.
I have gone to charismatic prayer meetings in the past, where indeed some people had messages from the Lord. However, I always had doubts as to whether they were genuine prophecies or not. How do you tell?
In general terms, if the messages contain predictions that come true then this is a sign that they are genuine; if they contain statements of a theological nature that are false then it is a sign that they are not genuine. In general, the same kinds of criteria that apply to discerning private revelations would apply here.
The spiritual gifts, in particular the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy, were obviously of some importance at least from within the context of the Corinthian community at the time St. Paul was writing, since he devotes a good chunk of his first letter to the Corinthians to them. In the Church today, they don’t really seem that important, except from within the charismatic movement. I’ve often wondered why that is. Any thoughts?
The development of Christian history revealed that the miraculous spiritual gifts began to appear more rarely than they appeared in the first century. This is consistent with the history of the Old Testament, in which prophecies seemed more common in some periods than in others. While God has never completely stopped giving private revelation, it seems that the initial intensity with which it was given at the beginning of Church history was something to help the early Church get off the ground. Afterwards, as the Church became firmly established, the granting of miraculous gifts and private revelations became less common, though it has never completely ceased.
In the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Charismatic movement developed, and many more reports of this type of activity began to be made. The Church thus far has not attempted to make a systematic determination of how many of these reports are genuine, and it is likely to do so given the overwhelming number of them. Instead, it has allowed Catholics (in general) to make their own assessments of how common these phenomena are at present. I would characterize the Church’s attitude in this matter as cautious but open, which incidentally reflects St. Paul’s instructions:
Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5:19-21).
A reader writes:
My husband and I were trying to figure out what happened to the gifts the Magi gave to Jesus. Was the gold kept as well as the other gifts. Also why did the wise men just leave and not stay to continue to worship Jesus. The Shepherds also knew Jesus was the Messiah. Why didn’t they stay and honor him and become his first apostles.
Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are unknown due to our disturbing lack of time machines, but we can speculate. So here goes:
1) Presumably the gold was initially kept by the Holy Family but then was later spent (perhaps during their sojourn in Egypt). The frankincense and myrrh could have also been sold, or they may have been burned, since they were used for incense.
2) It’s not clear that the Magi understood fully what Jesus was (i.e., that he was God). The worship they paid him might not be the worship of the divine but the "worship" (reverence) due to a king or other figures in authority (which is why the British sometimes refer to high officials as "Your Worship"–not implying that the officials are God but that they are to be reverenced because of their office; the word "worship" has become exclusively used to refer to divine worship only recently). The Magi thus may have understood there visit simply as a visit to an important king, who wouldn’t even take his throne for years. Hence, they went home.
3) Same thing with the shepherds. Even understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, they wouldn’t have known that he was God or that he would have disciples. They would likely have thought of him as the future king who would kick the Romans out of Israel–but that wouldn’t happen for years, and so they, too, went home.
Those are my thoughts, any way. Shy of getting a time machine, I don’t know how to check them out. If you happen to run across a Delorean with a flux capacitor accessory installed, though, let me know.
A reader writs:
I’m having trouble finding your several day posting on Creation/evolution that you did awhile back. Is there any way you could send me the link?
If it’s the one I think you mean (it having taken several posts to play out), it wasn’t on creation and evolution per se, but on the interpretation of Genesis 1.
That was a post I was particularly pleased with, and yours is not the only request I’ve had for a link to it. Newer readers also may not have seen it, so I’ll just go ahead and link it here.
A reader writes:
What’s your opinion of the translation that one often sees in James 2:14:
Can such faith save him? (NIV)
Can that faith save him? (NAS)
as apposed to the KJV and NKJV:
Can faith save him?
To
me, this one translation choice seems to be make a big difference in
how one reads James in light of the Sola Fide debates. But I’d be
interested in your thoughts on it from an "original language" viewpoint
and if it’s really as critical as it seems to me.
The Greek of the passage allows either translation. In the Greek original there is a definite article (the Greek equivalent of "the") in front of the word for faith in this passage. The thing about the definite article in Greek is that it’s a little tricky. It doesn’t fully correspond to the English word "the" in its meaning and usage.
If I may put it this way, the Greeks were kind of definite article happy. They slapped it in front of all kinds of nouns where we just wouldn’t. For example, if you’re reading along in the Greek New Testament you’ll run into statements that "the Jesus" or "the Paul" did or said things. (In other words, they’ll put the definite article in front of a proper name.) They also put it in front of a lot of other words where we wouldn’t use it, and in these cases it doesn’t convey the same force as the English "the."
In other cases, though, they used it with more force than "the" has. In these situations, it has the force of a pronoun, like "that."
There are thus three ways the translator may need to handle the definite article:
1) Leave it untranslated because it doesn’t correspond to English usage/doesn’t have as much force as "the"
2) Translate it as "the"
3) Translate it with a pronoun or similarly more forceful term, like "that"
Pretty much everybody agrees that option #2 is not the correct one in James 2:14. A reference to "the faith" would be most naturally understood as a reference to "the Christian faith," and it does not seem plausible that James wants to say that the Christian faith does not save people.
Translations thus divide between following option #1 (like the KJV and NKJV) and option #3 (like the NIV and NAS).
If you are coming from an interpretive school that tries to solve the James/Paul issue by saying that James is talking about a different kind of different and inferior faith than Paul is (e.g., "dead faith") then that would push you toward option #3. I think that there are problems with that approach, and I’ve written about that elsewhere.
The passage is more naturally handled with option #1, as the King James and New King James translators (who were firmly Protestant) did. The passage naturally reads like one in which the definite article has less force rather than more, and if you aren’t being motivated by a variant of the "dead faith" solution to the James/Paul problem, I don’t see why you’d want to go with option #3.
Thus Protestant author Bob Wilkins (who founded a ministry in support of the doctrine of sola fides) writes:
The Greek merely has the definite article. The noun faith occurs 11 times in vv 14-26. Of the 11 uses, 8 times James uses the definite article. Yet clearly in none of the other 7 places does it make any sense to translate the noun and article as that faith or such faith. For example, v 17, if handled the same way as some translate v 14b, would read, "Thus also that faith by itself, if it does not dead." Is there some kind of faith, then, that is not dead when devoid of works? Hardly. James’s point is that faith without works is dead. Not some special kind of faith [SOURCE].
In an e-mail titled "Does Jesus have two given names?" a reader writes:
How does Mary and Joseph naming their infant "Jesus" square with
Isaiah’s prophecy that his name shall be Immanuel? In Matthew the
angel revealed to Joseph that Mary, "will bear a son, and you shall
call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All
this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call
his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us)." (Matt.1:21-23)
This is one of those cases where the solution lies in the nature of prophetic fulfillment.
The starting point to unraveling the mystery is to go back into the Old Testament and look at the prophecy in its original context. The passage being quoted is Isaiah 7:14, which is a famous Messianic prophecy. But in its original context, it has a different signification.
In Isaiah 7, God has sent the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz of Judea that the king of Syria and his ally, the king of the northern ten tribes (Israel) will not be able to conquer Judea. In fact–the northern kingdom of Israel is to itself be conquered (a reference to theconquest by the Assyrians and subsequent deportation that Israel suffered). To convince Ahaz that this prophecy is true, he invites the king to name a sign for God to give him, and Ahaz refuses, saying that he will not but God to the test. This was the wrong thing to say, and Isaiah responds:
"Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman’u-el. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.
Now, there are two things about this passage that help us understand its original reference, and I’ve put them in blue.
The first is that the birth of the child is supposed to be a sign that God is giving to King Ahaz, since Ahaz refused to name a sign for himself. The purpose of this sign is to convince Ahaz that his kingdom really will not be conquered by Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel.
Ahaz reigned from appropximately 735 B.C. to 715 B.C., so it would do him no good at all if the sign were not to be fulfilled for over seven hundred years. That would (a) be long after he was dead and (b) long after the then-existing situation with Syria and Israel was over. It could scarcely serve as a sign backing up the truth of Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the situation.
This points us to look for the original fulfillment of the prophecy to be within the life of Ahaz, which ended in 715 B.C.
The second thing about the passage which helps us understand its original reference is the fact that it says before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good (i.e., avoid things that will hurt him and accept things that will help him), that the lands he is afraid of will get conquered. Now, the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians happened around 721 B.C., and it’s possible that the conquest mentioned in the prophecy is an even earlier one, which occurred in the 730s B.C.
So once again we’re pointed toward a child born in the 8th century B.C.
This child was not, in all likelihood, born of a virgin. The term that is used in Hebrew–almah–refers to a young woman. It is commonly assumed that an almah was a virgin, and the Septuagint translates it thus in Greek (parthenos), but that is not what the Hebrew requires.
This child may have literally been named Emmanuel, though not necessarily. Since "Immanuel" means "God (is) with us" and since saying that God is with us is a common idiom in the Old Testament for saying "we will be victorious" or "things will go well for us," the child’s prophetic "name" may not have been what he was literally called on a daily basis but may be taken as an expression of the fact that the child is a sign from God that God is with his people and their country will not be conquered by the alliance Ahaz feared. Or, in a third possibility, Immanuel may have been the literal name of someone who also had another name, such as was the case with kings, who took regnal names upon their accession to the throne. Thus some have speculated that Immanuel was King Hezekiah, who succeeded Ahaz and lived during the fulfillment of the prophecy. (Whether any have argued that Immanuel was Hezekiah’s birth name, I don’t know.)
However that may be, prophecy often has more than one fulfillment, and the authors of the New Testament recognized a deeper, Messianic fulfillment in the prophecy. There would come who truly was born of a Virgin and who truly was God with us, and thus Matthew sees in the prophecy of Isaiah a second, greater fulfillment in the person of Christ.
This is thus one of several passages in the New Testament that reveals that the sacred authors had a somewhat different idea of prophetic fulfillment than we tend to today. We tend to assume that, if Thing X fulfills Prophecy Y then X must be one and only fulfillment of Y, literal in all its details.
Not so to the authors of Scripture. To them, a prophecy might have multiple fulfillments, not all of which were equally primary and not all of which were equally literal. Some fulfillments might echo or reflect or correspond to the original prophecy, without its being its primary fulfillment.
That’s what we have here: A child born in Ahaz’s reign is the primary fulfillment of the prophecy, but within the spiritual sense of the text is another, grander, and later fulfillment that points to Jesus. We should not understand from Matthew’s application of this prophecy to Jesus that he was literally named Immanuel in the same sense that he was named Jesus. The application of "God with us" to Jesus is something that goes beyond being a name in the conventional sense–even in the conventional Hebrew sense–and applies to him directly as a descriptor of his Person. Jesus is literally God with us in the flesh.
What Matthew is doing, therefore, is taking a text from Isaiah and discerning within it (which is to say, within its spiritual meaning) a prophecy of a Virgin Birth leading to God Incarnate being with us.
Incidentally, here’s a tip for understanding how some New Testament fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies work: To avoid the trap of thinking that each Old Testament prophecy has one and only one fulfillment, which is the one the New Testament records, or that the New Testament fulfillment must be the primary fulfillment of the prophecy or that all the details of the New Testament fulfillment have to match those of the Old Testament prophecy, try replacing the word "fulfills" with a broader word, like "corresponds to" or "reflects" or "echoes," to reflect the broader understanding that the biblical authors had.
In a particular case, they may have meant only " . . . and this reflects what was said by Isaiah the prophet" instead of " . . . and this is the one and only literal-in-all-its-details fulfillment of what was said by Isaiah the proiphet."
A reader writes:
I was surveying commentary on the Widow’s Mite and ran across one
commentary indicatiing the most serious problem is that, while the story
can be made to relate to a number of other sayings of Jesus on trusting,
detachment, poverty, etc., it is not consistent at all with Jesus’ Corban
statement. He proclaims in Mark (7:10 -13).Furthermore, it would seem that the only way out of these acute
difficulties is quite simply to see Jesus’ attitude to the widow’s gift as
a downright disapproval and not as an approbation. The story does not
provide a pious contrast to the conduct of the scribes in the preceding
section (as is the customary view); rather it provides a further
illustration of the ills of official devotion. 11 Jesus’ saying is not a
penetrating insight on the measuring of gifts; it is a lament, “Amen, I
tell you, she gave more than all the others.” Or, as we would say: “One
could easily fail to notice it, but there is a tragedy of the day—she put
in her whole living.” She had been taught and encouraged by religious
leaders to donate as she does, 12 and Jesus condemns the value system that
motivates her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to do
it.I am interested in your commentary on these remarks.
I’m inclined to disagree with them. First, though, let’s start with the passage itself:
Mark 12
41: And he sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums.
42: And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny.
43: And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.
44: For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living."
It is not immediately clear how the widow’s mite would be a violation of Jesus’ teachings regarding the corban rule. When Jesus critiqued the use that was being made of corban, he pointed to some individuals’ use of it to circumvent the need to care for one’s parents, which is not in view here.
One could, however, construct a parallel argument to the effect that just as one owes a certain amount of money to the care of one’s parents so that they aren’t reduced to destitution, one also owes a certain amount of money to the care of oneself, and to donate this money to the temple would be wrong.
This is, indeed, something that often strikes people when they read this passage: They wonder what the widow was going to live on if, as Jesus said, she gave her whole livelihood.
It would be wrong to starve oneself to death by giving away all the money one has so that one is unable to care for oneself, but I don’t think that we can infer from this fact that Jesus disapproved of the woman’s action. The obvious interpretation of the passage is that he approved of what she was doing. The plain sense of Jesus statement that "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her
poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living" is that he is favorably comparing what the widow did compared to those who put in larger amounts but had larger amounts of money that made their gifts less sacrificial.
If needed, I can go into detail about why this is the likely interpretation, but for most readers I assume that it will be obvious that this is the natural sense of the text.
If we then accept that (a) Jesus was saying something favorable about the woman in comparison to others and (b) that it would be immoral to starve oneself to death by giving away all one’s money then that allows us to infer (c) that the woman was not starving herself to death by giving away all her money.
What might she have been doing?
Hypothetically, she might have had another source of support lined up and was expecting new money to come in soon–perhaps a small business she had or from a relative.
Or perhaps she really was at the end of her financial rope and, rather than spend her last two lepta on herself, she decided to give them to God in an act of faith, asking him to provide her with a new source of income so that she could keep living.
Or Jesus was using hyperbole.
Hyperbole–or exaggeration to make a point–is an extremely common feature of the biblical language, and my strong suspicion is that Jesus was using it here. In other words, the woman really wasn’t giving "everything she had, her whole living." Jesus uses these phrases in order to forcefully underscore the value of what she did put in relative to what she had. It wasn’t literally all that she had, but it was enough of what she did have that it made the use of hyperbole warranted when comparing what she gave to what those who were rich gave.
Incidentally, the picture above is of the front and back of a first century BC coin that is the same type as the widow used (though the pictures on the coin may have been different by the time she made her offering).
A reader writes:
I listen to a radio show called People to People and the commentator, Bob George states that we never have to ask for forgiveness because, it has already been given. We just have to give God thanks for forgiveness.
Callers confront Mr George with 1 John 1 :9 which says, If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us [our] sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Mr George states that in the Greek, the real translation would be in the “past tense” not the present, so the verse should read, “ he has been faithful to have forgiven us our sins. “
He uses this to support his claim that we do not have to ask for forgiveness since it has already been given.
Could you please shed some light on if he is right or not. In the Greek does it really use the past tense and not the present?
I haven’t heard Mr. George’s claims, so I can’t comment on them directly, but if he has said what you report then he is flatly in error.
First, Greek does not have a past tense. It has several tenses that can refer to the past: the pluperfect, perfect, imperfect, and (often) the aorist.
Here’s a so-literal-it’s-klunky-English translation of 1 John 1:9 with the relevant verbs (and one other important word) emphasized:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just that he would forgive us the sins and would cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
The first verb in this that describes God is "is" (estin). It’s an ordinary, present-tense "is." Nothing special about it; nothing past-tensy at all. In context, it tells us that God is faithful and just, not that God has been faithful.
But John has something particular in mind when he says that God is faithful and just, so he clarifies what he means by introducing the clause beginning with "that," which I’ve put in red.
In Greek the word corresponding to "that" is hina, which is often found at the beginning of clauses where the verbs are in the subjunctive mood. That’s what we have here. The verbs in this clause aren’t in the indicative mood but the subjunctive mood, which is why I’ve translated them as "would forgive" and "would cleanse." They tell us what God would do if we confess.
Now, these two verbs are in the aorist tense, and the aorist tense usually indicates an action occurring in the past–if the aorist is in the indicative mood–but in the subjunctive mood the aorist tells you nothing about time. It just refers to the occurrence of an event without telling you whether it is past, present, or future. Since we’re in the subjunctive mood here, one cannot appeal to the aorist as showing that God has already done something.
So if Mr. George has been claiming what is reported about the Greek in this passage, he is making some elementary (first year Greek) mistakes, including not recognizing the correct tense of "is" and/or not recognizing that the aorist doesn’t point to the past in the subjunctive.
The claim that we shouldn’t ask God for forgiveness but should only thank him for receiving it is particularly absurd because Jesus built into the model prayer for his followers the petition "forgive us our debts." That "forgive" is in the imperative mood which, in Greek, is used to ask for things (among other things), and here it is being used to ask for forgiveness.
Unless one is going to say that the Lord’s Prayer is not for Christians, you’re going to have to say that Christians have an ongoing need to ask for forgiveness.