Abba Doesn't Mean 'Daddy' — What Jesus's Aramaic Prayer Actually Says

If you’ve sat through more than a handful of sermons on Mark 14:36 — Jesus in Gethsemane crying out “Abba, Father” — you’ve probably heard this line before: “Abba is Aramaic baby talk. It’s what a toddler calls their father — the ancient equivalent of ‘Daddy.’ For Jesus to address God this way was scandalously, unprecedentedly intimate.” It’s a moving image, and it comes from a genuinely eminent source: the German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias. It also turns out to be wrong, and has been known to be wrong in scholarly circles for almost four decades.

Where the “Daddy” claim came from

Jeremias made his case most fully in the essay “Abba” collected in The Prayers of Jesus (Studies in Biblical Theology; SCM Press, 1967), and repeated it in his New Testament Theology, vol. 1 (SCM Press, 1971). There he described abba as “a children’s word used in everyday talk” and argued that when Jesus addressed God this way, he was speaking “as a child to its father: confidently and securely, and yet at the same time reverently and obediently.” The claim caught on. It fit a broader mid-century emphasis on Jesus’s radical intimacy with God, and it made for a vivid sermon illustration — one that has kept circulating in pulpits long after the scholarship underneath it shifted.

Barr’s correction: an adult word, not a nursery word

In 1988, the Oxford Semitist James Barr published “Abba Isn’t ‘Daddy’” in the Journal of Theological Studies 39.1: 28–47, and it became the standard reference point for correcting Jeremias’s claim. Barr’s argument, in short: abba did belong to familiar, colloquial Aramaic rather than to formal or ceremonious speech — but “familiar” is not the same thing as “infantile.” Ancient Aramaic and rabbinic sources show grown adults, including rabbis well into maturity, routinely calling their own fathers abba. It was the ordinary word a son used for “father,” not a toddler’s first attempt at language. Barr put it directly: “If the New Testament writers had been conscious of the nuance ‘Daddy’ they could easily have expressed themselves so; but in fact they were well aware that the nuance is not that of ‘Daddy’ but of ‘father.’”

Notably, Jeremias himself backed away from his strongest formulation once the criticism landed — later restatements of his position are considerably more cautious than the “children’s word” language of 1967/1971. Today, scholars summarizing the debate (Michael Heiser among them) generally agree on Barr’s point: abba was not the exclusive property of small children, and reducing it to nursery talk strips away real interpretive nuance rather than adding to it.

The intimacy isn’t gone — it’s just not childish

It’s worth resisting the opposite overcorrection, too: concluding that “abba” was merely a formal, unremarkable title with no warmth in it at all. That isn’t Barr’s point either. He grants that abba sits in the familiar register of the language, not the ceremonious one — it’s simply that “familiar” describes a mature son addressing his father with trust and closeness, not a toddler’s babble. The word carries real intimacy; it just isn’t the intimacy of “Daddy.” It’s closer to the warmth an adult son has for a father he trusts and respects.

That nuance shows up in Paul’s letters, too. In Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6, Paul — writing in Greek — leaves the Aramaic word untranslated and pairs it with the Greek translation anyway: “Abba, Father” (ὁ πατήρ). He didn’t need to keep the Aramaic; he chose to. That choice suggests the word had become a treasured, almost liturgical fragment of early Christian prayer — inherited directly from the way Jesus himself prayed — rather than a piece of vocabulary in need of glossing for a Greek-speaking audience.

The upshot for preaching

“Abba means Daddy” is a tidy sermon illustration, but it isn’t a linguistically defensible one, and pastors who want to keep using this text with integrity should retire it. What survives the correction is arguably the more durable point: Jesus addressed God with a word ordinary adult sons used for their fathers — not with the studied distance of a courtroom, and not with a toddler’s helplessness, but with the confidence, trust, and closeness of a grown child who knows exactly whose child he is.

References

• James Barr, “Abba Isn’t ‘Daddy’,” Journal of Theological Studies 39.1 (1988): 28–47
• Joachim Jeremias, “Abba,” in The Prayers of Jesus (Studies in Biblical Theology; SCM Press, 1967)
• Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology, vol. 1 (SCM Press, 1971)
• Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6 (Paul’s paired Aramaic-Greek “Abba, Father”)

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