When the Gospel writers reached for the word Jesus used to address God in his most private prayer, they did something they almost never did: they left it in his own language. Ἀββᾶ (Abba) appears only three times in the New Testament — once on Jesus’s own lips in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36), and twice in Paul’s letters describing how the Spirit prompts believers to cry out to God (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). In all three places the Aramaic word is transliterated into Greek and then immediately followed by the Greek for Father. That double phrasing — Abba, ho patēr — is the writers’ way of flagging it: this is the original word Jesus used, and here is its translation. It’s about as close as the written Gospels get to the sound of Jesus’s first language.

For most of the twentieth century, Abba was preached as a child’s word — the Aramaic equivalent of Daddy or Papa — largely on the strength of the German scholar Joachim Jeremias, who argued that no Jew had ever addressed God so intimately before. The picture was moving: Jesus alone in the dark the night before his death, speaking to God the way a small child speaks to a father.

More recent scholarship has refined that. Abba is intimate, but it isn’t only a child’s word. Adult students in the rabbinic tradition addressed their teachers as abba. The fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom, from a region where Aramaic was still spoken, noted that children used the word in his day — but not that only children did. And there are earlier traces, scattered and rare, of Jews addressing God as Father. So the right word for Abba isn’t childish but familial — the warm, settled address of one who belongs to the household, not the babble of an infant.

What was genuinely unusual was the constancy. Every recorded prayer of Jesus — with the single exception of the cry from the cross — addresses God as Father. That isn’t how Israel usually prayed. They prayed to the LORD, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the King of the Universe. Jesus prayed to the Father, and he taught his disciples to begin the same way: Our Father in heaven.

That is why Abba still matters when you pray. To say Our Father is to step into Jesus’s own way of approaching God — as a member of his family, with his own access to his own God. Paul says the same in different words: the Spirit prompts us to cry Abba, Father, the very word Jesus used in the garden. Not a stranger’s petition. A child’s voice in a Father’s house.