I happened to read a write-up presented by Rev. Jack Kilmon, Bible scholar and researcher in his website "Scriptorium". Kilmon has attempted a retro-translation of the 'Our Father in Heaven' prayer to Aramaic, the language in which Jesus spoke (cf. http://www.historian.net/lp-pap2.html). The text after the retro-translation reads like a perfect poem!
My question is: Is it true that Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer in verses and not in prose?
Having read the presentation myself, I find the idea pretty interesting. After all, it is quite likely that the Lord's Prayer was taught in Aramaic and not Koine Greek and, as such, would sound very different in accentuation, rhyme and tone - let alone the rhythm that good verse demands!
There are a few problems with his process that lead me to say we cannot say with any certainty come to his conclusion.
First, the nature of translations.
If we accept that the Greek version of the Lord's Prayer is indeed itself a translation of the original Aramaic (although we cannot discount the remote possibility of the prayer having been delivered in Hebrew), than the Greek translation itself, like all translations, is the translator's interpretation of the best way to render the Aramaic prayer in Greek. Translation is an art, not a science and translators always have to make decisions about the best way to convey what they think the meaning is.
Some translations are free, some translations are more rigid and literalistic (sometimes referred to as dynamic equivalence or formal equivalence). Some give a word-for-word translation and won't re-arrange the words, break the style or the syntax; some completely re-arrange the text itself to best convey what the translator thinks is the intended meaning in a language and style that he/she thinks would be best understood by the intended audience. There is a lot of freedom in translation. We have no idea how the translator of the supposed Aramaic original approached the task of interpretation into Greek.
Second, taking it one step further, there is a problem with Rev. Kilmon's process of creating an Aramaic retro-version that confuses the whole thrust of his paper.
His Aramaic retro-version is identified as a translation into Aramaic from the Peshitta, a text written in Syriac. The Peshitta is a 4/5th century translation that appears to have been written by several different translators, because the "freedom" or "rigidity" that they translate with varies from section to section. In the Gospel section, for instance, Metzger and Ehrman in "The Text of the New Testament" (p. 98) note that the Gospel sections of the Peshitta tend to follow a "text type" of Greek New Testament manuscripts called the "Byzantine Type." The Syriac Peshitta may have been translated from either an assumed yet unsubstantiated earlier Aramaic version or from Greek manuscripts (or something else, for that matter, we don't really know).
The gist of this is that his supposed Aramaic reconstruction may be a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. With this much translation going on, it would be virtually unbelievable that his Aramaic reconstruction is near enough to the original words to successfully evaluate things like rhyme, rhythm and accentuation to conclude with certainty that it was indeed verse and not prose. Perhaps he is close, but we have no way to say with any certainty.
This being the case, on the basis of Rev. Kilmon's work, we cannot say with any certainty that the original words were delivered in verse and not prose.
