The Lord's Prayer

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The Lord’s Prayer is the short petitionary prayer that the Gospels attribute to Jesus, given in answer to his disciples’ request that he teach them how to pray. It opens by addressing God as Father, asks that the divine name be hallowed and the kingdom come, requests daily bread and the forgiveness of debts, and ends with a plea to be spared trial and delivered from evil. From its Latin opening it is also called the Pater Noster; from its first English words, the Our Father.

Two versions survive in the New Testament — a longer one in Matthew, set inside the Sermon on the Mount, and a shorter one in Luke. They differ in wording and length, and the familiar closing doxology (“for thine is the kingdom”) is absent from the earliest manuscripts, added later in liturgical use; on this much textual scholarship agrees. What the historical Jesus said, and in what Aramaic phrasing, is reconstructed rather than known. The petition usually rendered “daily bread” turns on a Greek word, epiousios, that occurs almost nowhere else and whose sense — bread for today, bread for tomorrow, bread above substance — was already disputed in antiquity.

Within Christianity the prayer became near-universal, the one text held in common across communions that agree on little else, recited in the liturgy, taught to children, and woven into the rosary and the daily office. The Church Fathers treated it as a pattern for all prayer rather than a formula merely to be repeated; Tertullian called it a summary of the whole gospel, and commentaries on its clauses run from the patristic period to the present.

A long interpretive tradition reads the prayer as more than petition. Mystical and esoteric writers have taken its sequence of clauses as a graded ascent — from the naming of the Father through the coming of the kingdom to deliverance — and mapped its phrases onto stages of the soul’s return or, in Christian Kabbalah, onto the structure of the divine emanations. Such readings find a hidden architecture in a text the wider tradition recites as a plain request. The resemblance to other compressed contemplative formulas is real and often noted; it is also worth saying that the prayer’s surface remains stubbornly ordinary — bread, debts, the asking not to be tested.

What has kept it central is partly that ordinariness. The petitions name what people actually fear and need, in an order that moves from the divine to the daily and back to the threat of evil, and the brevity that makes it easy to learn is the same brevity that has left every clause open to centuries of commentary.

→ Related: Christian Mysticism · Christian Kabbalah · Gnosis · Logos