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. Fewer than seventy words in Greek, it carries more interpretive weight than any other text of comparable length in the Christian corpus — every clause of it glossed, line by line, from the second century to the present.

The Lord’s Prayer (Le Pater Noster), opaque watercolor by James Tissot, 1886-1896, showing Jesus between sky and disciples — Brooklyn Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two prayers, not one

What survives is not a single fixed text but two, transmitted side by side in the New Testament. The longer version stands inside the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew (6:9-13), framed by warnings against praying to be seen and against the heaping-up of words; the shorter stands in Luke (11:2-4), given when the disciples, seeing Jesus at prayer, ask him to teach them as John had taught his own. The Matthean form carries seven petitions; the Lukan carries five. Luke lacks the third petition, that the divine will be done on earth as in heaven, and lacks the closing clause of deliverance from evil; where Matthew asks forgiveness of debts, Luke asks forgiveness of sins, while keeping the human side of the bargain in the language of debt — forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

Which form lies closer to the source is contested. Martin Dibelius and Joachim Jeremias argued for Lukan priority on the principle that a liturgical text, once in use, is enlarged and enriched rather than trimmed — the shorter reading is the older. The two are usually traced to the shared sayings-source behind the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, though a growing minority of scholars holds that one evangelist drew on the other, or that several community forms of the prayer were already in circulation. What the historical Jesus said, and in what phrasing, is reconstructed rather than recovered; the prayer that the Gospels give is already a prayer in use, shaped to be spoken aloud by a congregation.

The added ending

The doxology familiar to English-speaking Protestants — for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory — is not part of the prayer as the oldest manuscripts preserve it. It is absent from the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and from the Alexandrian text generally, and the three earliest commentators on the prayer — Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian — comment on it nowhere, which is the surest sign they did not have it before them. It appears, in fuller form, in the later Byzantine tradition from which the King James Version was made.

A page of Codex Sinaiticus (4th century) carrying Matthew 6:4-32 — the leaf where the prayer ends without the doxology — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Its growth can be partly watched. The Didache, the late-first- or early-second-century manual of church order, already closes the prayer with a two-fold ascription — for thine is the power and the glory for ever — without the word kingdom; the Apostolic Constitutions later supply the kingdom, producing the threefold ending now recited. The doxology, in other words, was carried by the worshipping assembly back into the text it was meant to complete: a prayer ending on the bleak petition not to be tested wanted, in the mouth of a congregation, to turn at the last toward praise. Catholic and Orthodox usage keeps the doxology liturgically distinct from the Gospel text rather than folding it in; the textual fact and the liturgical instinct have learned to live alongside each other.

The sequence of petitions

The Matthean prayer falls into two movements. Three petitions concern God and are cast in the second person — that the name be hallowed, that the kingdom come, that the will be done on earth as in heaven; the remaining petitions concern those who pray — bread, forgiveness, deliverance from the time of trial. Augustine, in the Enchiridion, read the seven as three asking eternal goods and four asking temporal ones, and held that Luke’s five comprehend the same matter more briefly. The motion of the whole runs from the address upward — Father, in heaven — down through the hallowing of the name and the descent of the kingdom toward the table and the ledger of ordinary life, and out again to the edge of danger.

The opening address itself carries weight. To name God as Father, and in the underlying Aramaic with the intimate Abba, set the prayer’s register: not the approach of a suppliant to a remote power but the speech of a household. The petition that the kingdom come binds the prayer to the central announcement of Jesus’ preaching, the nearness of the reign of God; the request that the divine will be done on earth as in heaven asks, in effect, for the dissolving of the distance between the two. These first clauses ask for the world to be set right; only then does the prayer turn to bread.

Epiousios

The fourth petition turns on a single word that has resisted translation for eighteen centuries. The Greek adjective qualifying bread — epiousios — occurs, in this form, essentially nowhere outside the Lord’s Prayer and the texts that quote it. Origen, in his treatise On Prayer, observed that the word was used by none of the Greek writers and was unknown to ordinary speech, and concluded that the evangelists had coined it, perhaps to render a word of Jesus’ own language now lost; he analyzed it through ousia, the philosophical term for substance, and inclined toward a sense above ordinary bread.

Jerome, translating the Gospels into Latin, registered the difficulty in the most visible way possible: he rendered the same word two different ways within his own Vulgate, supersubstantialem — supersubstantial — in Matthew, and cotidianum — daily — in Luke. The competing construals were already in the air and remain so. From epi with ousia one can read bread necessary for existence; from epi with the participle of to come, bread for the coming day, the morning’s loaf asked for at evening, or the bread of the day that is dawning, the age to come; the supersubstantial reading carries the petition toward the Eucharist and the bread of heaven. The line that English recites as a request for ordinary sustenance is, in its Greek, the most disputed word in the prayer — and the dispute is not modern carelessness but a problem the earliest readers already faced.

A pattern for prayer

The patristic writers did not treat the prayer as a formula to be repeated for its own efficacy. Tertullian, in On Prayer, written around the turn of the third century, called it the breviarium totius evangelii — the epitome of the whole Gospel — and read its few clauses as containing in compressed form the substance of Christ’s teaching, the foundation on which other prayer is built rather than a text to discharge by recitation. Cyprian, who looked to Tertullian as his master, carried the reading into the mainstream in his own treatise on the prayer addressed to those preparing for baptism; through Cyprian the interpretation became common property, after Tertullian’s later turn to Montanism had cast a shadow over his name. Origen’s far longer work set the prayer inside a full theology of asking. These three ante-Nicene treatises are the only ones devoted to the prayer from before Nicaea, and the commentary tradition descending from them is nearly unbroken — through Augustine, the medieval expositors, the Reformers’ catechisms, down to the modern study.

The reading they established is that the prayer teaches not what to say but how to ask: it orders desire, placing the hallowing of the name before the request for bread, binding the petition for forgiveness to the petitioner’s own forgiving. The early manual already treats it this way in practice. The Didache instructs the community to pray it three times a day, distinguishing this from the empty repetition of the hypocrites — the same prayer that warns against many words being set, from the first, as a daily rhythm.

The Pater Noster in Latin on a tiled plaque in the Church of the Pater Noster, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem — one of more than a hundred multilingual panels — Croberto68, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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, woven into the daily office, and carried in the mysteries of the rosary as the Pater Noster that opens each decade. The comparative study of prayer placed it at the head of a type. Friedrich Heiler, in Das Gebet (1918), classed the Pater Noster as the exemplary instance of what he called prophetic prayer — spontaneous, personal, addressed to a living and willing God, set against ritual and legal formulae — and named Jesus the prayer-Master against whom the formulaic types are measured. Heiler’s ranking of the prophetic type as the summit of all prayer was itself a confessional judgment of its moment, and later comparative religion has declined to keep the ladder; but his placing of this prayer at the center of the discussion has held.

The hidden architecture

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 onto the structure of the divine emanations. Read this way, the descent of the petitions from heaven to earth is also a route the praying soul may climb in reverse, each clause a station; the logos spoken in the prayer becomes a thread laid down for the ascent, and the reading shades toward the territory of gnosis and the contemplative ladders of Christian mysticism.

In Christian Kabbalah the architecture is made explicit. The Renaissance current founded by Pico della Mirandola, who in 1486 set out to find Christian doctrine within Jewish mysticism, and extended by Johann Reuchlin in De Arte Cabalistica (1517), supplied a grammar for mapping sacred phrases onto the sefirot, the ten emanations of the Tree of Life. Within that grammar the opening address to the Father is set against the crown, Keter, the unknowable source from which the emanations descend, and the prayer’s clauses are distributed down the Tree toward Malkhut, the kingdom, the lowest emanation and the point of contact with the world. The added doxology gave the mapping its neatest hook: its triad of kingdom, power, and glory was read onto the lower sefirot directly, kingdom answering to Malkhut. The late-Victorian Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn carried this furthest, rendering the doxology into Hebrew and building it into the opening gesture of its ritual — the Qabalistic Cross — with kingdom, power, and glory assigned to the spheres of the Tree, so that the closing words of a Christian prayer became, in the order’s hands, a recitation of the cosmic map; the philologist Ola Wikander has traced the precise Hebrew the order used and the emanations it chose. Such readings find a hidden architecture in a text the wider tradition recites as a plain request.

The Sephirotic Tree of Life from Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652 — the diagram of the ten emanations later taken up in Hermetic Qabalah — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Comparison with other compressed contemplative formulas is often drawn — the brief invocations of the Jesus Prayer, the patterned ascent of the Psalms of degrees; it is also worth saying that the prayer’s surface remains stubbornly ordinary — bread, debts, the asking not to be tested.

The text and its students

The commentary on these few words begins with the three ante-Nicene treatises and has not stopped since. Tertullian’s On Prayer, the earliest of them, survives in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation by Sydney Thelwall and is freely readable in the Tertullian Project edition; Cyprian’s On the Dominical Prayer and Origen’s much larger On Prayer complete the founding set, and Augustine’s analysis of the seven petitions in the Enchiridion and the Sermon on the Mount fixed the schema the West has used since. The modern textual-critical record is settled on the points that matter: the doxology’s absence from the oldest manuscripts, the two divergent versions, and the singular standing of epiousios are documented in the apparatus of the critical Greek New Testament and rehearsed in every commentary. Raymond Brown’s 1965 study of the Pater Noster and Nicholas Ayo’s 1992 survey of its exegesis from the Fathers to the present remain standard guides to the line-by-line tradition. The comparative-religious placing of the prayer rests on Friedrich Heiler’s Das Gebet (1918), with the caution that Heiler’s elevation of prophetic prayer was a confessional verdict of its decade. For the esoteric afterlife, the philologist Ola Wikander has reconstructed the exact Hebrew into which the Golden Dawn cast the doxology and the emanations it assigned, in an open-access study, The Pseudo-Matthean Doxology from the Lord’s Prayer, Sephiroth, and Classical Hebrew.

The brevity that draws commentary

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.

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