The Lord's Prayer survives in two gospel versions that scholars still argue over
Christianity's best-known prayer comes in a longer form in Matthew and a shorter one in Luke, and nobody agrees which came first. Its famous closing line about the kingdom, the power and the glory was a later addition. Even the word usually rendered daily bread is a puzzling, disputed Greek adjective.
Called the Our Father, or Pater Noster in Latin, the prayer is credited to Jesus and asks for God's holiness, will and kingdom before turning to human needs. Most scholars think it genuinely goes back to the historical Jesus; Dale Allison and John P. Meier are both confident he composed it. Craig Keener, by contrast, sees the gospel form as something Matthew shaped. A first-century manual, the Didache, gives a version very close to Matthew's and to the one said today.
Mark lacks the prayer, so supporters of the two-source hypothesis trace it to the lost sayings collection Q, though theories that one evangelist copied the other are gaining ground. Martin Dibelius and Joachim Jeremias favoured Luke as earlier, reasoning that liturgical wording tends to expand before it settles. Michael Goulder and others argue the reverse, that Luke trimmed Matthew's repetition. Davies and Allison thought several versions may have circulated independently.
Matthew's text has seven petitions: three directed to God and four about human concerns. Only Matthew includes the lines about God's will being done and deliverance from evil. Both Greek versions use epiousion, commonly rendered daily despite debate. Protestants usually add a doxology found in some manuscripts of Matthew, while the Eastern Orthodox ending names Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Most verbs are aorist imperatives, shifting from third-person passive to second-person active.
With few exceptions churches use Matthew's version in worship, and the Catholic Catechism calls it a summary of the whole gospel. Since the 16th century it has been translated and gathered as a tool for comparing languages. Parallels appear in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish prayers, the Dhammapada and even the Epic of Gilgamesh, though the plea not to be led into temptation has no direct Old Testament counterpart. Settings run from 9th-century Gregorian chant to Christopher Tin.
Source: Lord's Prayer
