The Lord's Prayer is the most widely used prayer in the Christian community.

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                Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer

Irwin Tang

Professor Cousland

Religious Studies 414

November 10, 2003


Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And do not bring us to the time of trial,

but rescue us from the evil one.

Matthew 6:9-14 NRSV

        The Lord’s Prayer is the most widely used prayer in the Christian community.  Almost all Christian traditions accept and practice the Lord’s Prayer.  This universality reasons that this prayer is of great religious importance.  The appeal of the Lord’s Prayer is that it functions as the “perfect” prayer.  Taught by Jesus himself, this prayer was thought to replace the Jewish prayers that existed at the time.  For the most part, people associate the Lord’s Prayer with Christianity, contrasting it with Jewish prayer.  Many feel that the prayer Jesus taught was something completely new and revolutionary.  However, I feel that the Lord’s prayer is essentially a Jewish prayer, exhibiting the form and function of contemporary Jewish prayers.  

        As with many other studies of any writings in the Gospels, it is important to discuss how these traditions have been brought to us, and what, if any modifications were made to the original text.  Therefore it would be prudent, for the purpose of this paper to first look at the literary elements of the Lord’s Prayer.  

        To illustrate why the Lord’s Prayer is essentially a Jewish prayer, we must first define and explore what Jewish prayers were like during the time of Jesus.  We will be discussing the two most popular prayer traditions of the time, the Shema and the Tephilla.

        We will then draw the relations between the Jewish prayers and the Lord’s Prayer, paying attention to the traditions that Jesus would have been involved in.  Also, the context in which Jesus meant to Prayer to be used.  

We will touch briefly on the literary elements surrounding the Lord’s Prayer.  The Lord’s Prayer appears in only twice in the gospel, once in Matt 6:9-13 and again in Luke 11:2-4.  There has been much controversy as to why both the context and the contents of each version are different.  The shorter version appears in Luke, where the context is Jesus was seen praying, after which the disciples ask Jesus to “teach them how to pray”.  In Matthew, the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer is grouped with a variety of other Jesus teachings.  This group of teachings focuses around the shortfalls of the Pharisees and what the corrections would be.  In the case of prayer, Jesus denounces the empty prayers of the Pharisees and teaches them the Lord’s Prayer instead.  

        The composition is almost identical, such that the entirety of the Lucan version is included in Matthew’s account.  Therefore one school of thought is that the version in Luke is the original, and that Matthew later expanded it, adding phrases to clarify (Stevenson, 2000).  Phrases such as “in heaven”, or “your will be done…” both serve to clarify, the first to clarify that this prayer is for the God of heaven, and the second to clarify what it means for God’s kingdom to come.          Others speculate that it was Matthew that contained the original, and that Luke later condensed it (Crosby, 2002).  Luke does have other “condensed” passages from Matthew, for instance the beatitudes are only mentioned briefly and in a highly condensed version.  This theory is unlikely though because “no one would have dared to shorten a sacred text like the Lord’s Prayer…” (Jeremias, 1967).

        The mainstream theory is that Matthew and Luke drew upon a common oral source that was passed through the early Christian community.  This source may have been the “Q” source, which contains the material that is in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark.  It would suppose that Luke’s version is more closely resembling of the version in “Q”, and again, Matthew later expanded and clarified “Q”.  Another common may have simply been different oral traditions within the early Christian church (Lohmeyer, 1965).  There is much evidence that during this time, there were many schools of Christian thought, each emphasizing particular teachings of Jesus.  It is plausible that two different Christian communities used the Lord’s Prayer from its original form and changed it, through addition or modification to suit their particular worship needs (Crosby, 2002).  

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        However the Lord’s Prayer was transmitted, its importance is not diminished.  It is apparent that the Prayer in Matthew was eventually adopted by the entire church community.  Therefore, for the purpose of this paper, we will discuss the version in Matthew.  

        One function of prayer in the Jewish community is to identify the community as being chosen by God.  This identity comes in the form of the how they pray, and in what ways they address God.  Prayers in the Hebrew bible develop a relationship between God and humanity.  Not just in the sense that we are connected ...

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