Samuel Matthis

Handed Over Before Baptism

In many churches of the fourth and fifth centuries, a person did not simply pick up the Lord’s Prayer. It was given. In Hippo, shortly before baptism, on a set day, the candidates received it by ear, and eight days later they gave it back. The explanation came alongside, and in some cities only afterward.

Hippo

Some time around the year 410, on a day in Lent, Augustine stood before the candidates for baptism in his church at Hippo, in North Africa. They were called competentes.1 Earlier in Lent they had received the Creed and learned it, and they had just said it back. He began: “You have just repeated the Creed, where in brief summary is contained the Faith.” They had already heard the prayer once that morning, he reminded them, “when the Gospel was read.” Now they had eight days: “Learn then, this Prayer also which you will have to repeat in eight days time.”2

The order was deliberate, and he explained it in another of these sermons: “you have not first learned the Lord’s Prayer, and after that the Creed; but first the Creed, where ye might know what to believe, and afterwards the Prayer, where ye might know whom to call upon.”3 First they learned who God is. Then they were given words to speak to him.

What strikes me is how calm he was. The Creed had to be learned now, he said, because they would not hear it every day in church. At the Saturday vigil before their baptism they would say the Creed back once more.4 The prayer was different. “Every day must this prayer be said by you, when you are baptized. For the Lord’s Prayer is said daily in the Church before the Altar of God, and the faithful hear it. We have no fear therefore as to your not learning it carefully, because even if any of you should be unable to get it perfectly, he will learn it by hearing it day by day.”5

In another sermon he told them where the prayer had come from. It “was dictated (as you heard when the Gospel was being read) by the Lord Himself to His disciples, and came from them unto us.”6

Jerusalem and Milan

In Jerusalem the full explanation of the sacraments came after baptism. The lectures to the newly baptized, as their nineteenth-century translator Edwin Gifford describes them, were given “on Easter Monday and the four following days, after the public Service, not in the great Basilica, but in the Holy Sepulchre itself.”7 They go under the name of Cyril of Jerusalem, though some manuscripts give them to his successor John, so the honest form is Cyril, or perhaps John.8 The last of them walks the new Christians through the Eucharist they had just attended for the first time. After the great prayer of thanksgiving and the prayers for the living and the dead, “we say that Prayer which the Saviour delivered to His own disciples.”9 The Greek verb is paredōke: he handed it over.

In Milan, about 390, the newly baptized heard the prayer explained in Easter week, in the sermons On the Sacraments. They come down to us under the name of Ambrose, though their English editors of 1919 doubted that he wrote them.10 The preacher speaks straight to the new Christian: “O man, thou didst not dare to raise thy face to heaven, thou didst direct thine eyes to the earth, and suddenly thou didst receive the grace of Christ; all thy sins were forgiven. From a bad servant thou becamest a good son.” Now he may look up “and say Our Father. A good boldness that, but modest.”11

Rome

The Roman form of the handing over survives in the Gelasian Sacramentary, a Roman service book in a copy made in the seventh or early eighth century for a church in the Frankish lands.12 The scrutinies of the chosen candidates begin on the Monday of the third week of Lent. Later they receive three things in turn: the Gospels, in a rite called “the opening of the ears”, then the Creed, and last of all the Lord’s Prayer. The priest explains each petition in a sentence or two and sends them away to renew what they have heard in their hearts: nunc euntes ea vestris cordibus innovate.13

The monastery

Once baptized, they said it every day, aloud and together. In the sixth century Benedict wrote that into the Rule for his monks. Morning and evening prayer were never to end without the Lord’s Prayer, said by the superior “aloud, so that all may hear, because of the thorns of scandal which are always cropping up: that the community, by reason of the pledge given in this prayer, in the words, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us, may purge themselves from this kind of vice.” At the other hours only the last part was said aloud, “that all may answer, But deliver us from evil.”14

I like those thorns very much. Benedict knew that people who live together hurt each other all the time, so twice a day he put the promise to forgive into their mouths, in each other’s hearing. Nobody had to wait until they felt forgiving.

Received before understood

Look at the pattern across these cities. Nobody was asked to understand the prayer first and pray it afterward. They received it by hearing and gave it back. In Jerusalem and Milan the explanation came after the font. Augustine expected even the slowest to learn it at the altar, among people who already knew it.

I learned the prayer as a child, as Vater unser, in a Catholic village in western Germany. Then came years as an atheist when I did not pray it at all, and later I came back to it. Like everyone, I received the words before I understood them.

That is what this history means for us, I think. The prayer was always received before it was understood. Nobody earns it by grasping it first. It is given, and the understanding grows in the praying, slowly, often with others saying the words beside us on the days we cannot. Words given to us can become our own. That is not second best. It is how the church has passed this prayer on for most of its history.

This note was written with the help of an AI model. Its quotations were checked against their sources, and what it says about the prayer is mine.

Footnotes

  1. Karlfried Froehlich, “The Lord’s Prayer in Patristic Literature,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992): 71–87, at 72 and 75, archive.org. Froehlich places Sermons 56–59 at about the same time as Augustine’s letter to Proba, written after 410. ↩

  2. Augustine, Sermon 58.1, trans. R. G. MacMullen, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 6 (1888), where it is Sermon 8 on the New Testament, newadvent.org. ↩

  3. Augustine, Sermon 56.1 (NPNF Sermon 6), trans. MacMullen, newadvent.org. ↩

  4. Augustine, Sermon 58.13 (NPNF Sermon 8), trans. MacMullen, as above. In 58.1 he says the Creed will be said back “on the last Sabbath day, when you will be here to be baptized.” ↩

  5. Augustine, Sermon 58.12 (NPNF Sermon 8), trans. MacMullen, as above. ↩

  6. Augustine, Sermon 59.1 (NPNF Sermon 9), trans. MacMullen, newadvent.org. The same sentence repeats the rule of eight days. ↩

  7. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, introduction to The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 7 (1894), ccel.org. Gifford places the lectures to the candidates in or about 348. ↩

  8. Gifford reports that some manuscripts ascribe these five lectures, the Mystagogical Catecheses, to John, Cyril’s successor as bishop of Jerusalem. He himself defends Cyril’s authorship. ↩

  9. Mystagogical Catecheses 5.11, trans. Gifford, as above. ↩

  10. T. Thompson, trans., and J. H. Srawley, ed., St. Ambrose “On the Mysteries” and the Treatise On the Sacraments by an Unknown Author (London: SPCK, 1919), archive.org. Froehlich (p. 72) accepts Ambrose’s authorship and dates the sermons to about 390/91. ↩

  11. On the Sacraments 5.4.19, trans. Thompson, as above. ↩

  12. H. A. Wilson, ed., The Gelasian Sacramentary: Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), introduction, where Wilson follows Léopold Delisle on the date, archive.org. ↩

  13. Wilson, book I, nos. XXIX and XXXIV–XXXVI, pp. 45 and 57–59. I know of no public-domain English translation, so the description is my own summary of the Latin. The Latin words mean, roughly, “now go and renew them in your hearts.” ↩

  14. Rule of Benedict, ch. 13, trans. Cardinal Gasquet, The Rule of Saint Benedict (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925 printing), pp. 41–46, archive.org; Latin in D. Cuthbert Butler, ed., Sancti Benedicti Regula Monachorum (Freiburg: Herder, 1912), p. 45. Gasquet supplies the English liturgical words for the forgiveness petition; Benedict’s Latin quotes only Dimitte nobis sicut et nos dimittimus, “Forgive us as we forgive.” On the date, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) says the exact time and place of the Rule are not known, but “about 530” is likely, newadvent.org. ↩

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