Samuel Matthis

One Prayer, Two Versions

Most of us learned one Lord’s Prayer. The New Testament has two. Matthew gives a long form and Luke a short one, and they do not even stand in the same story. Some readers find that unsettling. I find it one of the most reassuring facts about the prayer.

Two settings

In Matthew the prayer belongs to the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus sees the crowds, goes up the mountain and sits down, and “his disciples came to him.”1 In the middle of his teaching on giving, praying and fasting in secret, he says, “Pray like this,” and gives the prayer.2

Luke tells it differently. There is no mountain and no sermon. Jesus has been praying somewhere, and when he finishes, one of his disciples asks: “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.”3 Here the prayer is the answer to a request.

Origen noticed the difference in the third century. One setting is public teaching, the other a reply to a private question, and he wondered whether these might be two different prayers that happened to share some parts.4 Raymond Brown, who taught at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, dismissed the idea in 1961 because it “would imply that the disciples forgot what Jesus told them and had to learn the prayer over again.”5 Anyone who has tried to teach anything to anyone may find that less unlikely than Brown did. But Origen saw the question clearly.

Seven and five

Matthew’s form opens with “Our Father, who art in heaven” and, in Augustine’s count, asks seven things: that the name be hallowed, the kingdom come and the will be done; that we be given bread, forgiven our debts, not led into temptation and delivered from evil. Augustine divided them into three petitions for eternal things and four for the things of this life.6

Luke’s form begins with the bare word “Father” and asks five things. In the Greek of the critical edition there is no “who art in heaven”, no “thy will be done” and no “deliver us from evil”.7 Augustine was not troubled by this. Luke, he wrote, gives “not seven, but five petitions,” and “indicates by his very brevity the mode in which the seven petitions of Matthew are to be understood.”8 For him, “thy will be done” said again what the first two petitions had said, and “deliver us from evil” was the other half of “lead us not into temptation”.

Which came first

Modern scholars ask the question Augustine did not: which form is older? Most think that Luke’s number of petitions is closer to what Jesus first taught. Joachim Jeremias gave the reason: “No one would have dared to shorten a sacred text like the Lord’s Prayer and to leave out two petitions if they had formed part of the original tradition.”9 Brown added a twist. Scholarship, he wrote, “favors the Lucan number of petitions as more original,” but “generally favors the Matthean wording of the petitions.”10 Luke kept the outline, in other words, and Matthew kept the words.

Hans Klein, writing for the German Bible Society’s online lexicon, points to one rare word. Both Gospels ask for bread that is epiousios, the word we translate “daily”, and the word is found nowhere else in ancient texts. So Matthew and Luke must go back to the same Greek version of the prayer.11

Not everyone agrees about the order. David Clark, in a doctoral thesis on the prayer’s earliest history, answers that “there are in fact no ‘laws’ governing the transmission of liturgical texts,” and argues that Luke shortened a longer form. He also admits that neither view can be proven.12

So how sure can we be? That Luke’s shorter outline is older is probable. It is still debated, and I would not build anything on it. I distrust scholarship when it makes definitive claims, and here the careful scholars do not make them. What almost nobody doubts is the ground under both versions. “Few interpreters would deny,” wrote Donald Juel, “that the Lord’s Prayer in substantial form derives from Jesus of Nazareth.”13

A third witness

There is a third early form, outside the Bible. The Didache, a short church manual, survived in a manuscript copied in 1056 and was published in 1883.14 Its American editors of 1884 dated it between 120 and 160. Brown thought “a date much later than the beginning of the second century seems unlikely.”15 Nobody knows exactly. It is very old by any count.

It gives the prayer almost as Matthew has it, with small differences. “Heaven” is singular. The fifth petition reads “forgive us our debt, as we also forgive our debtors.” And it closes with a line neither Gospel has: “for Thine is the power and the glory for ever and ever.”16 Then comes a rule: “Three times in the day pray ye so.”17

That rhythm was older than the church. Daniel “kneeled on his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God.”18 Karlfried Froehlich, a historian of the early church, reads the Didache’s rule as “a private prayer discipline according to Jewish custom.”19 The church of the Didache did not invent a new rhythm of prayer. It put Jesus’s words into the one it already had.

Why two is better than one

I believe scripture is inspired, human and trustworthy. God spoke through Matthew and Luke as the two writers they were, and the differences between them are part of the gift. They are not a problem to explain away.

Two versions tell me something a single text could not. From the very beginning the church prayed these words. It did not embalm them. Matthew’s community said them one way, Luke’s another and the Didache’s a third, and the church kept both Gospels side by side in its Bible without embarrassment. The words were handed on in use, by people who were praying them.

That frees me. I pray this prayer every day, slowly, phrase by phrase, and I do not need the exact syllables Jesus spoke on the day the disciple asked. We do not have them. What I have is the prayer he gave, in the forms his first followers prayed it, and the same invitation they had: “When you pray, say.”20

I wrote this note with the help of an AI model, and every quotation in it was checked against its source. The conclusion is my own.

Footnotes

  1. Matthew 5:1. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

  2. Matthew 6:9. The prayer is Matthew 6:9–13, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). The teaching on secret giving, prayer and fasting runs through Matthew 6:1–18. ↩

  3. Luke 11:1. ↩

  4. Origen, On Prayer 18.3, written in 233 or 234; Greek in Paul Koetschau, ed., Origenes Werke 2 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1899), pp. 340–341, archive.org. The two settings as “a public ordinance” and “the answer to a private request” are Karlfried Froehlich’s summary of Origen in “The Lord’s Prayer in Patristic Literature,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992): 71–87, at 71 and 74, archive.org. ↩

  5. Raymond E. Brown, “The Pater Noster as an Eschatological Prayer,” Theological Studies 22 (1961): 175–208, at 177 n. 5, theologicalstudies.net. ↩

  6. Augustine, Enchiridion 115, trans. J. F. Shaw, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 3 (1887), newadvent.org. ↩

  7. Luke 11:2–4 in Michael W. Holmes, ed., The SBL Greek New Testament (2010), github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. Its apparatus records the longer wording as the reading of the Byzantine text (Robinson–Pierpont). The World English Bible prints that longer wording in Luke, which is why I do not quote it here. ↩

  8. Augustine, Enchiridion 116, trans. Shaw, as above. ↩

  9. Joachim Jeremias, quoted in David Andrew Clark, “From Jewish Prayer to Christian Ritual: Early Interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer” (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2014), pp. 267–268, repository.nottingham.ac.uk. Clark says this is the view of “the majority of modern scholars.” ↩

  10. Brown, “Pater Noster,” p. 178. ↩

  11. Hans Klein, “Vaterunser,” in Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex, 2011), p. 1, bibelwissenschaft.de. The summary of his German is mine. Klein holds that the shared source had Luke’s five petitions and that Matthew kept their older wording. ↩

  12. Clark, “From Jewish Prayer,” p. 268; on proof, p. 223 n. 2. ↩

  13. Donald Juel, “The Lord’s Prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992): 56–70, at 57, archive.org. ↩

  14. R. D. Hitchcock and F. Brown, eds., Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Recently Discovered and Published by Philotheos Bryennios (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), pp. iii–iv, archive.org. ↩

  15. Hitchcock and Brown, p. v; Brown, “Pater Noster,” p. 177 n. 4, where he also reports J. P. Audet’s dating to between 50 and 70. ↩

  16. Didache 8.2, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, as transcribed at earlychristianwritings.com; Greek in Kirsopp Lake, ed., The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1912). In the Greek the Didache says “as we forgive” in the present tense, where Matthew’s Greek has “as we also have forgiven” (Matthew 6:12, SBLGNT). ↩

  17. Didache 8.3, trans. Lightfoot. ↩

  18. Daniel 6:10. ↩

  19. Froehlich, “Patristic Literature,” p. 74. ↩

  20. Luke 11:2. ↩

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