Samuel Matthis

The Ending the Church Added

Anyone who has prayed the Lord’s Prayer in a mixed congregation knows the moment. Everyone says “deliver us from evil” together. Then some go on, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” and others have already stopped.

Both are right, in their way. The last line of the prayer is the place where the prayer the church received meets the prayer the church learned to pray. I want to tell that story calmly, because nobody who prays the ending should feel foolish, and nobody who leaves it out should feel they are missing something.

What the oldest pages say

The two great Greek Bibles of the fourth century are Codex Sinaiticus, now mostly in the British Library, and Codex Vaticanus, in the Vatican Library.1 In both, Matthew’s prayer ends at the same word: ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ, apo tou ponērou, “from evil,” or “from the evil one.” In Sinaiticus the copyist then set two small dots, an end mark, and the prayer is over.2 There is no “For thine is the kingdom.”

In 1882 the Cambridge scholars Westcott and Hort set out the wider evidence. The ending is missing from the oldest manuscripts, from most of the Old Latin copies and the Vulgate, and from every Latin writer who commented on the prayer. Among the Greek commentators, only John Chrysostom and those who followed him have it.3 The critical Greek texts used today end Matthew’s prayer at “evil.”4

I am usually cautious when scholars sound certain. Here I think the evidence really is decisive. Anyone can look at the pages.

Where it came from

That does not mean someone invented the ending out of nothing. Westcott and Hort thought there could be “little doubt that the Doxology originated in liturgical use in Syria,” and that it was “probably derived ultimately from 1 Chr xxix 11,” perhaps “through the medium of some contemporary Jewish usage.”5 Raymond Brown made the same point more simply: “Jewish prayer formulae generally end in a doxology.”6

Here is the verse. David stands before the whole assembly at the end of his life and prays: “Yours, Yahweh, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty! For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, Yahweh, and you are exalted as head above all.”7 Kingdom, power, glory. The church did not have to invent a doxology. It found one in Israel’s prayers.

Still finding its words

The ending appears very early in the Didache, a little manual of church life that Brown thought could hardly be later than the beginning of the second century.8 It gives the prayer almost word for word as Matthew has it, and then: “for Thine is the power and the glory for ever and ever.”9 No kingdom yet, and no amen.

The early translations show the ending still finding its shape. The Coptic of southern Egypt has the Didache’s two words, with an amen: “because thine is the power and the glory unto the ages, Amen.”10 An old Syriac copy has “the kingdom and the glory.”11 A Latin Gospel book known as Codex Bobiensis has a single word: “for yours is the power for ever and ever.”12 By the fifth century, in the Greek Codex Washingtonianus, the full form we say appears, with its amen.13 The ending was being prayed before anyone agreed on its words. Nobody copies four different endings from one page. People pray them.

How the churches handle it

William Tyndale’s English New Testament of 1526 ends the prayer “but delyvre vs from yvell/ Amen.”14 His revision of 1534 adds: “For thyne is the kyngedome and the power, and the glorye for ever. Amen.”15 John Calvin knew it was missing from the Latin copies and kept it anyway: “yet as it accords so well with the whole, we cannot think of omitting it.”16

Catholics, outside the Mass, end the prayer at “evil,” as Matthew does.17 At Mass they say a doxology too, but not straight away. The priest first prays a short prayer that carries “deliver us from evil” further, and then the people answer: “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and for ever.”18 Protestants mostly pray it straight through, as their prayer books print it.19

Giving it back

What does it mean to pray words the church added? I think it means something good.

For seven petitions we have been asking: give us, forgive us, lead us not, deliver us. It is a prayer full of us, as it should be. The doxology stops asking. It hands the whole prayer back. Thine: the kingdom is not mine to build, the power to make bread and forgiveness happen is not mine, and the glory, when good things happen, is not mine either.

David knew this. In the same prayer that gave the church its doxology, he looks at the gifts the people have brought and says: “But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to offer so willingly as this? For all things come from you, and we have given you of your own.”20

That is what the ending does with our prayer. We bring God our needs, our debts, our fears. At the end we notice that even the words were his gift. Whether we stop at “evil” and keep a moment of silence, or go on to the kingdom and the power and the glory, we are doing the same thing. We are giving the prayer back to the one who gave it.

Words Given prints the ending, and Days Twenty-seven and Twenty-eight pray with it. The Second Sunday tells the story of the manuscripts.

I wrote this note with the help of an AI model, as I did the book. Every quotation was checked against its source, and the view is my own.

Footnotes

  1. Codex Sinaiticus Project, History and Date pages, codexsinaiticus.org; the catalogue of the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung, Münster, dates both to the fourth century, ntvmr.uni-muenster.de. ↩

  2. Matthew 6:13 in Codex Sinaiticus, British Library f. 202b, codexsinaiticus.org; Codex Vaticanus in the INTF transcription, ntvmr.uni-muenster.de. ↩

  3. B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek: Introduction [and] Appendix (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), Appendix, pp. 8–9, archive.org. ↩

  4. Michael W. Holmes, ed., The SBL Greek New Testament (2010), apparatus to Matthew 6:13, github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. The World English Bible, which this site quotes, does print the ending in Matthew 6:13: “For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.” ↩

  5. Westcott and Hort, Appendix, p. 9. ↩

  6. Raymond E. Brown, “The Pater Noster as an Eschatological Prayer,” Theological Studies 22 (1961): 175–208, at p. 178, theologicalstudies.net. ↩

  7. 1 Chronicles 29:11. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

  8. Brown, p. 177 n. 4. ↩

  9. Didache 8.2, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, as transcribed at earlychristianwritings.com. The Greek is in Kirsopp Lake, ed., The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1912). ↩

  10. [George Horner, ed.,] The Coptic Version of the New Testament in the Southern Dialect, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), pp. 46–47, archive.org. ↩

  11. The Curetonian Syriac at Matthew 6:13, as given by the Dukhrana Peshitta Tool, dukhrana.com. ↩

  12. J. Wordsworth, W. Sanday and H. J. White, eds., Old-Latin Biblical Texts No. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), p. 32, archive.org. Our translation of “quoniam est tibi uirtus in saecula saeculorum.” ↩

  13. Matthew 6:13 in Codex Washingtonianus (GA 032), INTF transcription and catalogue, ntvmr.uni-muenster.de. ↩

  14. The New Testament … published in 1526, reprinted verbatim (London: Samuel Bagster, 1836), Matthew 6, archive.org. ↩

  15. The English Hexapla (London: Samuel Bagster, 1841), Matthew 6:13, Tyndale 1534 column, archive.org. ↩

  16. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) III.20.47, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845), ccel.org. ↩

  17. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Our Father,” usccb.org. ↩

  18. The Roman Missal, Order of Mass, as printed by the Liturgy Office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, liturgyoffice.org. ↩

  19. For example, The Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 364, justus.anglican.org. ↩

  20. 1 Chronicles 29:14. ↩

The book: Words Given

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