Samuel Matthis

Why German Says Vater Unser

I learned the Lord’s Prayer as a child, in German, in the village church. It begins Vater unser im Himmel. Word for word that is “Father our in heaven.”1 The “our” comes after the noun.

English speakers notice this at once. The usual explanation is short: German simply copied the Latin, Pater noster, and the order stuck. It is a tidy answer. The scholars who edited Luther’s works rejected it.

The oldest German prayers

One of the oldest German Lord’s Prayers we have is on a page now kept at St. Gall. Its editor, Elias von Steinmeyer, reported that its sounds place it in the late 780s or early 790s.2 It begins Fater unseer, thu pist in himile. A catechism copied at Weißenburg in the ninth century begins Fater unser, thu in himilom bist, and the Old High German gospel harmony known as the Tatian has fater unser thu thar bist in himile.3 The poet Otfrid writes Fáter unser gúato, “our good Father.”4 Notker of St. Gall, who died in 1022, writes Fater unser dû in himele bist.5 The first printed German Bible, from Strasbourg about 1466, still has Vatter vnser du do bist in den himeln.6 And Gothic, an older cousin of German, already had atta unsar in Wulfila’s Bible.7

Every one of them puts the Father first. To be fair, so do the Greek, Pater hēmōn, and the Latin these translators were working from. The old texts alone cannot decide whether the order came from Latin or from German. So the question is what else we know.

Luther turns it round

In September 1522 Luther published his New Testament, translated from the Greek, where earlier German Bibles had been translated from the Latin.8 There the prayer begins Vnser vater ynn dem hymel, “Our Father in heaven,” with “our” in front.9 His Bible kept that order to the end: the last edition of his lifetime, in 1545, reads Vnser Vater in dem Himel.10

One of his critics, Emser, objected. Luther, he wrote, had die ersten zwey Worth gleich vmbkert, “turned the first two words right round,” and translated Vnser Vater instead of Vater Vnser, wie im Euangelio steht vnd wir Teutschen lenger denn tausent Jahr gebetet haben, “as it stands in the Gospel and as we Germans have prayed it for more than a thousand years.”11

The editors of the great Weimar edition of Luther’s works explain the old order in a footnote. Vater unser, they write, is “not a literal transfer from the Latin.” It follows “the old German usage of placing the pronoun after the noun in the vocative,” the form used to address someone, and it “was kept from the inherited practice of prayer.”12 The Old High German evidence fits their view, even if it cannot prove it alone.

What is certain is what Luther did. In his Bible he wrote Unser Vater. In his Large Catechism of 1529, and in the Small Catechism from 1531, he kept Vater unser der du bist ym himel.13 The Bible was for reading. The catechism was for praying, and there he left the words the way people already said them.

Not every Protestant followed him. The Reformed Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 has the Bible order, Unser Vater der du bist in himmeln.14 So does the Luther Bible today: Unser Vater im Himmel.15

Übel or Böse

The last petition has its own story, and it is often told as a matter of confession: von dem Übel for Lutherans, von dem Bösen for Catholics. Both are German words for “evil.” The record is more interesting than the shortcut.

Luther prayed erlöse uns vom ubel. Yet in his Large Catechism he says that in the original the petition reads von dem argen oder boshafftigen, “from the wicked or malicious one,” and that it sounds als rede er vom Teuffel, “as if he were speaking of the devil.” The first printing says “in the Hebrew,” a slip of the pen that later printings corrected to “Greek.”16 The Reformed Heidelberg Catechism already had erlöse uns vom bösen in 1563.14 And the Catholic school catechism of the German dioceses in the 1950s still has erlöse uns von dem Übel. Its explanation asks God to free us vom Bösen und allem Übel, “from evil and from every ill,” and so uses both words.17

The line between Übel and Böse never ran neatly between the churches. It ran through them.

One text

In the end the German-speaking churches agreed on one common text. It keeps the old order, Vater unser im Himmel. It says erlöse uns von dem Bösen. It ends with the doxology, Denn dein ist das Reich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit in Ewigkeit. Amen. Today the Protestant and the Catholic churches in Germany publish it word for word the same.1

When the German bishops decided in 2018 not to change one of its lines, they named that agreement as a reason in itself. The konfessions- und länderübergreifende Einheitlichkeit des Textes im gesamten deutschen Sprachraum, the sameness of the text across churches and countries in the whole German-speaking world, was “not the least important argument.”18

Emser’s complaint still has an odd afterlife. A Protestant who opens the Luther Bible at Matthew 6 reads Unser Vater. The same Protestant, in church, prays Vater unser.

Two villages

I grew up in a very Catholic village in western Germany. The village next door was very Protestant. Today the Catholic village and the Protestant village next door say the same words.

A common prayer does not end every difference between two churches. But it means that on a Sunday the two villages say the same thing to the same Father. And they say it in the old order, the one Emser defended and Luther kept for praying: Father first. Before the prayer says anything about us, it names the one we are speaking to.

An AI model helped me write this note, as it helped with the book.

Footnotes

  1. The common text of the German-speaking churches, as published by the Evangelical Church in Germany, ekd.de, and by the Catholic portal katholisch.de; the wording is identical, the punctuation differs slightly. All translations from German in this note are ours. ↩ ↩2

  2. Elias von Steinmeyer, ed., Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler (Berlin: Weidmann, 1916), p. 28, reporting the work of R. Henning: “in der zweiten Hälfte des Zeitraums zwischen 780 und 793.” The text is on p. 27 of the 2nd ed. (Berlin and Zürich, 1963), TITUS transcription. ↩

  3. Weißenburg Catechism: Steinmeyer, 2nd ed. (1963), p. 29, TITUS; Steinmeyer dates its hands to the first decades of the ninth century (1916, p. 35). Tatian: Eduard Sievers, ed., Tatian: Lateinisch und altdeutsch, 2nd ed. (1892), 34.6, TITUS. ↩

  4. Otfrid, Evangelienbuch II.21, 27, ed. Oskar Erdmann, 6th ed. by Ludwig Wolff (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973), TITUS. ↩

  5. Paul Piper, ed., Die Schriften Notkers und seiner Schule, vol. 2 (Freiburg and Tübingen: Mohr, 1883), p. 633, archive.org. For Notker’s dates (about 952 to 1022): Arthur F. J. Remy, “German Literature,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1909), newadvent.org. ↩

  6. W. Kurrelmeyer, ed., Die erste deutsche Bibel, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1904), pp. 22–23, archive.org. ↩

  7. Wilhelm Streitberg, ed., Die gotische Bibel (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1919), Matthew 6:9, via Project Wulfila, wulfila.be. Remy (see the note on Notker above) calls the Gothic Bible “the earliest written record in any Germanic language” and adds that it “does not belong to German literature.” ↩

  8. Remy, “German Literature” (see the note on Notker above). ↩

  9. Luther, Das Neue Testament (September 1522), Matthew 6:9, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Die Deutsche Bibel, vol. 6 (Weimar: Böhlau), p. 32, archive.org. ↩

  10. Luther Bible, 1545 (“Letzte Hand”), Matthew 6:9, bibel-online.net. ↩

  11. Emser, quoted in the editors’ note to Luther’s Small Catechism, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 30, part 1 (Weimar: Böhlau), p. 369 n. 4, archive.org. Emser’s own text was not available to me. ↩

  12. Same note: die Wortstellung nicht buchstäbliche Übertragung aus dem Lat., sondern gemäß dem alten deutschen Sprachgebrauch, das Fürwort im Vokativ hinter das Hauptwort zu stellen …, ist aus der überlieferten Gebetspraxis beibehalten. ↩

  13. Large Catechism (1529), in D. Martin Luthers Werke, vol. 30, part 1, p. 131. The first editions of the Small Catechism (1529) have no address at all; the Wittenberg edition of 1531 adds it as Vater unser der du bist jm himel (p. 369). ↩

  14. Catechismus oder Christlicher Underricht (Heidelberg, 1563), pp. 77–78, archive.org. ↩ ↩2

  15. Die Bibel nach Martin Luthers Übersetzung, revidiert 2017 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2016), Matthew 6:9, bibleserver.com. ↩

  16. Large Catechism, in D. Martin Luthers Werke, vol. 30, part 1, p. 210 and n. 3. ↩

  17. Katholischer Katechismus der Bistümer Deutschlands (Münster: Aschendorff, 1956, licensed edition of the Herder model edition), p. 132, archive.org. ↩

  18. Glaubenskommission der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, Zur aktuellen Diskussion über die Vaterunser-Bitte „Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung“, press release no. 010a, January 25, 2018, p. 2, dbk.de. ↩

The book: Words Given

Last updated

All notes