The Lord's Prayer
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 ti...
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..., both during the time of Jesus and today.
For thine is the Kingdom, the Power,
And the Glory, for ever.
Amen
Matthew 6:13b KJV
References
Balentine, S. (1993). Prayer in the Hebrew Bible Minneapolis: Fortress
Press.
Crosby, M. (2002). The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us New York: Orbis
Books.
Fox, E. (1938). Sermons on the Mount New York: Harper & Brothers
Publishers.
Jeremias, J. (1967). The Prayers of Jesus London: SCM Press Ltd.
Lohmeyer, E. (1952). The Lord's Prayer (John Bowden, Trans.). London:
Collins.
Roth, L. (1972). Judaism: A Portrait New York: Schocken Books.
Steinberg, M. (1947). Basic Judaism New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company,
Stevenson, K. (2000). Abba Father: Understanding and Using the Lord's
Prayer Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Morehouse Publishing.
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Eastman, Roger. The Ways of Religion: An Introduction to the Major Traditions. Third Edition. Oxford University Press. N.Y. 1999
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Kohn, Risa Levitt, and Rebecca Moore. A Portable God: The Origin of Judaism and Christianity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Print.
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