To review a little bit: The oldest version of the Pater Noster ("Our Father," "The Lord's Prayer") is apparently the shorter, Lukan version. We almost lost that shorter, Lukan version, but it survived in the Codex Vaticanus ("B"), the Codex Sinaiticus ("א"), the Sinaitic Palimpsest ("Syr-s") and in Papyrus 75. It also survived in the Vulgate, probably because Jerome used "B." It is significant that all of these sources are fourth-century, except P75, which is third-century. By the late fifth century, we see (from Syr-c, the Curetonian Syriac) that the shorter, Lukan version of the prayer had been swamped by a longer version intended to harmonize it with the Matthaean version. From there, the longer version got into the (Byzantine) Textus Receptus, and from there into countless other translations, including the KJV. Had the texts mentioned above not survived (most were either discovered or began to be studied in the nineteenth century), we would probably have lost Luke's original version.
In the previous part of this article, I gave a Syriac (Christian Aramaic) text (from the Oldest Old Syriac, Syr-s) of Luke's original version.
We have no version that short, or that old, for Matthew. The oldest that we have is that in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew. It goes like this:
Our father, may your name be sanctified; may your kingdom be blessed; may your will be done in the heavens and on earth.
Give our bread continually.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,
and do not lead us into the power of temptation but keep us from all evil, amen.
One notices that it says OUR father, and not just Father as in the Lukan version. It says "in heaven/the heavens, which the Lukan prayer does not. It says "heavens" (plural) because this word is always plural in Hebrew, In common with all versions, it says "may your name be sanctified." It also says "may your kingdom be "blessed," instead of "come." In common with all the earlier versions, it says "sins" instead of "debts." It says (uniquely) "the POWER of temptation" and it mentions "all evil" instead of "evil" or "the evil one" (or nothing at all, as in the Lukan version). It has no ending mentioning kingdom, or power, or glory (or all three, as in the Byzantine texts). Finally, it ends with "amen," as Jewish prayers should.
It is these variations that I want to track in this trajectory through time, I will condense the various points so that I can represent them graphically, as I did in the case of the Beatitudes. This will not be easy, but I'll try to do it in the following table.
Luke Shem-Tob Didache "k" Syr-s Vulgate .
Father Our Our Our Our Our
kingdom kingdom blessed in heaven in heavens heaven heavens
daily bread will done kingdom come kingdom [lacuna] kingdom
forgive sins bread continually will done will will
temptation forgive sins daily bread daily bread supersubstantial bread
no ending power of temptation forgive debt forgive debts forgive debts
evil temptation temptation temptation
no ending evil one evil evil
amen power&glory power no ending
Syr-c "D" Canon. Gk. Mt.
Our Our Our
in heaven heavens in heaven
kingdom kingdom kingdom
wishes will will
continual bread continual bread daily bread
forgive debts forgive debts forgive debts
temptation test temptation
evil one evil evil
.kingdom&glory no ending kingdom, power, glory
amen
The above table is a graphical version of the Matthaean version of the Pater Noster. One can see the general tendency for the prayer to become more elaborate. There is doubt at certain points, notably with regard to the dating of the Didache. It exists in one Greek document, which is clearly from the Byzantine period, but it is believed to reflect Church practices of 40-120 CE. The Two Ways portion of the Didache is Jewish in origin, and a copy was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. But in its Byzantine dress it can tell us little or nothing about the earliest history of the prayer.
To my mind, at least, the omission of "Our" in the Lukan version may indicate translation from Aramaic, and indeed it existed in that form into the late fourth century (Syr-s), as I showed in the previous part of this article. The form "our father" (avinu) would be more common in Hebrew. This has got me wondering whether Matthew IIa, from which (according to my Layered Matthew Hypothesis) Luke drew, may have been written in Aramaic, while the later IIb stage (the base text-type for Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew was clearly in Hebrew.
The earliest texts have "sins" rather than "debts," but "debts" predominated in the Matthaean version of the prayer by the late fourth century (Vulgate).
We see that the earliest texts had no fancy ending (kingdom, power, and glory). The earliest to have even part of such an ending would probably be "k," with only "power," which never made it into the Vulgate. The full additional ending was a feature of Byzantine texts, which became the basis of the Textus Receptus or Received Text. The ending appears to be a reference to 1 Chron 29:11-13, but it could not be called a quotation. The Byzantine texts, which were exceedingly numerous, became the basis of most Protestant translations. The Catholics, on the other hand, had the Vulgate, which had the benefit of better and more ancient readings, including those of "B" (Codex Vaticanus), which modern scholars consider to be the best of all, along with a few others such as "א" (Codex Sinaiticus).
Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
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