In this article I intend to show the development of the Pater Noster ("Our Father," or "The Lord's Prayer") through time.
This beloved and ancient prayer has survived in three editions: that of Matthew, that of Luke, and that of the Didache. Somehow, the canonical (Greek) text grew out of this development, and that is what we want to shed light on.
So far as I can tell, the oldest version is that in Luke. According to my Layered Matthew Hypothesis, that is because Luke used an older edition of Matthew's gospel (Matthew IIa) for the material that he got from Matthew. Here is Luke's version (Lk. 11:2-4), according to modern scholarship:
Father,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come
Give us each day
our daily bread,
and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive
everyone who is indebted to us;
and lead us not into temptation.
I happen to believe that the original of this prayer was taught in Aramaic, and such a version has survived in the Sinaitic Palimpsest. I'll show it first in Hebrew letters, easier for me to write than Estrangelo (classical Syriac script):
אבא נתקדש שמך ותאתא מלכותך ׃ 2
והב לן לחמא אמינא דכליום ׃ 3
ושבך לנ חטהין ואף אנחנן שבקין אנחנן לכל דחיב לן ולא תעלן לנסיונא ׃ 4
This sounds something like:
abba netqaddash sh'mak watite malkutak
wahab lan lahma amyna d'kulyum.
wash'buq lan n'tahayn 'ap ennahnan sh'baqn l'kul d'hayyabin lan w'la ta'lan l'nesyuna.
But we should not suppose that this minimalist, Lukan version was widely known or available to all. It did survive in the Vulgate:
Pater sanctificetur nomen tuum
adveniat regnum tuum
panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis cotidie
et dimitte nobis peccata nostra
siquidem et ipsi dimittimus omni debenti nobis
et ne nos inducas in temptationem.
This was fine for Latin-speaking Christians in the West, but in the East, Luke's shorter version was replaced just a hundred years later (in Syr-c, the Curetonian Syriac). The replacement text was full of material intended to harmonize it with Matthew's longer text. The replacement text became canonical in the new Greek translation, as also in the Syriac Peshitta. We inherited the longer text in Luke (although it was more Matthaean than Lukan) in the (Byzantine) Textus Receptus, the Received Text, and from there it went into, for example, the King James Version. All this served to obscure the textual history of the Pater Noster.
(to be continued)
Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
