Should the Lords Prayer Be Changed?
This is an article first printed in Christianity Today, July 19, 2018. It brought up some aspects of the Lord’s Prayer I’ve not thought of before.
The church has a long history of fiddling with the Lord’s Prayer and debating the right wording.
Scripture itself isn’t unified on the wording. The Bible gives us two versions of the prayer—also often referred to as the Our Father—one from Matthew’s gospel (Matt. 6:9–13) and one from Luke’s gospel (Luke 11:2–4).
Additionally, today we often forget that the last two lines (“for thine is the kingdom…”) aren’t from Scripture but were added later by well-intentioned churchmen who felt that ending with sin didn’t tell the whole story.
Then there’s the question of translations and traditions. If Matthew’s wording probably borrows a term that refers to financial debts in the original Greek, is it okay that many traditions say “trespasses”?
The church has a long history of fiddling with the Lord’s Prayer and debating the right wording.
Scripture itself isn’t unified on the wording. The Bible gives us two versions of the prayer—also often referred to as the Our Father—one from Matthew’s gospel (Matt. 6:9–13) and one from Luke’s gospel (Luke 11:2–4).
Additionally, today we often forget that the last two lines (“for thine is the kingdom…”) aren’t from Scripture but were added later by well-intentioned churchmen who felt that ending with sin didn’t tell the whole story.
Then there’s the question of translations and traditions. If Matthew’s wording probably borrows a term that refers to financial debts in the original Greek, is it okay that many traditions say “trespasses”?
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