The Lord's Prayer

The wording above arrived in stages, and the first stage beat the King James Version to print by eighty-five years. William Tyndale set the word he spelled "treaspases" into his 1526 New Testament. Thomas Cranmer carried that choice into the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, and the 1662 revision fixed the form the English-speaking world still recites. Most people who know this prayer by heart learned it from a service book, and far fewer learned it by reading Matthew.

That is why the prayer people recite often differs from the Bible open in front of them. The King James Version of 1611 used "debts" and "debtors" in Matthew. The prayer book kept "trespasses." Both were in wide circulation at once, and both are still spoken every Sunday.

Catholic English wording runs almost word for word with the version above through "deliver us from evil." In private devotion it closes there with Amen. Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Baptist congregations usually continue into "For thine is the kingdom." Both endings are correct inside their own tradition, and the split traces back to manuscript history.

Matthew places the prayer in the middle of a passage about how not to pray. The King James Version reads: "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen."

Luke sets the scene somewhere else. A disciple watches Jesus finish praying and asks to be taught, the way John had taught his own followers. How short Luke's answer looks on the page depends on which manuscripts your translation follows. The King James Version prints Luke's opening almost word for word with Matthew's, then goes its own way: "Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil."

Translations that follow the earliest surviving Greek copies print something much barer. The American Standard Version gives all of Luke's opening as "Father, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come," and stops the prayer at "And bring us not into temptation." That version has no "our," no "in heaven," no "thy will be done," and no closing plea for deliverance. Its own footnote records that many manuscripts put those phrases back.

Christians have explained the gap in different ways. Some hold that Jesus taught the prayer more than once, to different crowds, and that both accounts are accurate. Some read the short Lucan form as closest to the original, with Matthew's fuller shape reflecting how the early church prayed it out loud together. Others read Luke as trimming Matthew. The question is old enough that nobody alive is going to settle it.

"Our Father, who art in heaven." The first word is plural. Alone in a parked car at midnight, you are still praying with other people. "Father" was the ordinary family word, used here as the ordinary way to address God. "In heaven" keeps that closeness from sliding into casualness.

"Hallowed be thy name." Hallowed means held holy. The verb is passive, which turns the line into a request: let your name be treated as holy, starting with how I treat it. In Hebrew usage a name stands for the whole person, so the petition reaches well past the sound of a word.

"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." These two run together. The kingdom is God's rule arriving in a world that mostly operates on other terms. Adding "on earth" drops the request into your actual week and your actual house. It is the most costly line in the prayer, because it asks for something you may not want yet.

"Give us this day our daily bread." The Greek word behind "daily" is epiousios, and it turns up almost nowhere else in surviving ancient writing. Jerome rendered it two different ways inside the same Bible, using one Latin word in Matthew and another in Luke. It has been read as bread for today, bread for the coming day, and bread needed to exist at all. Whichever sense you take, the request stays small and physical, and it comes back every morning.

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." The second half is uncomfortable by design. Matthew comes straight back to it in the two verses after the prayer ends and presses hard. This is the only petition Jesus stops to explain, which suggests he expected it to be the one people quietly hurry past.

"Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." The Greek can mean testing, trial, or the kind of pressure that breaks a person. The closing phrase can be read as evil in general or as the evil one. Either way, a prayer that opened in worship ends with a plain request for rescue.

The ending is genuinely ancient and genuinely absent from the oldest copies of Matthew. The Didache, an early Christian handbook, already attaches a short doxology to the prayer and tells believers to say the whole thing three times a day. Its version names the power and the glory and says nothing about the kingdom, so even that early ending is not quite the sentence congregations use now. Christians were praying some form of it within living memory of the apostles.

The earliest Greek manuscripts of Matthew stop at "deliver us from evil." Jerome's Latin Vulgate has no doxology either, which is why the line never entered Catholic liturgical wording. Later Greek manuscripts of the Byzantine family do carry it, and those manuscripts stood behind the King James Version in 1611. English Protestants learned it as part of the prayer itself.

Catholics still say the words. At Mass the priest prays a short expansion after "deliver us from evil," and the congregation answers with a doxology naming the kingdom, the power, and the glory. The Catechism discusses it at paragraphs 2855 and 2856 and treats it as a conclusion to the prayer instead of an eighth petition inside it.

The practical rule is simple. Praying alone, either ending is defensible. Praying in someone else's church, listen to where the room stops and stop there.

Three English words cover the same ground. Matthew's Greek says debts. Luke's says sins. "Trespasses" reached English through Tyndale, and it matches the vocabulary Jesus uses two verses later in Matthew, where the subject is forgiveness again. Congregations say whichever word they grew up saying and stumble over it when they travel.

The temptation line has drawn fresh attention. Speaking on Italian television on 6 December 2017, Pope Francis said the Italian wording then in use suggested God does the tempting. The Italian bishops adopted revised phrasing in November 2018, and Pope Francis approved it. French Catholics had already made a similar change in 2017. English liturgical wording has not been altered.

The concern is older than the recent debate. James states that God tempts no one. Many readers hear the petition as asking not to be brought to the point of testing where they would fall. Saying the traditional English words commits you to nothing about God setting traps.

Most explanations of this prayer assume you arrive wanting to say it. Often you do not. It is two in the morning, the words are available, and nothing inside you is moving. The prayer still works from there, and the reason is built into how it was given.

It was handed to someone who had just admitted he did not know how to pray. Nobody in that scene is described as feeling anything. Jesus supplies words, which is what you give a person who has run out of their own.

Slow it down. Say one petition, stop, and put your own situation into it before moving to the next. "Give us this day our daily bread" becomes rent, or a scan result, or getting through Thursday without saying the thing you will regret. The prayer is short enough that this takes four or five minutes.

Say it out loud if the room allows. Hearing your own voice speak something you cannot currently feel is a normal way to pray. You are borrowing steadier words than the ones you have tonight, which is close to the original purpose.

If the emptiness lasts for weeks, tell a person. A pastor, a spiritual director, or a counselor has sat with dry stretches before and will not be shocked by yours. This site is software built by a company. It holds no teaching authority, it takes no side between traditions, and where your own church says something different from what you read here, your church is the one you belong to.