Welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your modern passage into the life and ministry of the historical Jesus. If this is your first time here, start over from the beginning by following this hyperlink.
We will waste little time on exposition today. Suffice it to say that we are in the midst of the Lord's Prayer, a specifically worded prayer that Jesus teaches his followers during his famed Sermon on the Mount. Today, we will read the last three verses of that prayer, take note of a particular Greek phrasing behind these verses, define and discuss the "doxology" of the Lord's Prayer, and draw some simple conclusions about the prayer as a whole. Let's get started, as per usual, by looking at the text and then looking at some Greek words.
Matthew 6:11 through 6:13
11 Give us today our daily bread;
12 and forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors;
13 and do not subject us to the final test,
but deliver us from the evil one.
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Some Greek Words
Today we have quite a doozy of a translation issue on our hands with the phrase "daily bread." Since the Greek origin of "daily bread" is uncharacteristically difficult to understand, we will forgo any study of the other Greek words that underpin today's reading and focus entirely on this particular phrase. Take my word that the rest of the Greek here is relatively unambiguous.
"What's ambiguous about 'daily bread'?" you'll immediately ask. And I appreciate the inquisitive attitude.
The ambiguity here lies in the word "daily." In the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew, the scribes recorded the term "epiousios" here in Matt 6:11 as the adjective for "bread." Throughout history, "epiousios" has most often been interpreted as meaning "daily," but that interpretation is not as straight-forward as one might think. Because of the possibility of alternative translation, the term "epiousios" warrants our special attention today.
As it turns out, "epiousios" is completely unique to the Gospel; it is not extant in any other ancient Greek text. While it has traditionally been translated as "daily," translators have struggled with this interpretation since very early Christianity. The struggle becomes apparent when we realize that, in the New Testament, every other time that the word "daily" is used, it has been translated from a more common Greek word: "hemeran." Hemeran comes from the Greek "hēmérā," meaning "day" or "time," and is very precisely translated to English as "daily." Bible scholars are right, then, to pay keen attention to the fact that in both Matthew and Luke's versions of the Lord's Prayer, the evangelists used this unique "epiousios" word, rather than the word "hemeran."
As I suggested, there is debate among linguists to this day as to what "epiousios" really means, and how the word came to be. Tradition has translated it as "daily" by breaking it down into two Greek parts: "epi" and "ousia," where "epi" is taken to mean "for," and "ousia" is is taken to mean "being." "For being." A logical leap is then made from "for being" to "for the day being," where the traditional interpreter assumes that "the day" is implicit in this phrase. So the traditional interpreter reads "for the day being," as in "for this day" or "daily."
Other translators, however, including the creator of the Latin Vulgate, St. Jerome, have alternatively translated "epiousios" as "supersubstantial." This translation depends on translating "epi" as "over" or "before," and "ousia" as "essence" or "substance." This alternative translation is certainly no more dubious than the previous.
In Matt 6:11, all the uncertainty lies in this word "epiousios." The word we have translated as "bread" is "arton," and this is a straight one-to-one translation; the word definitely refers to a nourishing baked good. So, we are left wondering: what kind of "bread" was Jesus talking about here? Was it, as tradition has indicated, "daily bread," meaning, simply, the calories needed to sustain one's life for a day? Or was it "supersubstantial" bread? It is impossible to say with certainty, but I lean toward believing that "supersubstantial" comes closer to the mark, simply because the Gospel's author went out of his way here to use a unique term, as opposed to "hemeran," which he had used to clear effect elsewhere.
If "supersubstantial" is closer to the phrasing Jesus might have used, what could he have meant by this? Questions abound, but I think it's easy to look at these words and imagine that Jesus here referred to a kind of "spiritual" bread; a kind of nourishment for the mind, heart, and psyche. Perhaps "supersubstantial bread" was the grace of a quiet soul, happy in its faith in God or in goodness generally. Perhaps "supersubstantial bread" was the capacity to weather the trials and pains of life without being subject to internal misery. Or, perhaps "supersubstantial bread" refers to a metaphysical substance of some kind; a sort of mana. We can really only guess, since we have no other use of the word to compare it to.
Of course, as is always the case, since we have no record of the words of Christ in their original Aramaic, we would be derelict of our duty if we said we can know with 100% certainty what Jesus said and thought in any particular case. Because of the fog of history, we can truly only know Jesus generally, not specifically. That said, the difference between "daily" and "supersubstantial" here are not enough to markedly change what we understand about Jesus' moral vision. But the difference is worth noting, and, seeing it now, I think that the Lord's Prayer has slightly more meaning to me.
On to other questions.
Where's the "For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory" Part?
When I was growing up, I learned the Lord's Prayer as follows:
Our father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;I maybe said this prayer a trillion times in my childhood. That's hyperbolic... but I said it a lot. Among other prayers, this prayer is etched into my mind as if it had been there when I was born. The words flow together like an unstoppable river once I've started the prayer; it would be impossible not to carry it to its fruition. Certain prayers, to those of us who were raised Catholic, feel warm and familiar like our own flesh. This is one of them.
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those
who trespass against us;
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil. Amen.
Imagine my shock, then, when I first found myself at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, somewhere around age twenty, and was bowled over upon hearing a slightly different version of the the Lord's Prayer. (This different version is said in unison by meeting attendees at the end of most AA meetings.) "Shock" is truly the correct word, here. It was like a train crashing in my mind. The prayer was going fine until we got towards the end and everyone around me started saying a bunch of unfamiliar, ugly sounding words at the moment when I said "amen."
Many of you already know what I'm talking about. The extra words, with which I was as yet unacquainted, were "for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever," and by them I was totally taken aback.
Today, to the surprise of my younger self, I would say that most people I've known outside of the Catholic Church seem to say the Lord's Prayer with these additional "for thine..." words. Interestingly, though, as you can see above, these words do not exist in the New American Bible, and, in fact, do not appear in the oldest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The Catholic-child part of my brain quietly inquires: "why is everyone saying this prayer wrong?" This is myopic of my Catholic-child mind; there is no objective "right" or "wrong" to such things, of course. But the question remains: where did this extra verbiage come from?
To get to the bottom of this, we need to get familiar with the term "doxology." A "doxology" is a "liturgical formula of praise to God," or, in other words, a short, regimented string of words of praise for God. "For thine is the kingdom..." is one of the better known doxologies in the world today. Another is the Latin "gloria in excelsis Deo," which means "glory to God in the highest." A third relatively well known doxology is a protestant hymn that reads as follows:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.Doxologies have been common aspects of Christian liturgies since very early on in Christian history. Doxologies derived from an ancient Jewish practice wherein the Jewish hymn of praise known as the "Kaddish" was used to conclude various segments of synagogue worship.
Sadly, there is no extant evidence of the exact origin of the "for thine..." doxology. All we can know for sure is that it was used in the eastern half of the Roman Empire as early as the First-Century. The dating of this doxology is based in part on its presence in a text known as the "Didache," which we have had occasion to mention before. Recall that the Didache was a Christian treatise that many scholars today believe was written in the late First-Century.
The Didache, which survives in its entirety, says the following in a section titled "Concerning Prayer:"
Do not pray as the hypocrites either, but pray as the Lord commanded in His Gospel:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one; for thine is the power and the glory unto ages of ages.
Pray this way three times each day.So how did this doxology make it into various translations of the Bible itself, then? Well, most scholars find it nearly certain that some version of the "for thine..." verbiage must have been added to some very ancient Christian liturgy by some creative church elder, and that this liturgical use spread among other Christian communities until it became so common that scribes and translators began including it in their copies of the Gospels. An alternative minority view states that the doxology had been there all along, and that translations of the Gospel without the doxology are the deviations. Indeed, there are some very old Gospel manuscripts that include the phrasing, leading some scholars to this day to argue that "for thine..." is as true to the words of Christ as anything else in the Gospel.
Did Jesus utter the doxology of the Lord's Prayer? Again, 100% certainty eludes us.
Either way, my mind is still jarred whenever I hear someone say "for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever," instead of just "amen." It always will be, and, for that selfish reason, I'm glad the New American Bible doesn't include this foreign-sounding verbiage.
And that's what we know about that.
Conclusions About the Lord's Prayer
Jesus has now been very specific with his followers about how to pray. He had told them in what spirit they ought to pray, and he has offered them the Lord's Prayer as a rote prayer mechanism. When they needed something from God, or simply desired communion with him, they were to repeat the Lord's Prayer privately.
As I pointed out before, the clear theme of the Lord's Prayer is humility. The entire prayer subordinates the one praying to forces above him or herself. The prayer subordinates the will of the one praying to the will of God. There is no act more humble, perhaps, than the submission of one's will.
In teaching his followers this prayer, I believe that Jesus continues to do what he has been doing since the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount: he is re-ordering the universe in which his followers exist. He is asking his followers to give up whatever terrestrial height or status that they have achieved (or think that they have achieved, or desire to achieve) in order to make themselves humble and low before God and humanity.
"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." If the Christian desires forgiveness, he or she must be willing to give it.
"Your kingdom come. Your will be done." If the Christian desires to glimpse the Kingdom of God, he or she must forgo their own will.
Beautiful abject humility. I love this prayer. I hope to never stop learning from it.
That's all we have for today. Join us next time for more in-depth Gospel work. Until then, happy studies. Please share this writing.
Love
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