The Lord's Prayer in Full

We’ve already been inside two of the lines. In Chapter 9 we sat with your kingdom come and recovered the Aramaic malkuth — the active reign of a king, not a territory on a map. In Chapter 15 we sat with lead us not into temptation and recovered the Greek peirasmos — the testing and ordeal, not just the modern English idea of moral enticement. Both chapters opened single phrases of the Lord’s Prayer the way Part II opened phrases generally.

But the Lord’s Prayer is more than a string of phrases. It’s a single prayer. It moves. It builds. It has a shape. And when you take it apart line by line and put it back together, you discover that almost every line is doing more work than English carries — and that the prayer as a whole is doing something larger than any single line tells you.

So in this chapter we’re going to walk the whole prayer, line by line. We’ll move quickly over the two lines we’ve already opened, and spend more time on the lines we haven’t. By the end, I hope, the prayer you’ve been saying since childhood will feel both more ancient and more alive than it has in a long time.

Our Father in heaven

Start with the first two words. Our Father. In English, those two words land softly. In the Aramaic Jesus spoke, they were closer to a small explosion.

The word the Gospel writers preserve from Jesus’s prayer life is Abba (Aramaic: אַבָּא). It appears only three times in the New Testament — once on Jesus’s lips, in his prayer in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36), and twice in Paul’s letters, describing how the Spirit prompts believers to cry out to God (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). In each of those three places, Abba is transliterated into Greek and immediately followed by the Greek word for Father. The double phrasing — Abba, ho patēr — is the writers’ way of saying this is the original Aramaic word Jesus used, and here is its Greek translation. It’s the closest we come, in the written Gospels, to Jesus’s voice in his own first language.

What is Abba? For most of the twentieth century, scholars — led by the German biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias — argued that Abba was a child’s word, the Aramaic equivalent of Daddy or Papa. The reading caught on. You may have heard it preached. The picture was striking: Jesus, alone in the dark in the garden the night before his death, addressing God the way a small child addresses a father. The intimacy of the word was supposed to be unprecedented. No Jew, the argument went, had ever addressed God that way.

More recent scholarship has refined that picture. Abba is intimate, yes — but it isn’t exclusively a child’s word. Adult students in the rabbinic tradition addressed their teachers as abba. The fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom — who came from Antioch, in a region where Aramaic was still widely spoken — said the word was used by children in his own day, but he didn’t say it was only used by children. And there are some traces in earlier Jewish prayer of addressing God as Father, though the practice was nowhere near as widespread as it would become in the Christian church.

What was unusual was the constancy of Jesus’s use of it. Every prayer of Jesus recorded in the Gospels — with one exception, the cry from the cross — addresses God as Father. This wasn’t how Israelites usually prayed. They prayed to the LORD, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the King of the Universe. Jesus prayed to the Father. And he taught his disciples to do the same.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. (Matthew 6:9, NIV)

When Jesus told his disciples to begin their prayer with our Father, he was inviting them into the address he himself used. He was giving them his own way of approaching God. The Anglican biblical scholar N. T. Wright, who taught at Oxford and at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and whose small book The Lord and His Prayer (Eerdmans, 1996) is one of the most accessible modern treatments of this prayer, has put it this way: Our Father is shorthand for we are praying the way Jesus prays, as members of his family, with his own access to his own God. Paul’s letters say the same thing in different words. The Spirit, Paul writes, prompts us to cry out Abba, Father — the same Aramaic word, in the same prayer-voice, that Jesus used in Gethsemane. To pray Our Father is to step into Jesus’s own way of approaching God.

And note the our. Not my Father. Our. The prayer is communal from the first word. Even when you pray it alone in your kitchen at six in the morning, you’re praying our. You’re part of a body. The prayer assumes a family.

Hallowed be your name

The next line, in English, sounds archaic. Hallowed. It’s a word almost no one uses outside of this prayer. It just means made holy. In the Greek, the line is hagiasthētō to onoma sou — let your name be made holy. And here, English readers miss something important.

The Greek verb is in what grammarians call the divine passive — a construction where the subject is unstated because it is, by implication, God himself. Let your name be made holy — by whom? Not by us. By God. The line isn’t asking us to honor God’s name. It’s asking God to do the honoring — to vindicate his own name, to make his name great in the eyes of the world.

This is exactly what Ezekiel had promised, in a passage we’ve already met in Chapter 10. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, God says through Ezekiel (Ezekiel 36:23, NIV). The Lord’s Prayer takes that promise and turns it into a petition. God, do what you promised through Ezekiel. Vindicate your name. Show your holiness. Let the world know who you are.

So the line is bigger than it sounds. It isn’t a polite tip of the hat to God’s reputation. It’s a prayer for God to act — to break in and make his name great in a world that doesn’t yet know it.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven

We opened your kingdom come in Chapter 9. To recap briefly: the Aramaic malkuth (and the Greek basileia behind it) isn’t a place but an active reign. The line asks God to rule — to bring his active, restoring, healing, justice-doing rule into the world we live in. The Jewish hope was always for God to come back as king and put things right. The line is a prayer for that.

What is new in this part of the prayer is the next phrase: your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is the prayer’s most cosmic petition. It assumes that, in heaven, God’s will is already being done — perfectly, gladly, without obstacle. And it asks for that pattern to be reproduced down here, in the world we actually live in, where God’s will is mostly not being done. It is, in a real sense, a prayer for the reunion of heaven and earth — the goal scripture has been moving toward since Eden. Wright reads this petition as standing near the heart of the whole prayer: everything else, in some sense, is unpacking what on earth as it is in heaven would actually look like.

Give us this day our daily bread

This is one of the strangest lines in the prayer, because the word translated daily isn’t a normal Greek word at all. It’s epiousios (ἐπιούσιος) — a word so rare that it appears essentially nowhere in surviving Greek literature except in the Lord’s Prayer itself. (A single apparent occurrence in an ancient papyrus shopping list, long cited as the lone exception, turned out on re-examination to be a misreading of another word.) Scholars call this a hapax legomenon — a word that appears only once. Epiousios is one of the most famous hapaxes in the Greek New Testament, and it’s caused translators trouble since the second century.

The problem is that the word can be broken down several different ways, and the parts mean different things depending on how you assemble them. The prefix epi- means upon or for. The root could come from a verb meaning to be (which gives you supersubstantial or necessary for existence), or from a word meaning to come (which gives you for the coming day — that is, for tomorrow). St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin around 400 AD, was so unsure about the word that he translated it two different ways in two different places. In Luke’s version of the prayer he rendered it quotidianum — daily. In Matthew’s version he rendered it supersubstantialem — supersubstantial or above-essence. The same word, in the same prayer, translated differently by the same translator. That’s how slippery epiousios is.

Most modern English Bibles have gone with daily, which has the advantage of being familiar and of fitting the rhythm of the prayer. But it’s worth knowing what may be hiding inside the line. If epiousios means for tomorrow, then give us today our bread for tomorrow echoes the wilderness manna story, where God gave Israel exactly one day’s worth of bread each morning — except on the day before the Sabbath, when he gave them tomorrow’s portion too. If epiousios means necessary for existence, then the line is give us today the bread we need just to be. If it has the supersubstantial sense the Catholic tradition has often read in it, then the line points beyond physical bread to the bread of life — to Christ himself, to the Eucharist, to the sustenance the soul cannot live without.

I am not going to choose between these readings for you. The honest answer is that epiousios may have meant several of these things at once, and that the Greek word is doing more work than any single English word can do. What’s clear is that the line is asking God for what we need today — physical and otherwise — and trusting him to provide it. The simplicity of the petition is part of its weight. Give us bread today. Tomorrow we will ask again.

Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors

This is the line that breaks down most dramatically in English-speaking Christianity. Walk into any congregation that prays the Lord’s Prayer aloud and you’ll hear, at this point in the prayer, a small cacophony. Some say debts. Some say trespasses. Some say sins. This is one of the few places in Christian worship where the words actually differ depending on which denomination raised you.

The Greek of Matthew 6:12 uses the word opheilēmata — literally debts, the things owed to a creditor. The NIV, ESV, and most modern translations preserve this: forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Luke’s version of the prayer (Luke 11:4) uses a slightly different word, hamartias — sins. So the New Testament itself gives us debts in Matthew and sins in Luke.

Where does trespasses come from? From William Tyndale, in 1526. When Tyndale produced the first English New Testament translated from the Greek, he rendered Matthew 6:12 as forgeve us oure trespases, even as we forgeve oure trespacers — not because the Greek says trespasses but because three verses later, in Matthew 6:14, Jesus uses a different Greek word (paraptōmata) that does mean something closer to trespasses or transgressions. Tyndale appears to have harmonized the two verses for consistency. When the Book of Common Prayer was compiled for the Church of England in 1549, it used Tyndale’s trespasses in its liturgy. When the King James Bible appeared in 1611, it went back to the Greek and used debts — but by then the Book of Common Prayer had already shaped a generation of Anglican worship, and trespasses was locked in for English-speaking Catholics and Anglicans. Most Protestant denominations followed the King James and use debts. Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and some others say trespasses. The Roman Catholic Catechism of the Catholic Church uses sins in some recent translations. All three are translating the same line.

What matters is what’s underneath them. In Aramaic — the language Jesus actually spoke — there is a single word, ḥōbā (חוֹבָא), that can mean both debt and sin. To owe money and to commit a moral wrong were, in Aramaic thinking, two shades of the same idea. Sin was a debt you ran up before God. Forgiveness was God cancelling that debt. This is why, in the Gospels, Jesus tells so many parables that work both ways at once — parables about servants who owe huge sums and are forgiven, parables about debt and release. He wasn’t switching back and forth between metaphors. In Aramaic, the metaphor was already inside the word.

So the line in the Lord’s Prayer, in Jesus’s own language, was forgive us our ḥōbā as we forgive those who run up ḥōbā against us. Debts and sins, in one breath. And then — and this is the line that has unsettled Christians for two thousand years — Jesus tied the two halves of the petition together. As we forgive our debtors. As we forgive those who sin against us. Matthew immediately drives the point home in the verses right after the prayer: if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins (Matthew 6:14-15, NIV). The link isn’t optional. It’s the whole architecture of the line.

This is one of the hardest petitions in the prayer. It’s also, in some ways, the most ordinary. It assumes we’ll be sinned against. It assumes we’ll be the ones holding debts that aren’t ours to keep. And it asks God to forgive us in the same measure that we forgive others. That’s what we’re praying every time we say this line.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

We opened the first half of this petition at length in Chapter 15. Briefly: the Greek peirasmos covers a wider range than the English temptation. It includes testing, trial, ordeal, and the great end-times testing the prophets warned about. The line is asking God to spare his disciples from being brought into that testing — from both the daily testing that breaks faith and the larger ordeal that may come.

The second half of the line — but deliver us from evil — has its own ambiguity in Greek. The phrase is rhysai hēmas apo tou ponērou. The word ponērou can be read two ways: as a neuter noun (evil in general) or as a masculine noun (the evil one — that is, the devil, the personal adversary). Greek grammarians have debated this for centuries. The NIV opts for the second reading: deliver us from the evil one. The KJV and many older translations opt for the first: deliver us from evil. Both are defensible. Both are in the church’s prayer tradition.

What’s striking is that the two halves of this final petition work together. Do not bring us into the testing. And deliver us from the evil one who would want to test us. It’s one petition with two halves. We’re asking the Father to spare us, and to rescue us. We’re praying the same prayer Jesus prayed in the garden — let this cup pass from me — in our own much smaller way, every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

Most of us learned to end the Lord’s Prayer with this doxology — for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. It’s one of the most moving moments in the prayer. And, in a sense that may surprise you, it’s the part of the prayer that is least clearly part of the original.

If you look up Matthew 6:13 in a modern Bible — the NIV, the ESV, the CSB, the NRSV — you’ll likely find that the prayer ends with deliver us from the evil one. Full stop. The doxology, if it appears at all, will be in a footnote. The reason is that the doxology doesn’t appear in the earliest Greek manuscripts of Matthew — including the two most important fourth-century witnesses, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. It appears in later, mostly Byzantine manuscripts. When the King James translators produced their version in 1611, they were working from a Greek text that included the doxology, and so it became part of the English-speaking Protestant liturgy.

But here’s the twist. The doxology is not a late invention. It appears, in a slightly shorter form, in a very early Christian document called the Didache (which means teaching in Greek) — a manual of Christian practice written, most scholars think, around the year 100 AD, possibly even earlier. The Didache gives instructions for how Christians should pray the Lord’s Prayer (three times a day, by the way) — and at the end of the prayer, it includes the line: for thine is the power and the glory forever. Not yet with the kingdom, but the doxology in essence. So the praise-ending was being prayed by Christians within a generation of the apostles. It may not have been part of Matthew’s original text. But it was part of the prayer almost from the start.

What this means, practically, is that when you end the Lord’s Prayer with for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever — you’re doing something Christians have been doing for nearly two thousand years. Not something Matthew wrote down, exactly. But something the church has prayed since within living memory of the apostles. The doxology is a Christian instinct. The prayer wanted an ending. The church gave it one. And the ending was good enough that almost every English-speaking tradition kept it.

Reading this yourself

Try saying the prayer once, slowly, with all of this in mind. Our Father — Jesus’s own way of addressing God, given to us. In heaven — the place from which God’s reign is breaking in. Hallowed be your name — God, vindicate your own name; do what Ezekiel promised. Your kingdom come — let your active reign arrive. Your will be done, on earth as in heaven — the great cosmic petition; bring earth into alignment with heaven. Give us today our bread — what we need for today, and trust for tomorrow. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors — the link that ties our forgiveness to God’s. And lead us not into testing — spare us the ordeal. But deliver us from the evil one — rescue us from the adversary who would test us. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever — the church’s instinctive ending, the chorus the prayer wanted. Amen. So be it.

You won’t pray it slower than that very often. Most of the time you’ll say it fast, the way you’ve always said it, and that’s fine. The prayer is short. The prayer is meant to be prayed. But once in a while, when you have a quiet morning and a cup of coffee and ten minutes to spare, try saying it the slow way. Hear what’s underneath each line. The prayer Jesus gave his disciples was never just a script. It was a whole way of approaching the Father. Saying it slowly is one of the ways you find that out.

The prayer Christians have prayed for two thousand years is small enough to fit on a notecard and large enough to contain almost everything scripture has to say about how God relates to his people. Father. Kingdom. Bread. Forgiveness. Testing. Deliverance. Glory. Each word a doorway. Each line connected to a thousand years of Israelite prayer and prophetic hope and the voice of Jesus himself in his first language. The disciples asked Jesus how to pray, and he gave them this. He could have given them a whole liturgy. He gave them seven petitions and a single address and a praise that the church would fill in for him. And the prayer has held. It’s held through persecution, through schism, through translation into every language the church has spoken, through controversies and reforms and a thousand changes of style. It’s held because it’s the prayer that Jesus prayed — and it teaches the rest of us how to pray as he prayed, with the same Father, in the same family, with the same hope. Every time we say it, we’re doing what disciples have been doing since the beginning. We’re praying the prayer Jesus taught us.