Lord's Prayer

Lord's Prayer or Our Father,the principal Christian prayer that Jesus in the New Testament (Mat. 6.9–13; Luke 11.2–4) taught his followers, beginning, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” It summarizes Jesus' teaching and stresses the concern of honoring God before that of meeting one's own needs. It also reveals Jesus' sense of a filial relationship with God. After the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholics added a version of the doxology (“For thine is the kingdom,” etc.) to prayer when used in the Mass; the doxolgy was already current in Protestant liturgies and is present in some manuscripts of Matthew. In Latin the prayer is called Paternoster. It also occurs in the Didache. The first three phrases of the prayer parallel the opening words of the ancient Jewish Kaddish.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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