Spiritual traditions

The Lord's Prayer: The Original Text

Jesus taught this prayer in Aramaic, the everyday language of first-century Judea and Galilee. That spoken Aramaic was never written down at the time — what survives is the Greek of the Gospels, an early Aramaic translation, and the Latin version that Western Christianity prayed for over a thousand years. This is an honest look at those layers, not a claim that a single recovered "original" text exists.

Where does this prayer come from?

The Lord's Prayer appears twice in the New Testament, and not identically. The longer, more familiar version is in the Gospel of Matthew (6:9-13), within the Sermon on the Mount. A shorter version is in the Gospel of Luke (11:2-4), given as Jesus's direct answer when a disciple asks him, "Lord, teach us to pray."

Jesus preached in Aramaic, but no text written in that Aramaic from his own generation has survived. The oldest manuscripts that actually exist are in Koine Greek, the common language of the eastern Mediterranean in which the Gospels were composed a few decades after his death. That makes Greek — not Aramaic — the earliest documented starting point we have direct access to.

The oldest Greek text that survives

Here is Matthew 6:9-13 according to the Textus Receptus tradition, the Greek base text behind the earliest printed translations of the New Testament:

Koine Greek · Matthew 6:9-13

Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου· γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς·
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

One word deserves special attention: epiousion ("daily," or "of this day") is exceedingly rare in surviving ancient Greek — it shows up here and almost nowhere else in earlier texts. Its exact meaning ("for this day," "necessary for existence," "for tomorrow") is still debated among scholars.

The language Jesus spoke: Aramaic

Because the Aramaic Jesus actually spoke was never written down at the time, what circulates today as "the Aramaic Lord's Prayer" is usually one of two very different things, and it's worth not confusing them:

The first is the Peshitta, the translation of the Greek New Testament into Classical Syriac — an eastern Aramaic dialect — made around the 2nd century AD. It's a genuinely ancient text, in a language and script closely related to what Jesus likely used, though technically it is a translation from Greek rather than an autograph from his own time:

Aramaic (Classical Syriac) · Peshitta, Matthew 6:9-13

ܐܒܘܢ ܕܒܫܡܝܐ ܢܬܩܕܫ ܫܡܟ
ܬܐܬܐ ܡܠܟܘܬܟ ܢܗܘܐ ܨܒܝܢܟ ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܒܫܡܝܐ ܐܦ ܒܐܪܥܐ
ܗܒ ܠܢ ܠܚܡܐ ܕܣܘܢܩܢܢ ܝܘܡܢܐ
ܘܫܒܘܩ ܠܢ ܚܘܒܝܢ ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܐܦ ܚܢܢ ܫܒܩܢ ܠܚܝܒܝܢ
ܘܠܐ ܬܥܠܢ ܠܢܣܝܘܢܐ ܐܠܐ ܦܨܢ ܡܢ ܒܝܫܐ

Abun d-vashmayo, netqadash shmokh.
Tithe malkuthokh, nehwe sebyonokh aykano d-vashmayo of b-arco.
Hab lan lakhmo d-sunqonan yaomono.
Washbuq lan hauboyn aykano d-of hnan shbaqan l-khayobayn.
Wlo ta'lan l-nesyuno, elo passan men bisho.

The second is the modern poetic renderings that began circulating in the 1990s, such as the one beginning "Abwoon d'bwashmaya…". These are not translations — they're contemporary mystical reinterpretations, written by 20th-century authors, that freely expand each Aramaic word into several meditative lines in English. They're a valid creative exercise, but they are not "the original Aramaic" or an ancient document — worth knowing the difference if you come across them presented that way.

The Latin of the Vulgate

Jerome's Latin translation (4th century AD), known as the Vulgate, was the standard liturgical text of Western Christianity for over a thousand years. It's where the traditional name "Pater Noster" comes from:

Latin · Vulgate, Matthew 6:9-13

Pater noster, qui es in cælis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cælo et in terra.
Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

A curious detail: for that same hard-to-translate Greek word (epiousion), Jerome used "supersubstantialem" in Matthew but "cotidianum" (daily) in his translation of Luke's version — a deliberate inconsistency that shows how uncertain he was about the term's exact meaning.

Matthew and Luke: two versions within the Bible

Luke's version is noticeably shorter than Matthew's: in the oldest surviving Greek manuscripts, it doesn't even say "our Father who art in heaven" (just "Father"), and it leaves out "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Over time, in later manuscript transmission, Luke's version tended to be harmonized toward Matthew's, which is the one that ended up being memorized and prayed almost universally.

The closing line many people pray today — "for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever, Amen" — is also absent from the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts of Matthew (such as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus). It appears, in a somewhat shorter form, in the Didache, a very early Christian text (from the late 1st or early 2nd century), as a closing liturgical formula. Everything suggests it was used when praying in community, and that over time some copyists folded it into the Gospel text itself. Today it's a central part of the prayer as most Christian traditions pray it, even though it wasn't part of Matthew's original text.

The prayer as it's prayed today

To read it straight through in English, here is the King James Version — a classic, public-domain translation, not any single church's official text, but one of the most influential renderings in the English language:

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.

The Lord's Prayer today

Whatever religious tradition you belong to, or none at all, this prayer carries almost two thousand years of history and is still prayed, in hundreds of languages, every day. Knowing its layers — the Greek that first recorded it, the Aramaic of the person who taught it, the Latin that carried it for centuries, the differences between the two Gospels that tell it — takes nothing away from anyone who prays it in faith. If anything, understanding where such a repeated text comes from is itself a way of taking it seriously.

Sources and further reading