The Lord's Prayer is the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, and the Gospels carry it twice: at Matthew 6:9-13, inside the Sermon on the Mount, and at Luke 11:2-4, after a disciple asks him to teach them to pray. The two are not the same prayer word for word. The list below follows Matthew's version, the longer of the two and the one behind the formula said aloud in church. Even the number of petitions is counted differently: the Catholic and Lutheran catechisms count seven, while the Reformed tradition — the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Shorter Catechism — counts six, reading the last two as a single petition.
The two versions
The two differ both in setting and in wording. In Matthew nobody asks for it: Jesus gives the prayer inside a block of teaching on how to pray — not like the hypocrites, not by piling up words. In Luke it answers a disciple's request, made just after Jesus had been praying himself. Matthew opens with "Our Father in heaven"; Luke, in the oldest manuscripts, with a bare "Father". Luke also lacks "your will be done, on earth as in heaven" and, in today's critical editions, "but deliver us from evil". The bread is asked for differently: Matthew says "today", Luke "each day" — and the Greek adjective behind "daily", epiousios, turns up in no other known ancient text, which is why translations render it "daily", "that we need" or "for tomorrow". Where Matthew says debts and debtors, Luke says sins, while keeping "everyone indebted to us". Later copyists pulled Luke's wording towards Matthew's better-known text, so some Bibles print the two passages almost identically and others do not — open both chapters in the translations on this site and you can watch it happen. Which of the two forms stands closer to what was originally said is a debated question, and this page does not settle it.
- 1That God's name be held holy (Matt 6:9)
- 2That his kingdom come (Matt 6:10)
- 3That his will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10)
- 4Bread for the day, asked for today (Matt 6:11)
- 5Forgiveness of one's own debts, tied to the forgiveness one grants (Matt 6:12)
- 6Not to be brought into testing, or temptation (Matt 6:13)
- 7To be delivered from evil, or from the evil one: the Greek allows both readings (Matt 6:13)
The ending not every Bible carries
The closing line "for yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen" is not in the oldest Greek manuscripts of Matthew: it is missing from Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Codex Bezae and the Latin Vulgate, and the earliest writers who comment on the prayer line by line never mention it. It does appear in later manuscripts of the Byzantine family, which is the basis of the printed Greek text of the sixteenth century and, through it, of the King James Version, the Reina-Valera and the Almeida — which is why those Bibles set it in the body of the text. As a spoken ending it is old regardless: the Didache, an early Christian handbook of disputed date, already gives the prayer with a similar close — without the word "kingdom" — and tells the reader to pray it three times a day. The upshot today is that some editions print it, some drop it into a footnote and some leave it out; the translations on this site part company at Matthew 6:13 too. And it is not a line between denominations: modern Protestant translations footnote it, and Catholics say it at Mass.
Neither biblical version matches word for word what people actually say aloud, because the spoken formula comes from the liturgy: it was fixed centuries before any modern translation and, in the West, came through Latin. English shows this plainly. Catholics and most Anglicans say "trespasses", many Presbyterian and other Reformed congregations say "debts", and the modern ecumenical wording says "sins" — one line, three received formulas, and Matthew 6:12 itself speaks of debts and debtors. At Roman Catholic Mass the doxology is said, but not as part of the prayer: the priest inserts a short prayer in between, so "for the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours" comes back as a response. The formulas also still get revised: in 2017 the French-speaking bishops changed their rendering of the petition about temptation, and the Italian missal later made an equivalent change.