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.

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Lord's Prayer

Prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples and used by all Christians as the basic prayer in common worship. It appears in two forms in the New Testament: a shorter version in Luke 11:2–4, and a longer version, part of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6:9–13. In both contexts it is offered as a model of how to pray. It is sometimes called the Pater Noster (Latin: “Our Father”) for its first two words.