In his post yesterday on the embolism, the prayer which follows the Lord’s Prayer in the Mass, and builds off its concluding words, Dr Foley noted that something of the sort is found in all Western liturgies, and several Eastern ones. For example, the ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, known as the liturgy of St James, or Hagiopolite Rite, has the priest say in the analogous place, “And lead us not into temptation, o Lord, Lord of hosts, who knowest our weakness, but deliver us from the evil one, and from his works and his every assault and devising, though Thy holy name, that hath been invoked upon our low estate.”
He then concludes with this doxology: “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.” This latter part is also said in the Byzantine Rite, not only at the Divine Liturgy, but also at the many occasions when the Lord’s Prayer is said in the Office. Partly under Byzantine influence, it has been adopted by various other Eastern rites as well.This addition is extremely ancient, already attested in germinal form (“for Thine is the power and the glory forever”,) in the Didache, ca. 100 A.D. The names of the three Divine Persons were added to this formula later, in the wake of the Christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries. Likewise the word “kingdom”, for the same reason that the words “whose kingdom shall have no end” were added to the Nicene Creed, in response to the heretic Marcellus of Ancyra, who taught that Christ would cease to be after He had delivered the eternal kingdom to God the Father.
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| Matthew 6, 9-13, the Lord’s Prayer with the doxology, in a Greek manuscript of the Gospels with interlinear Latin translation, commonly known as Codex Δ; originally written ca. 850 AD at the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy, now in the library of the monastery of San Gallen in Switzerland. (Cod. Sang. 48, p. 33; https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/0048, CC BY-NC 4.0) |
There is an interesting story of how this Eastern liturgical addition became part of the standard way of saying the Lord’s Prayer among English-speaking protestants. There are many manuscripts of the Gospel of St Matthew which include one version of it or another at chapter 6, verse 13. This is found not just in Greek, but also in a few manuscripts of the old Latin versions, three of the four Syriac translations, in Armenian and Coptic, etc. On the other hand, it is missing from the oldest and most important witnesses to the text of the New Testament, such as the codexes Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and one of the most important ancient translations, St Jerome’s revision of the old Latin. The first Latin commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, that of St Cyprian, also makes no mention of it. The consensus of modern scholarship recognizes that it is a later addition.
The first printed Greek New Testament was put together by the famous humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), issued in 1516, and revised four times over the following 19 years. But the manuscripts which he and his collaborators had to work with were few, late, and by modern standards bad. The great uncials codices such as the two named above were completely unknown to the West, nor had any of the Egyptian papyri yet been discovered which in more recent times have proved such valuable witnesses to the original text. Erasmus, judging from what he had in his manuscripts, included the doxology at Matthew 6, 13 in his edition, from which it passed into various protestant versions, including the King James Bible, and from that to the Book of Common Prayer. And thus an eastern liturgical interpolation came to be commonly said as if it were part of the prayer itself.
In the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, there is a scene in which the main character, Capt. Jack Aubrey, leads a funeral service for sailors killed in a battle on an English military vessel. At approximately 2:00:45, the whole company recites the Lord’s Prayer together; at the words “give us this day,” the camera moves to show the other main character, Aubrey’s friend and the ship’s doctor, Stephen Maturin, who is Catholic. When they reach “for thine is the kingdom”, Maturin stops speaking, since the addition of those words was a protestant custom which he would not observe. I am certain that this must have been deliberate, even though Maturin’s Catholicism isn’t noted in the film, since the actor who plays him, Paul Bettany, is English, was raised Catholic, and would have known this. (I am not the first person to have noticed this. In this excerpt, Maturin appears at 00:44.)
