Our Father's Story

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name; your kingdom come; Your Will be done on earth as
it is in heaven. Give us your daily bread today; and forgive us our debts, just as we have forgiven
our debtors; and do not let us fall into temptation, but deliver us from evil (Matthew 6: 9-13)

Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, give us our daily bread every day, and
forgive us our sins, because we also forgive everyone who owes us, and do not let us fall into
temptation. (Luke 11: 2-4)

DEFINITION

The title of Our Father or Our Father comes from the Latin Pater Noster and is the name of a
Christian prayer made known by Jesus of Nazareth, according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Between the two authors there are differences between the description of the circumstances and
also in the style of the text of the sentence, from which the different existing versions in different
Christian denominations derive.

The Lord's Prayer is considered the common Christian prayer par excellence for the majority
confessions: for Catholics it is the summary of Christian doctrine, for Protestants it is the model of
Christian prayer and, according to the Orthodox, it is the perfect prayer.

There is a parallel that links the Christian Our Father with some Jewish prayer and even in an
Islamic one, which we will see later in this same study. We must not forget that Jesus of Nazareth
was immersed in the liturgical traditions of the Jewish religion, in which Christianity initially
developed.

BACKGROUND OF THE PADRENUESTRO

Primitive men began to divinize aspects that they did not understand, both of the world and of
nature, and began to have gods of rain, wind, love and many others. Contact with these divinized
forces of nature began to refine and this gave rise to religions.

Judaism implied a breakthrough for its time, in a context where most ancient cultures professed
polytheism, since they summed up all the gods in one since Abrahamic times, and developing a
liturgy where prayer was the most effective way of approach to divinity.
Other remote antecedents to the Our Father are considered from theological theories that link the
doctrine of Christianity with ancient pagan beliefs. The theologian, Egyptologist and former
Catalan priest, Llogari Pujol, has pointed out what for him is a concrete antecedent of the Our
Father in an Egyptian text of the year 1,000 BC, where the so-called Prayer of the Blind is collected:

"The God of the Earth is the ruler of the horizon.

God is to make his name great, he dedicates it to the worship of his name,

Give your existence of God, He will do your business. Its similarity is on Earth.

God is given incense and food in daily offerings.

God will judge the true and honest and forgive our debtors. Beware of the thing that God
abominates, preserve yourself from evil.

God is the king of the horizon, of power and of glory. He increases, whoever increases it. Allow me
to be tomorrow like today. "

PRAYER IN THE OLD ROME AND GREECE

Already in those historical times, organized religions emerged and had temples and priests that
worshiped the forces of nature which, most of the time, already looked like anthropomorphic
gods, even though they generally lacked the concept of a unique and universal God . Rather, local
gods were worshiped, thinking that they would favor only their people. Similarly, the local gods of
other peoples were considered true. For example, an Egyptian could consider that the goddess
Athena helped the Greeks and, therefore, the Egyptian had to ask for help from his equivalent
god, that is, Horus.

Each town had its way of communicating with its gods. One way to establish contact with them
was through words, more or less ritualized, as if the gods were people who listen and respond
with acts. And that communication with words was prayer.

In the case of the Greco-Roman religion, there was a great contrast between the prayer addressed
to the great divinities and that made to the family gods. In the case of the great divinities (Jupiter,
Neptune, etc.) the prayer was very ornate, with very elaborate and complicated rites, full of pomp
and ceremony. On the other hand, domestic or family gods were prayed differently: they were
asked for advice and protection in an intimate way, since they felt love for those little gods.

Within Christianity the group that would become more numerous is that of believers of Gentile
origin, not Jewish. In fact we must take into account that the New Testament was written in a
pagan language, Greek. Nowadays Jews consider Christians as Gentiles.