THE LORD'S PRAYER.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 2, 1 November 1883, Page 15

THE LORD'S PRAYER.

“ The model prayer known as the Lord's Prayer , with which Jesus furnished his followers, he evidently borrowed from Jewish literature. The few instances of verbal difference between it and the following translation of a part of the Jewish Euchologues, made by a revered and pious Christian, may be the result of a little alteration effected by time, either in the Christian or the Jewish prayer, or even in both ; or may have arisen either from Jesus’s imperfect recollection of the Jewish prayer, or from the imperfect manner in which his repetition of it was reported by the Evangelists. The principal difference, however, is caused by Jesus’s omission of several words found in the Jewish prayer, which would indicate that he knew it but imperfectly. But even now, at this distant time, when each has undergone a translation from a dead language, they are so much alike that they afford ample internal evidence of their identity. The Jewish prayer runs thus : Our Father which art in heaven , be gracious to us, 0 Lord our God ; hallowed be thy name, and let the remembrance of thee be glorified in heaven above, and upon earth here below. Let thy kingdom reign over us, now and for ever. The holy men of old said, remit and forgive unto all men whatsoever they have done against me. And lead us not into temptation, hut deliver us from the evil thing. For thine is the kingdom, and thou shalt reign in glory, for ever and for evermore.’ (The works of the Eev. John Gregorie, p. 168, Lond. 1685.) All the expressions italicised in the foregoing prayer will be found in the following [the Lord’s prayer]. Well might Basnage say that the Jew had an ancient prayer called the Radish, precisely like Jesus’s prayer; and Wetstein remark that it is a curious fact that the Lord’s prayer may be reconstructed almost verbatim out of the Talmud But as Jesus’s prayer is so much shorter and smoother in expressions [than the foregoing], while it has scarcely a word, and certainly not a single idea, that is not in the Jewish prayer, much older than his time, the proof is complete that either he, or some one else, borrowed it from the Jewish Talmuda productionlike all the Jewish writings—very justly represented, even by learned Christians, as replete with the most absurd and fabulous tales that were ever penned by the religious guides of any nation.” (“ The Prophet of Nazareth,” by E. P. Meredith, page 426.) [ln a debate at a meeting of the Wanganui Freethought Association the Christian disputant in his reply stated that the Mishna of the Talmud was written A.D. 250, and therefore he claimed originality for the prayer of Jesus. It would have been as pertinent, and have shown as profound a knowledge of the subject, to have argued that a history published in 1800 of the Baconian philosophy, was the date when that philosophy was given to the world ! He did not apparently know that the Babbins whose commentaries are given in the Talmud were mostly anterior to the Christian era.]