Praying – “Final” Thoughts

This morning early, truth be told I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this, there are two things I want to share with you for your thought and consideration on the Lord's prayer.  They both have their root in Matthew 6:13 (here @ BibleGateway): "²For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen."

²This clause not found in early mss [mss, is the abbreviation for manuscripts - JMC] (New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995), Mt 6:13.)

Because I am somewhat of a stickler for detail when it comes to the Bible, I examined 33 versions, translations, or paraphrases (if you would like to understand the difference between these three types of Bibles, I wrote three posts about this starting here).  Unless you are using one of the three King James Versions or the Young’s Literal Translation, your Bible does something with 13b to indicate that the oldest and best manuscript evidence we have for Matthew do not include this clause.  

What?

What is happening here, the translators or committees are dealing with the results of the discipline of textual criticism.  If you are like me, your reaction to a sentence that contains both the words Bible and criticism calls for a fight.  For me that is a reaction is to something called “Higher Criticism” which in a loose definition is a “scholar” attempting to prove that a book of the Bible was copied from a non-existent source or wasn’t written by whom the book says it was written – again loose definition.  I am not a fan.

On the other hand, textual criticism is the examination of the over 5,000 ancient copies of parts of the New Testament that have been discovered by archaeological projects.  We have portions of the New Testament that date to the first century.  All of these portions are dated and compared.  The purpose of the discipline is to attempt to get a Greek text that is as close to the original autographs as possible.  A full description of the discipline is beyond the scope of this post.  The results of this work is called the Majority Text or the Eclectic Text.  It is published by the United Bible Society and the current version is NA28 (Current, in that, there are often new discoveries or new learnings that are applied from version to version).  Some versions or translations, choose to use the Textus Receptus which is a full Greek text of the New Testament that is later than some of the archaeological finds.  That was either a choice for philosophical reasons or else the Majority was not yet available.

Thus, the different ways the 29 other Bibles noted that there was an issue with 13b.

That is one of the things I wanted to share.

The next one is a translation issue with the Lord’s prayer, also in 13 (here @ BibleGateway), at the end of the first clause is the phrase… “deliver us from…” then your Bible will either say “evil” or “the evil one” or have a footnote with the alternate translation.  The Bibles are more split on this one; 39% go with "evil", 54% with "the evil one".  This is more of a Greek grammar and lexical issue and hangs on the use of "the" in the text.

I was planning to address some possible implications of each of these in this post; which are, I believe significant.  However, I felt it was important to give you a description of the issues before doing so.  That said, my intention is to share those implications in tomorrow’s post.  However, if I get long winded, it may take a couple of days.