abstract
| - The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father and the Pater Noster, is a venerated Christian prayer that, according to the New Testament, was taught by Jesus to his disciples. Two forms of it are recorded in the New Testament: a longer form in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the Sermon on the Mount, and a shorter form in the Gospel of Luke as a response by Jesus to a request by %22one of his disciples%22 to teach them %22to pray as John taught his disciples%22. The prayer concludes with %22deliver us from evil%22 in Matthew, and with %22lead us not into temptation%22 in Luke. The first three of the seven petitions in Matthew address God; the other four are related to human needs and concerns. The liturgical form is the Matthean. Some Christians, particularly Protestants, conclude the prayer with a doxology, a later addendum appearing in some manuscripts of Matthew.The context of the prayer in Matthew is a discourse deploring people who pray ostentatiously.In biblical criticism, the prayer's absence in the Gospel of Mark together with its occurrence in Matthew and Luke has caused scholars who accept the two-source hypothesis (against other document hypotheses) to conclude that it is probably a logion original to Q.On Easter Sunday 2007, it was estimated that many of the two billion Catholic, Anglican, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians who were sharing in the celebration of Easter would read, recite, or sing the short prayer in hundreds of languages. Although theological differences and various modes of worship divide Christians, according to Fuller Seminary professor Clayton Schmit, %22there is a sense of solidarity in knowing that Christians around the globe are praying together..., and these words always unite us.%22
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