The independent career of Matthew's pater-nostrum

That which we Latins call the "Pater Nostrum" is the version of "the Lord's Prayer" preserved in Matthew's Gospel. A fortnight back, Neil Godfrey at Vridar proposed an argument that the prayer's author cobbled the thing from earlier Christian formulae and texts - most of which survive to this day.

Says Godfrey: the prayer has authentic analogues to early Christian jargon, as we know it from Mark and from Paul. The first generation were prone to invoke "Abba / Father" as a Syro-Greek gloss; "Marana tha" is another early Aramaeism, "our Lord come". The Lord's Prayer conflates these, opening with, "our Father" (it becomes Abbana, in Aramaic). For the latter, the Lord's Prayer went with "thy kingdom come" (malkhûthâkha thâ...?).

Godfrey further notes that where the author changes the wording of these early Christian terms, he does it in accordance to how Matthew's Gospel does it elsewhere. Mark would have Jesus, walking amongst us like YHWH through Genesis Two, forgive sin. Matthew instead presents Jesus as the human Christ, walad begotten of Yoseph in the line of (all too) human King David. This messiah hasn't authority to forgive sin... but he can forgive debt, if only we'll crown him. (Michael Hudson, proponent of Jubilee in our day, prefers Matthew.)

Godfrey concludes that Matthew had the means, motive, and opportunity to compose a communal prayer in tune with his own reading of Mark... and that it wasn't Jesus who taught him. It was not even "Q": Luke's parallel in the "sermon on the plain", Godfrey says, is stripped down from Matthew's.

A commenter Steven Watson on 5 July asked, what about the Didache. Since Godfrey hasn't got 'round to it, I'll give that a shot here :

Emran El-Badawi noted in his book The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions that the Edessene "Syriac" tradition contains Syriac adaptations of the New Testament, which weren't always perfect translations. The Beatitudes, for instance, rhyme: El-Badawi, 90-1. The "Pater Nostrum" is similarly pithy and loaded in rhyme: 107-8. "Our Father" is "Abbûn" in this version rather than the "Abban(a)" I expected, although that may be Osrhonene dialect. A more-drastic change is tîthê malkhûthâkh. This is there to rhyme with nêtqdash shmâkh. This has to be secondary to early Aramaean Christendom.

This strategy of rhyme looks like the memré genre in Edessene Syriac and, soon enough, the saj' rhetoric in the Qur'an. Matthew composed and the Edessenes re-composed. And the latter did it without reference to earlier Aramaean Christians.

Pericopae like this probably went out as qeryâné first, independently of a full official translation. (It went similar in Old Latin, before Jerome.) When the Edessenes hammered out their "Peshitta" translation, wherever they feared a fight with those Christians accustomed to the older readings, they just copied those readings right in there, fixing only what was at worst deviance from the Greek at the time. (Again: similar in Jerome. And with King James, with respect to the translations before him.)

Even in Greek a lot of the "New Testament" scraps come to us through Greek lectionaries. These, too, often stubbornly held to older readings which the Byzantine official text had revised.

To answer Steven Watson: the Lord's Prayer is composed exactly to be memorised and spoken in a group. It was Matthew's full intent that it escape "into the wild", as it were; to enter liturgy even in places like Edessa where the full Gospel was not yet translated. It is no marvel that the Prayer drifted into Greek liturgies too, even such as weren't yet ready to accept a Jesus biography as Scripture - or, if they already had one, like Mark's, and weren't ready to replace it. It would be more of a marvel if the Didache had resisted this prayer.