3. The Lord’s Prayer (6:9b-13) comes from the historical Jesus himself. I can say this with confidence because of the multiple attestation of the prayer in Matt 6:9b-13; Luke 11:13; Did. 8.2, sources independently attributing the Lord’s Prayer to Jesus. Since one can assume, however, that most of the petitions, perhaps even all of them, have been adapted form prayers current at the time, in composing this prayer, Jesus himself acted as an author/redactor. As a result of this prayer, despite its traditional nature, is also a highly original creation displaying its own distinctive theology. It is, therefore, justified to name Jesus as its author, which makes this prayer the oldest text in the SM and the only one that can be attributed directly to the historical Jesus.

. . .

2. Authorship

All ancient sources agree in ascribing the Lord’s Prayer to Jesus of Nazareth as the original author. There is no reason on scholarly grounds to doubt this ascription, because it meets the standard criteria of authenticity and inauthenticity as they have been developed in New Testament scholarship. Even inf one accepts Jesus’ authorship of the Lord’s Prayer, one has numerous problems to consider.

Typical of all prayers, the Lord’s Prayer also consists of much material that was traditional at the time. When Jesus created this prayer, he did not create something altogether new, but he created it out of tradition. For this reason, almost all the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer have close parallels in older Jewish prayers. This way of creating prayers was and still is characteristic of most prayers. In order to make new prayers acceptable to a liturgical community, they must reflect the traditional language and form. Within this limit, one can introduce new elements that the worshiping community will accept. The originality of the prayer, therefore, lies in the conception of the prayer as a whole, in the selection and precise formulation of the petitions, and in its peculiar theology.

The Lord’s Prayer can be shown to have its own theology (see below, section 6). It is a Jewish, but a peculiarly Jewish, theology. This theology differs slightly depending on the versions one considers, and it is different from the literary contexts in which it is transmitted.