The doxology, ‘For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen,’ is lacking completely in Luke, and in Matthew it is absent from the oldest manuscripts. We encounter it first in the Didache. But it would be a completely erroneous without some closing words of praise to God; in Palestinian practice it was completely unthinkable that a prayer would end with the word ‘temptation’. Now, in Judaism prayers were often concluded with a ‘seal’, a sentence of praise freely formulated by the man who was praying. This was doubtless also what Jesus intended with the Lord’s Prayer, and what the congregation did in the earliest period: conclude the Lord’s Prayer with a ‘seal’, i.e. a freely formulated doxology by the person praying. Afterwards, when the Lord’s Prayer began to be used increasingly in the service as a common prayer, it was felt necessary to establish a fixed formulation of the doxology.