The Lord's Prayer - Part 5 Series

Over the last five weeks we have been taking a look at The Lord’s Prayer and today we come to the end of verse 13 which says …

Matthew 6:13

“For Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

That is a grand statement! I love getting to that part of the Lord’s Prayer and proclaiming that great truth! The curious thing is … that it’s not found in every Bible!

We know that it is the truth because it is a theme that runs throughout the Bible!

The Kingdom of God is never mentioned in the OT. But it just explodes onto the scene in the NT with around 150 references!

So, why is that part of verse 13 in some Bibles and not in others?

Currently, scholars are aware of over 5,700 manuscripts that contain some portion of the New Testament, and the total is growing slowly as additional manuscripts are discovered. Among these manuscripts, a couple thousand contain all or portions of the Biblical Gospels.

Besides textual evidence derived from the New Testament Greek manuscripts and from early versions, there are numerous scriptural quotations included in the commentaries, sermons, and other writings by early Church fathers. Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.

So, from these 5,700 manuscripts and thousands upon thousands of quotes of New Testament Scriptures how are they able to determine what the original text said?

Let me give you an example which is a vast oversimplification of how the attempt is made to “back into” the text of the original manuscripts.

(Show PPT slide of the letters J L M T I K -

representing Jesus Loves Me This I Know)

Let’s pretend this is a text in the original manuscript but we don’t have the original manuscript. Instead we have five copies from the original manuscript.

This is what they show:

J L M T I K

J L M T I K

J L M T I K

J L Y T W K

J L M T I K

Now it’s easy to see that the fourth line is different.

This one says: Jesus Loves You This We Know

It is not the same as the majority of the copies so it is discarded in favor of the majority texts. Perhaps a scribe was trying to make it more inclusive. Who knows? The important thing is that we were able to recover and verify the original text.

What if the five copies looked like this?

J L M T I K

J L M I K T

J L M T I K

J L M T I K

J L M T I K

This time the phrase in error says, Jesus Loves Me I Know This. The same words with the same meaning but perhaps rearranged by error or perhaps rearranged for readability. In either case we end up with the original text.

How about if it looked like this?

J L M T I K

J L M T I K

J L Y T W K

J L Y T W K

J L M T I K

In that case the Bible might say, “Jesus Loves Me This I Know” with a note that some manuscripts say, “Jesus Loves You This We Know”.

There is a great range of Bibles

Some Bibles are paraphrases of the Bible such as

The Message - written by Eugene Peterson and

The Living Bible - written by Kenneth B. Taylor

We need to know that these include the writer’s interpretation of Scriptures and should not be used for detailed study but for casual reading and if any thoughts seem unusual they should be checked in a solid translation.

Three notes about The Living Bible

- Pastor Karenlee grew a great deal in her walk with the Lord over the early years of her walk with Christ while she was using The Living Bible

- In his crusades Billy Graham distributed over 600,000 copies of The Living Letters which is a printing of the epistles taken from The Living Bible

- When it came time to update The Living Bible paraphrase it was actually rewritten into the New Living Translation

OK, so we’ve got paraphrases. Then we have translations:

We know and use many of these, KJV, NKJV, NIV, NASB, RSV, ESV, HCSB

On BibleGateway.com I read the translators notes about their efforts and while some said very little, the ones mentioned above were quite exhaustive and convincing in their sincerity at trying to be faithful to God’s Holy Word.

On the far end of the spectrum are bibles that are intentionally misinterpreted such as the Joseph Smith Translation, The Jehovah’s Witness Bible aka New World Translation and one that I won’t even put on the screen the Queen James bible (by homosexuals for homosexuals).