Note 25 — Chapter VI · THE DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE THREE FIRST GOSPELS.1

The warnings against Pharisaic hypocrisy (vi. 1–6) are without a parallel in Luke; but he has one of the model prayer, which recent criticism has turned not a little to the disadvantage of Matthew. The ancient harmonists, it is true, had no hesitation in supposing that Jesus delivered this prayer twice,—in the connexion in which it is given by Matthew, as well as under the circumstances narrated by Luke (xi. ff.).25 But if Jesus had already in the Sermon on the Mount given a model prayer, his disciples would scarcely have requested one afterwards, as if nothing of the kind had occurred; and it is still more improbable that Jesus would repeat the same formulary, without any recollection that he had delivered it to these disciples long before. Hence our most recent critics have decided that Luke alone has preserved the natural and true occasion on which this prayer was communicated, and that like many other fragments, it was interpolated in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount by the writer.26 But the vaunted naturalness of Luke’s representation, I, for one, cannot discover. Apart from the improbability, admitted even by the above critics, that the disciples of Jesus should have remained without any direction to pray until the last journey, in which Luke places the scene; it is anything but natural that Jesus should abstain from giving his disciples the exemplar which was in his mind until they sought for it, and that then he should forthwith fall into prayer. He had, doubtless, often prayed in their circle from the commencement of their intercourse; and if so, their request was superfluous, and must, as in John xiv. 9, have produced only an admonition to recollect what they had long seen and heard in his society. The account of Luke seems to have been framed on mere conjecture; it was known that the above prayer proceeded from Jesus, and the further question as to the motive for its communication, received the gratuitous answer: without doubt his disciples had asked him for such an exemplar. Without, therefore, maintaining that Matthew has preserved to us the connexion in which this prayer was originally uttered by Jesus, we are not the less in doubt whether it has a more accurate position in Luke.27 With regard to the elements of the prayer, it is impossible to deny what Wetstein says: tota hæc oratio ex formulis Hebræorum concinnata est;28 but Fritzsche’s observation is also just, that desires of so general a nature might be uttered in the prayers of various persons, even in similar phraseology, without any other cause than the broad uniformity of human feeling.29 We may add that the selection and allocation of the petitions in the prayer are entirely original, and bear the impress of that religious consciousness which Jesus possessed and sought to impart to his followers.30 Matthew inserts after the conclusion of the prayer two propositions, which are properly the corollary of the third petition, but which seem inaptly placed, not only because they are severed by the concluding petition from the passage to which they have reference, but because they have no point of coincidence with the succeeding censures and admonitions which turn on the hypocrisy of the Pharisaic fasts. Mark, however, has still more infelicitously appended these propositions to the discourse of Jesus on the efficacy of believing prayer (xi. 25).31