On Earth as in Heaven: The Lord’s Prayer from Jewish Prayer to Christian Ritual

Description

Convinced that our access to the original sense of Jesus's prayer must be mediated by its history of "effects," David Clark seeks to trace the meaning of one of Christianity's most repeated, and thus most "effective" texts through the early centuries of the faith. Clark begins by arguing that the prayer's original context was in a revival of Jewish prayer, then sets it in the literary context of Gospels that, he argues, represented Jesus as recapitulating Israel's testing in the wilderness in his own temptation. He then traces the prayer's meaning within the narratives of Matthew and Luke and in the Didache, then examines the first full commentary on the prayer, that of Tertullian in the third century CE. Clark attends to the evolution of ideas and themes embodied in the prayer and of the understanding of prayer itself across epic transitions, from Judaism to the teaching of Jesus, from Jesus to the Gospels, and from the Gospels to earliest self-consciously "catholic" Christianity. This is an engaging narrative of the history behind and reception of the Lord's Prayer; it illustrates how a text's reception may help us explore and understand the multivalent meaning of the text itself. Introduction ix 1. A Prayer Revival 1 2. Prayer and Covenant Renewal 25 3. Matthew’s Vision of Heaven and Earth 59 4. Order and Chaos in the Didache 87 5. Luke on Prayer 117 6. Tertullian: “Prayer Alone Conquers God” 163 7. Conclusion 193 Appendix: Praying the Lord’s Prayer 207 Index of Ancient Sources 211 Index of Modern Authors 223