Matthew 6:13

Research Dossier

Does the Lord’s Prayer End in Praise?

Master series: The Authentic Text of the New Testament: A Book-by-Book Examination of Textual Variants Division: Gospels and Acts — Article 27 of 380 Book sequence: Matthew — Article 27 of 75 Overall series: Article 27 of 750

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” — Matthew 6:13

Few textual variants are heard as often as the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer.

In churches shaped by the Authorized Version, the prayer rises from petition to praise:

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

In many modern Bibles, the prayer ends after “deliver us from evil” or moves the doxology into a footnote. In liturgical churches, worshippers may still say the words even when the Bible used by the officiant brackets or omits them. The result is a curious division: the church prays words that its printed critical text may not regard as Matthew’s.

The Textus Receptus reads:

ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήν.

The Nestle–Aland and United Bible Societies texts end the verse before these words.

The question is not whether the doxology is orthodox. Its every affirmation is biblical. The question is whether Matthew wrote it at this location. The critical case appeals to its absence from several early and diverse witnesses, the varying forms in which it appears, and the natural tendency of public worship to add a conclusion of praise. The received-text case appeals to its broad Greek preservation, its early ecclesiastical presence, its integral relation to the prayer, and the weakness of treating early commentary or liturgical variation as decisive proof of interpolation.

This is a major test of method because “liturgy” can explain change in either direction. Public worship may add words, abbreviate them, expand them, or separate a biblical conclusion from the petitions that precede it. The label does not settle the history.

The Received Doxology

The clause begins with ὅτι, “for” or “because.” The prayer does not merely stop asking; it gives the reason for confidence.

σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία — “thine is the kingdom.” The kingdom requested in verse 10 already belongs to the Father. The church does not ask him to acquire sovereignty but to manifest, extend, and consummate the reign that is his.

καὶ ἡ δύναμις — “and the power.” The petitions are not addressed to a benevolent but helpless deity. The Father possesses the power to supply bread, forgive debts, guard from temptation, and deliver from the evil one.

καὶ ἡ δόξα — “and the glory.” The final end of every petition is not the comfort of the petitioner in isolation but the glory of God. His answer displays his holiness, mercy, kingship, and strength.

εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας — “for ever,” literally “unto the ages.” The kingdom, power, and glory are not temporary possessions delegated by a higher authority. They are eternally his.

ἀμήν — “Amen.” The worshipper affirms the truth of the praise and expresses desire and confidence concerning the petitions. The Shorter Catechism explains the conclusion in exactly this devotional manner: we take encouragement in prayer from God alone and praise him by ascribing kingdom, power, and glory to him; “Amen” testifies our desire and assurance of being heard.

The doxology therefore performs real literary and theological work. It gathers the prayer into a God-centered conclusion. The kingdom of verse 10 returns in verse 13. Dependence on the Father’s will, provision, pardon, and protection resolves into praise of his sovereign sufficiency.

The Familiar Threefold Form

The received form is often called threefold because it names:

• the kingdom,the power,and the glory. It is supported by a broad Greek tradition, including Codices K, L, W, Delta, Theta, Pi, Family 13, and the mass of later copies. These witnesses do not all belong to one century or one narrowly local recension. Codex Washingtonianus, for example, carries the familiar form in a fifth-century Gospel manuscript whose textual character varies from section to section. Ancient versions also transmit doxological conclusions, though the wording is not uniform. The Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Gothic, and other traditions require careful differentiation by manuscript and form. Their importance lies partly in showing that the conclusion was known far beyond late Greek Byzantium. John Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew in the fourth century, expounds the doxology as the Lord’s words. He explains that Christ makes the disciple courageous by reminding him of the King’s kingdom and power and then leads him to glorify God. Chrysostom’s witness is not an apparatus symbol; it is evidence that a major Greek-speaking expositor received the clause as part of Matthew. The Apostolic Constitutions also presents a form of the prayer with doxological praise. Its exact historical layers are debated, but it belongs to the early church’s transmission and use of the text. The evidence demonstrates ecclesiastical presence, not a late Reformation addition. The Critical Case for Omission The omission also has formidable evidence. Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus end after ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ, “from evil” or “from the evil one.” Codex Bezae and most Old Latin witnesses likewise lack the familiar doxology, as does the leading representative of Family 1. Several Coptic witnesses and other ancient versions omit it. Early Christian treatments of the Lord’s Prayer by Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian do not expound the familiar conclusion. Origen’s extended treatise moves through the petitions without treating “thine is the kingdom” as the next Matthean clause. Because these writers come from different locations and periods, their silence is more substantial than the silence of one commentator. The wording also circulates in multiple forms: The familiar form has “the kingdom and the power and the glory.”The Didache has a doxology corresponding to “for thine is the power and the glory for ever,” without “the kingdom.”Some Coptic witnesses have a similar two-member form.The Curetonian Syriac lacks “the power” in its form.One Old Latin witness has only “for thine is the power for ever and ever.”Some Greek copies enlarge “for ever” to “for ever and ever.”Many add “Amen,” while the placement and presence of “Amen” vary.A few late manuscripts use an explicitly Trinitarian expansion naming the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To critical editors, this instability looks like liturgical growth. A prayer ending with deliverance from evil invited a congregational ascription. Different churches supplied different doxologies; the familiar threefold form eventually became dominant and entered most Greek copies. First Chronicles 29:11–13, with its praise of the Lord’s greatness, power, glory, victory, majesty, and kingdom, provides a biblical reservoir from which such language could be drawn. That explanation is coherent. Public prayers naturally end in praise. Orthodox additions can enter precisely because they are orthodox and edifying. The doxology’s omission should not be defended by pretending its opposing evidence is weak. What the Didache Actually Proves The Didache is especially important because it is commonly dated very early and instructs Christians to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. Its form ends: “for thine is the power and the glory for ever.” This is not the full received wording, because “the kingdom” is absent. It would therefore be careless to cite the Didache as though it reproduced the Textus Receptus verbatim. It is equally careless to treat it only as evidence against Matthew’s doxology. The document proves that a doxological ending closely related to Matthew 6:13 was attached to the Lord’s Prayer at a very early stage of Christian worship. The dispute is already ancient. The church did not wait until the medieval period to append praise. Two historical accounts remain possible. On the critical account, the Didache preserves an early liturgical addition whose varying forms later entered Gospel manuscripts. On the received-text account, it preserves an abbreviated liturgical form of a conclusion already known from Matthew. A church manual can shorten a biblical doxology just as readily as it can create one. The Didache alone cannot choose between those histories. It confirms antiquity and variation. It does not provide Matthew’s autograph for comparison. Does Variation Prove Addition? Multiple forms often indicate secondary development, but the inference is not automatic. Endings are unusually exposed to variation. Copyists, readers, and liturgists may append “Amen,” replace “for ever” with “for ever and ever,” or adapt a doxology to Trinitarian worship. The existence of these expansions does not prove that the entire shorter received form is an expansion. It proves that a stable core attracted further elaboration. The familiar threefold form has a coherent internal structure and broad Greek support. The two-member and one-member forms can be explained as abbreviation, local liturgical adaptation, or partial preservation. The Trinitarian ending is visibly later and more elaborate; no defender of the received text needs to accept it merely because it is doxological. There is also an asymmetry in the critical argument. When a clause appears in many forms, the variation is taken as evidence that no form is original. Yet when the clause is absent in several forms and settings, those absences are treated as one stable reading. Omission can also spread through a stream, particularly once a Gospel exemplar without the clause becomes influential. The proper question is not “Is there liturgical variation?” There plainly is. It is “Which form best stands at the head of the extant variation?” The received text answers: the familiar Matthean doxology, from which abridgments, omissions, and expansions can all proceed. The Early Commentaries Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian deserve serious attention. If their copies contained the familiar doxology, why do their expositions not treat it? The silence may indicate that their local texts lacked the clause. That is the most direct critical conclusion, and in Origen’s case it fits the Alexandrian stream represented by Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The evidence should be admitted plainly. But commentary is not continuous transcription. An author may organize a treatise around petitions rather than reproduce every concluding liturgical word. A doxology may be uttered by the congregation, reserved for another speaker, or treated as a customary conclusion not requiring separate exposition. Patristic works also survive through their own manuscript histories, translations, abridgments, and editorial problems. Cyprian’s Latin and Tertullian’s North African context do not independently reproduce a lost Greek archetype; they may reflect related Old Latin forms. Origen’s enormous influence on biblical scholarship and the transmission of Alexandrian readings also cautions against counting every later echo of his textual form as an independent origin. None of this cancels their testimony. It assigns it its proper category. Their silence is evidence for early omission, not direct inspection of Matthew’s first copy and not proof that every Greek church originally ended the prayer without praise. The Biblical Roots of the Doxology The language resonates strongly with David’s prayer in 1 Chronicles 29: “Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty ... thine is the kingdom, O Lord.” The relationship can be used in opposing ways. Critics see a ready scriptural source for liturgical composition. Defenders see the Lord teaching his disciples to conclude prayer in the idiom of inspired praise. The doxology is not a verbatim quotation of either the Hebrew or the Greek Old Testament. It is a concentrated biblical ascription. Its vocabulary also belongs naturally to Matthew’s theology. The Gospel announces the kingdom of heaven, displays Christ’s authority, and ends with the risen Lord declaring, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” Glory belongs to God throughout Scripture, and “unto the ages” is ordinary doxological language. Biblical fitness cannot by itself prove authenticity. A skilled scribe or worshipping church can compose biblical words. Yet alleged derivability from Scripture cannot prove interpolation either. Inspired writers themselves quote, condense, and echo earlier Scripture. The theological integration is especially precise. The prayer asked, “Thy kingdom come.” The conclusion answers, “Thine is the kingdom.” The prayer sought the Father’s effective will, provision, forgiveness, and deliverance. The conclusion confesses his power. The prayer hallowed his name; the conclusion returns glory to him. “From Evil” or “From the Evil One” The doxology follows the petition ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ. The genitive can be understood as neuter, “from evil,” or masculine, “from the evil one.” The Authorized Version gives the broader “evil”; many modern versions choose “the evil one.” The textual status of the doxology does not depend on resolving that grammatical question. In either case, the praise is fitting. If the petition seeks deliverance from evil generally, God possesses the kingdom and power to rescue. If it seeks deliverance from Satan, the doxology declares that the kingdom does not belong to the tempter but to the Father. The transition is rhetorically strong: evil does not have the last word; glory does. Temptation does not define the kingdom; the Father does. The church’s vulnerability resolves in God’s eternal sovereignty. That coherence does not make omission impossible. It does make the received ending far more than an ornamental flourish. Was the Doxology Added for Worship? The phrase “liturgical addition” often sounds more decisive than it is. The Lord’s Prayer was liturgical from the beginning in the broad sense that Jesus gave it to a community to pray. The plural pronouns—our Father, our bread, our debts, lead us, deliver us—are corporate. The Didache instructs repeated communal use. Matthew himself places the prayer within instruction on public piety rightly ordered before God. Consequently, discovering liturgical use does not distinguish original from secondary words. Original words will be used liturgically too. A more precise critical proposal is that worshippers felt a prayer should not conclude with “evil” and therefore supplied praise. That motive is plausible, but unproved. The Psalms sometimes move from distress to doxology, yet biblical prayers can also end abruptly. Early Christian communities differed in whether the congregation, leader, or all worshippers spoke concluding words. Such performance conventions could separate the doxology from copied petitions even if it belonged to the Gospel text. The received-text judgment does not need to identify one universal omission mechanism. It observes that a major early stream lacked the clause, that commentators associated with that stream reflect the lack, and that the broader Greek church preserved a stable full form. Providence is not measured by whether modern scholars can name the first scribe who omitted a line. Prayer, Providence, and the Public Text Confessional bibliology asks how Christ’s church is to possess and use Scripture, not merely how an editor might reconstruct an inaccessible starting point from surviving fragments. The doxology was received in the Greek ecclesiastical text, translated in the Reformation Bibles, expounded in catechisms, sung and prayed by congregations, and confessed as Scripture. That history does not make the church capable of inspiring words after the apostles. It is evidence that the church recognized and retained words already given. The Westminster divines quote and explain the conclusion in the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Their doctrine of preservation in the Confession is therefore not an abstraction detached from the text they used. They understood “kept pure in all ages” while reading Matthew 6:13 with the doxology. Confessional reception must not be reduced to a vote of seventeenth-century theologians. The reading predates them by many centuries. Nor should it be dismissed as KJV-only reasoning. The standard is the preserved Greek text; the Authorized Version witnesses to that text in English. What This Variant Teaches about Method Omission can be early and geographically diverse. The evidence against the doxology is substantial and should be stated without concealment. An early church manual is not a Gospel manuscript. The Didache proves early use of a related doxology but must be interpreted in its own genre. Liturgical influence is bidirectional. Worship can add, shorten, expand, separate, and standardize wording. A stable core can attract unstable expansions. “For ever and ever,” additional “Amens,” and Trinitarian forms need not discredit the received threefold form. Patristic silence is evidence, not omniscience. Commentaries can disclose local texts while remaining selective literary works. Biblical derivability is not proof of interpolation. Matthew can echo Chronicles just as a later worshipper can. The public use of Scripture belongs to the evidence. A reading broadly copied, translated, preached, catechized, and prayed is not thereby inspired, but neither is that catholic history irrelevant. Verdict: “For Thine Is the Kingdom” The authentic conclusion of Matthew 6:13 is: ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήν. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” The shorter reading is unquestionably ancient. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Bezae, much Old Latin evidence, and important early commentators establish that omission arose early and circulated widely. The varying doxological forms and the needs of public prayer give the critical explanation real force. Those facts do not overturn the received conclusion. The familiar threefold form is broadly preserved in Greek, represented in ancient ecclesiastical use, expounded by Chrysostom, structurally integrated with Matthew’s prayer, and capable of explaining both abbreviation and expansion. The Didache does not reproduce it exactly, but it places a closely related doxological ending at the dawn of the church’s recorded prayer practice. The critical reconstruction asks the church to regard its most familiar ending as a successful liturgical composition. The confessional judgment recognizes instead an authentic conclusion that was omitted in an early stream, varied in worship, and preserved in its full form across the Greek ecclesiastical tradition. The words do not merely provide a satisfying cadence. They teach why the church may ask for the coming kingdom, daily bread, pardon, and deliverance: the kingdom already belongs to the Father; the power to answer is his; the glory of the answer returns to him; and none of these possessions expires. The prayer begins with the Father’s name and ends with the Father’s praise. “Amen” is therefore not a human ornament attached to Christ’s petitions. It is the church’s confident answer to the sovereign sufficiency Christ has just taught it to confess. Principal Sources The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, 1 Chronicles 29:10–13; Matthew 6:9–13; 26:30; 28:18–20; Romans 11:33–36; 1 Timothy 1:17; Revelation 5:9–14.F. H. A. Scrivener, The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge, 1894), Matthew 6:13.Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, The Greek New Testament, Edited from Ancient Authorities, vol. 1 (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1857), Matthew 6:13 and apparatus.Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek (Cambridge, 1881), Matthew 6:13.Eberhard Nestle et al., Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), Matthew 6:13 and apparatus.Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), Matthew 6:13.Didache, 8.2–3.Tertullian, On Prayer; Origen, On Prayer; Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer.John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, homily 19.Apostolic Constitutions, book 7.John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, at Matthew 6:13.Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 107; Westminster Larger Catechism, question 196; Westminster Confession of Faith, chapters 1 and 21.John William Burgon, The Revision Revised (London: John Murray, 1883), and John William Burgon and Edward Miller, The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896). Related Completed Studies Textual Tuesday - Matthew 6:13 — 1,156 words Planned