The Death Prayer that is the Lord's Prayer

[Russ Saltzman]

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/a-prayer-for-death

On the Lord's Prayer

"Some scholarship asserts that the prayer did not originate with Jesus. He never said it. It is instead the collective work of early Christians who strung together a number of ideas, thoughts, passing remarks and the like that Jesus may have offered at one time or another to anybody listening. I cannot say which is more surprising: rejection of the prayer as Jesus’s own, or the notion that a church committee could have agreed on the wording."

[George Erdner]

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/a-prayer-for-death

On the Lord's Prayer

"Some scholarship asserts that the prayer did not originate with Jesus. He never said it. It is instead the collective work of early Christians who strung together a number of ideas, thoughts, passing remarks and the like that Jesus may have offered at one time or another to anybody listening. I cannot say which is more surprising: rejection of the prayer as Jesus’s own, or the notion that a church committee could have agreed on the wording."

If Jesus did, at various times during His ministry, pray all the petitions of the Lord's Prayer, and only later did the Apostles string those petitions that Jesus taught into one single prayer (or technically two, since there are slight differences between the two times it appears in the Gospels), does that make it any less the "Lord's" Prayer? Presumably, whatever prayers Jesus prayed that his disciples heard, they were probably repeated more than a few times. Would that make a difference?

I'm not arguing that point. I'm just asking.

[John Mundinger]

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/a-prayer-for-death

On the Lord's Prayer

"Some scholarship asserts that the prayer did not originate with Jesus. He never said it. It is instead the collective work of early Christians who strung together a number of ideas, thoughts, passing remarks and the like that Jesus may have offered at one time or another to anybody listening. I cannot say which is more surprising: rejection of the prayer as Jesus’s own, or the notion that a church committee could have agreed on the wording."

I find it interesting that you clipped that paragraph from the article.  In fact, given the title of the article, I'm not sure what that paragraph adds.  As I read it, the crux of the piece would seem to be these paragraphs:

Jesus has us begin by asking that God’s kingdom will come to us in a way that we will know him as Father, that we may count on him in every time of crisis, doubt, and in every low, lonely, and desperate moment. Praying for that, we have prayed for things Jesus himself believes most essential: We have prayed for the Word of God, and we have prayed for the faith to believe it.

Yet in praying for those things we have also come to the verge of Jordan. To pray for God’s kingdom coming is to pray that his will will be done. We are not always as interested in that as we think, because in praying for God’s will to come to us, we are coincidentally praying to preclude our own will from ever coming at all. We die right there.