The Poetic Structure of Lordʼs Prayer

Abstract

The Lord’s Prayer is recorded in two canonical texts, the Gospel of Matthew (69-13) and the Gospel of Luke (112-4). The main purpose of this paper is to look at their common poetic characteristics, and starting from Matthew’s text, we will point out the differences (regarding invocation, number of petitions and vocabulary) in those segments in which poetic oscillations are evident, that is, when differences arise in the atmosphere of different literary settings of the evangelists themselves. Since a significant number of authors (Goulder (1963), Green (2001), Lutz (2007, 2018), Hammerling (2010), Clark (2016, 2017), Martin (2015), etc.) agree that Matthew’s variant is more poetic, in our study, combining the previous insights into the literary structure of both Matthew’s Gospel and the prayer itself, looking back at the positioning of the Lord’s Prayer within the Sermon on the Mount, as well as the general relationship to Old Testament poetry, we describe the aesthetic form and internal structure of this variant of the central Christian prayer, its poetic characteristics, as well as cohesive factors of the textual segments. Accordingly, we are talking about parallelisms, rhythm, rhyme, refrain, contrast, enthymeme, inclusion, anaphora, epiphora, polyptoton, paregmenon, on which the text of the Lord’s Prayer is built. We base our research on the premise of the discursive, but also the aesthetic closeness of prayer and song, that is, the act of praying itself and the act of poetic creation. The structure of the text of the prayer carries a significant, even key, trace of poetic expression. This frees the prayer discourse from external frameworks and schematic arrangement of constitutive elements. The Lord’s Prayer itself, the prototype of the Christian prayer, is far from the formal annulment and abolition of the mentioned scheme, but at the same time it is not exhausted within it, but traces of poetic practice are revealed in its text, as it realizes its being outside the given and ossified frameworks. The text of the prayer thereby reveals its nature as ludic, since, paradoxically, in formal constraints, trapped in the patterns of theological discourse, it strives to free its idiom and its discourse from any form of ossification and traditionality, striving to free the speech that moves from man to God, which is the basic theopoetic demand. The Lord’s Prayer is recorded in two canonical texts, the Gospel of Matthew (69-13) and the Gospel of Luke (112-4). The main purpose of this paper is to look at their common poetic characteristics, and starting from Matthew’s text, we will point out the differences (regarding invocation, number of petitions and vocabulary) in those segments in which poetic oscillations are evident, that is, when differences arise in the atmosphere of different literary settings of the evangelists themselves.