Next week I'm going to start teaching a new series on Wednesday nights called Christ's Church: The Pillar and Support of the Truth.  We'll talk about what the church is, who runs the church, and why we do things the way we do.  So, if you have any questions that you would like answered about the church, or just about the way we do church at FBC, post them in a comment after this blog post and I'll try to cover them in class.  There's even a good chance I'll answer your question here before the class even starts.  Hope to hear from some of you.

We've been studying the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 this month, and some of you may be wondering, "What happened to the end of the Lord's Prayer?" If you are reading from the KJV or the NKJV then the prayer ends with what is known as a benediction, "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever" (KJV). I have been preaching from the English Standard Version (ESV), which like most of the modern versions simply ends with "deliver us from evil." Rather than bore most of you with a long explanation, I'm going to attempt to give you the Reader's Digest version of why some things found in the KJV are "missing" from translations like the NIV and the ESV.

To start with, we have to acknowledge that the original copies of the writings that make of the New Testament have been lost to history. So we don't have the first version of Romans that Paul dictated to Tertius. What we have are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of very old, hand written copies and copies of copies and copies of copies of copies and so on. These hand written copies are called manuscripts. To figure out what the original writing contained, we compare and contrast the existing manuscripts. The process of determining what the original writing said is known as textual criticism.

For translations such as the NIV and the ESV a whole team of scholars who specialize in textual criticism lies behind what we read in English. The reason these scholars have decided to omit some phrases, such as the end of the Lord's Prayer, is because the earliest and best manuscripts do not contain it. The general rule in textual criticism is "The earlier the manuscript, the more closely it will resemble the original document," which should make sense to anyone who has played the "Pass It On" game where a phrase is secretly passed from person to person only to be compared with the original at the end. The more people that pass it on, the more likely it is to be distorted. The same is true of written documents.

Since the New Testament of the KJV was translated from only a handful of later manuscripts and the modern versions are translated from an edition of the Greek New Testament based upon many more, and some much older manuscripts, the modern versions, at least in regards to textual criticism, are the more accurate. This matters because it was the original writings that were inspired by God, not later copies, so we want to know what the originals said.

So, in summary, the end of Lord's Prayer was not originally part of the Lord's Prayer, but was added later. It hasn't been omitted, but set aside because it is not technically a part of Scripture.