That’ll teach me not to ignore footnotes. Thanks for pointing that out.
The doxology only began appearing in later texts of the Byzantine tradition. With that group of texts’ influence on Orthodox liturgy, it was adopted into Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic liturgies. I am not sure why it appears in the Anglican tradition, although I would guess that it has to do with which Greek texts were available, (or used), to re-translate the New Testament in the period of the Reformation and in the years leading up to the Reformation.
Wikipedia has a brief comment on it in the article on the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen”
Since the question seems to be answered, I’ll just say that a while back, I stumbled across the Lord’s Prayer in Old English. I find it rather fascinating.
This has both the text and audio. The audio is somewhat more understandable.
As evidenced by the Didache (see the wiki link above) the Early Church added the doxology as a matter of liturgical practice.
Since the addition of the doxology became standard liturgical practice, some monk/scribe got it into his head to ‘correct’ Matthew’s text and add in the doxology. Thus, many ancient, but not the earliest, copies of Matthew’s Gospel have the doxology.
When the King James bible was written, the translators didn’t know that the doxology was a later addition and so they included it in the text. The Anglican Church, especially with its fondness for the KJV Bible, keeps the doxology appended to its liturgical praying of The Lord’s Prayer.
In the Catholic liturgical reforms of Vatican Council II, there was a desire to stay true to modern biblical scholarship by not appending the doxology to The Lord’s Prayer since that’s not what scholars say is the original text (as best as we can piece together from ancient copies). So, they put an intervening prayer between the The Lord’s Prayer and the doxology. Of course, one can rightly point out that this nod to biblical scholarship is a bit inconsistent in the Catholic Church since it still uses the KJV of the translation, which, by modern standards, is a poor translation of the original Greek. But, they don’t want to take the heat of changing the text in English that everyone knows by heart.
That’s pretty cool of the teacher. Most of the Catholic schools I’ve lived near or had relatives attend (I have some Catholic relatives) have always had non-Catholics as students. In my LDS ward in Busan, two of the women graduated from a Catholic high school.
For some reason I could never say the Lord’s prayer without stuttering.
You wouldn’t happen to have a cite for that assertion, would you?
(Unless, of course, I’ve been whooshed and, in that case, just ignore the question.)
Why would such an assertion be a whoosh? Scholarship of translation evolves over time, hopefully for the better. Access to ancient manuscripts and technology for dating them were much more primitive in the KJ’s time than today.
But below is a link for KJV fundamentalists who pretty much claim that the KJV is an inerrant translation. (!) They make their case why the doxology is really part of Matthew’s original text even though earlier copies omit it…
I dont’ buy that the translators were that incompetent to actually add another verse as it were to the prayer without realizing what they were doing. And a freaked out fundamentalist site really isn’t going to persuade me of…well, anything at all, really.
Not incompetent, ignorant. They didn’t know the things that modern scholars know. Many ancient copies have come to light in the past four hundred years. They didn’t have carbon dating or microscopic examinations or infrared imaging or computer databases during that time period. It’s not like there was just one text to which all other copies agreed. Even today there is debate over what was the very original text. All we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of the original text and those copies don’t all agree with each other. And we know more about those copies now than we did 400 years ago.
They surely were at least aware of the Byzantine text being a tad different than others, yes?
Witch!!
Not quite. The word was “sockdologizing” Our American Cousin - Wikipedia
I’m not sure they even had that text, and if they did, they were seriously lacking in the archeological and philological knowledge to date them. If they did have both texts, they’d know that the versions with the doxology were more numerous and thus assume it was the better attestation to the original, which can be sometimes the case. Including the doxology at that time was the state of the art in reconstructing and translating the original. Since then, the preponderance of scholarly opinion has shifted.
Update: Here’s a good graph on the text used by the KJV:
I buy the graph, I just don’t buy your explanation. Sorry.
OK, Monty, so what’s your explanation for how it got in there?
And moriah, that link is hilarious. They claim that it must be authentic, since it appears in a really old text, and we should ignore the fact that it doesn’t appear in two even older texts, since just because a text is old doesn’t mean anything.
No shit! Of course he had to wait for a cue…
I was christened Anglican and have only attended Anglican, United, Salvation Army, and a Pentecostal church, so this was my first experience with a Catholic church (other than visiting tourist sites) so I wouldn’t notice anything other than those glaring points (I posted another thread about the song “Amazing Grace”.) I did notice that when the priest paused everybody seemed to know what to say during the pause, but I couldn’t make out what was said.
Thanks for the explanation, everyone, I thought I had missed something important since I stopped going to church.
As far as I know, the previously mentioned Protestant was the only non-Catholic I went to school with all 12 years. Obviously, that’s not TRUE, but I had discarded my faith by about 10th grade, and never cared anyway. Most students in my school gave a half a fuck about their Catholicism at best - they went to mass because forced, and did the rituals, but never seemed to care.