Whose Father in Heaven?

The Lord’s Prayer can be traced
back to the historical Jesus, sort of.

One single word in the gospel of Matthew symbolizes the work that early Christians had to do to turn Jesus’ Jewish sect into an independent religion. The historical Jesus taught Jews to pray to God as “Father.” This instruction was recorded in an early written collection of Jesus’ sayings, the so-called Q document, and it turns up in Luke’s gospel. In Matthew, however, the anonymous evangelist has improved the wording. Matthew has Jesus teach people to pray to “Our Father.” Jesus was a mystic, independent of any religious structure, but Matthew needed him to be the founder of a church, so he inserted the word “our.”

The Jews had a formal, communal religious practice, headed up ultimately by the leaders of the Jerusalem Temple, but that wasn’t Jesus’ way. Like John the Baptist before him, he led a ministry that implicitly challenged the spiritual authority of the Temple and the Jews’ religious leaders. True to mystic practice everywhere, Jesus taught people to pray privately. About a generation after Jesus’ calamitous death on a cross, his followers wrote down the sayings they remembered, often arranging them in groups by theme. The Lord’s Prayer, which starts “Our Father,” is one such collection. Historians consider it plausible that the prayer was assembled by early Christians rather than being a formula that Jesus literally told people to use. Referring to God as “Father” was typical of Jesus, and he probably really did teach people to pray to God as a father in the sky (“heaven”). Luke includes the Lords’ Prayer from Q, and in Luke the prayer starts, “Father…”

That’s all well and good for an individual, but it doesn’t do for a church. The author of Matthew was particularly concerned about the church, and he’s the only evangelist to refer to the church (or “assembly”) in his gospel. Unlike Jesus, this evangelist didn’t want people praying in their closets. He needed a prayer for a Christian congregation to pray publicly and in unison. For that purpose, the prayer in Q needed to start with “our.” With that addition, it could be a congregation’s prayer, with a group of people saying it together. All across the Christian world down through the centuries, Matthew’s version of the prayer has been the one recited in church, just as the evangelist intended. The prayer is known as the “Our Father” (or “Pater Noster”).

We humans evolved religion to bind ourselves together in community. Mystics, such as Jesus, promote a more personal and internal spiritual experience, and in every religious tradition they face resistance from priests, who prefer uniformity and conformity. Jesus was charismatic enough to found a sect that continued among pious Jews after his execution, but it was a counter-culture movement within Judaism, not a new religion. In order to be suitable for an independent church, Jesus’ tradition needed some revising, and the author of Matthew was evidently up to the task.

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Jesus’ reference to God as "father" or "dad" (abba) may have a special meaning if indeed he was a bastard.

Was Jesus a Bastard?

Baptism (“washing”) was for sinners, so Jesus’
baptism required some explanation. 

Of the four canonical gospels, Mark is the earliest and the most reliable. Mark’s style is frank and hasty, reporting rather too frankly on some of Jesus’ embarrassing biographical details. Later gospel writers “improved” on Mark’s embarrassing stories by omitting them, revising them, or explaining them away. For example, when Jesus was crucified, did he cry out in despair, like a mortal man? Yes, says Mark. No, say Luke and John. Did Jesus get baptized as a repentant sinner? Mark says yes, but the other three gospels finesse the issue away. Mark wrote about Jesus getting angry at a pathetic leper. Imagine that, sweet Jesus being angry at a sick person! Later, a scribe changed Mark’s text so that Jesus felt not anger but compassion. In addition to all these questionable details, Mark makes Jesus look bad by implying that he had no father. There’s no Joseph, and Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth refer to him as “Mary’s son.” In Jesus’ patriarchal culture, if you were a woman’s son, that meant you had no father.

Being a bastard fits the life story of the historical Jesus, a penniless hillbilly. When he talked about the poor and the hungry, he wasn’t making it up. His charismatic career took place in the hinterlands of Galilee, where rural Jews were being systematically impoverished by the Greek-speaking foreigners in the cities. In Jesus’ insignificant home village of Nazareth, people lived in built-out caves. In Jerusalem, Jews were having a tough time of it, but at least they could look down their noses on the racially impure Jews in the hills of Galilee. Jesus wasn’t an aristocratic philosopher like Plato. He wasn’t a learned poet like Lao Tzu. He wasn’t a prince (the Buddha), a priest (Zarathustra), or a merchant (Muhammad). He was a country preacher, a faith healer, and an exorcist. How perfect, that this poor indigenous laborer, sent to his death by the elites of Jerusalem, should also be a bastard.

After the gospel of Mark, Matthew and Luke assign Jesus a respectable father: Joseph. This addition was part of the same campaign that edited out Jesus’ mortal cry on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” No one wants to worship someone who felt abandoned by God, and no one wants to worship a bastard.

Readers' Questions

Q. When you say that the gospel writers after Mark finessed Jesus’ baptism away, what to do you mean?

A. Bible scholars conclude that Jesus’ baptism was embarrassing (and probably factual) because of the way the other gospel writers minimized it. Matthew leaves the baptism in, but explains it away. Here, Jesus isn’t repenting of sins and he doesn’t need baptism, but he goes through the motions because it’s proper. Luke mentions Jesus’ baptism in passing, and he has the heavens open up when Jesus is praying, not when he’s baptized. In John, Jesus isn’t baptized at all. In fact, Jesus one-ups John by leading an even bigger baptism campaign of his own.

Q. Even with the addition of Joseph, isn’t Jesus still a bastard because Mary got pregnant before he had sex with her? Didn’t early Christians consider him a bastard based on that story?

A. In Jesus’ culture, a man’s father was the man who publicly proclaimed him as his son, biology aside. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus has a father and is not a bastard by local standards. That’s why Matthew changes Jesus from being a carpenter (in Mark) to being the son of a carpenter (that is, not a bastard).

Hunger Is Our Secret Weapon

Nosy and hungry, she's the mother of us all

As mammals, we have big appetites. Cold-blooded bugs, fish, and lizards can get by on less food. A constrictor snake can go months without eating. We hot-blooded critters don’t have it that easy. Without food, a shrew dies in 5 hours. Keeping your body hot costs energy, even with fur. A mother secreting milk for her young uses up even more energy. It’s physiologically expensive to be a mammal, so mammals have no choice but to eat a lot more than reptiles. The need to keep eating or die seems like a hefty drawback, but we turned it into our special power. Hunger drove us mammals into evolutionary high gear.

Reptiles lead a slow motion life and spend a lot of time just hanging out, conserving their energy until it’s needed. The first shrews, on the other hand, learned to hunt quickly, racing through the night stuffing their toothy snouts with bugs. In the great Darwinian contest of life, reptiles competed against each other on a weekly schedule, but we mammals lived and died by the day. Natural selection worked faster with us, clearing out the less fit and rewarding the winners with multiple litters. And now we mammals dominate every environmental niche worth dominating.

What’s more, we humans have big, hungry brains. Our brains use up a fourth to a fifth of the body’s metabolic energy. Pressed to feed these hungry brains, our hominid forefathers ventured out onto the African savanna and began scavenging meat. In terms of sheer nutritional density, meat beats plants hands down, and hunger made meat eaters out of us. Returning to the tribe with meat, males finally had something special to offer their mates and children. With their new role to play as meat providers, males stopped being mere rabble rousers and became fathers. It’s incessant mammalian hunger that got us where we are today.


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