It dawned on me a while back that there is nothing specifically Christian about the content of the Pater Noster. Its origin of course is Christian. When his disciples asked him how they should pray, Jesus taught them the prayer. (Mt 6:9-13) If you carefully read the prayer below you will see that there is no mention in it of anything specifically Christian: no mention of Jesus as the Son of God, no mention of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us (the Incarnation), no mention of the Resurrection, nothing that could be construed as even implicitly Trinitarian. So I thought to myself: a believing (non-Christian) Jew could pray this prayer, and could do so in good faith. There is nothing at the strictly doctrinal level that could prevent him. Or is there?
In the context in which the Pater Noster is embedded, there are of course indications of those specifically Christian doctrines. And so a Christian who recites, or rather prays the prayer, whether verbally or mentally, whether by himself in his ‘closet’ (cubilicum) as per MT 6:6, KJV, or together with others, does so with those doctrines resonating in the background. My concern, however, is the prayer itself and whether a believing (as opposed to a secular) Jew could pray it in good faith.
Christians pray the Psalms. In fact, at Christian monasteries, psalmody is most of what goes on in the oratory from Vigils in the morning until Vespers at night. Do any believing Jews pray the Our Father? Would they have a good reason not to? No more than a believing Christian would have a good reason not to incorporate into his prayer life Plotinus' "It is by the One that all beings are beings" (from the Enneads) despite the non-Christian provenience of this marvellous and beautiful saying.
PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.
OUR FATHER, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
The philosopher Andrew Bailey comments on an earlier version of the above:
A long-standing tradition at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame was to recite the Our Father before meetings. Many (but not all) Jewish philosophers associated with the Center would join in these prayers in the years I was there. I asked about it once, and the answer I got was along these lines: "Of course I pray the prayer. Whoever wrote it — whether Jesus of Nazareth or one of his disciples — was definitely a Jew, after all."
No doubt, whoever wrote it, or rather composed it, was a Jew; that fact, however, does not by itself suffice to show that a Jew could pray the prayer in good faith. It would have to be added that the Jew in question was a believer in the God of the Bible.