"For Thine Is the Kingdom" Was Added to the Lord's Prayer Later

Did you know the ending of the Lord's Prayer — "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen." — isn't in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew?

The doxology appears in the KJV at Matthew 6:13, but the earliest Greek manuscripts don't have it:

— P-Vindobonensis G 2.323 (early manuscripts) — no doxology
— Codex Sinaiticus (4th century) — no doxology
— Codex Vaticanus (4th century) — no doxology
— Codex Bezae (5th century) — no doxology
— Most Old Latin and Vulgate manuscripts — no doxology

Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer (Luke 11:2–4) doesn't have any doxology either — and Luke is the only other gospel that records the prayer. If Jesus had taught the prayer with a doxology, Luke's omission would be strange.

So where did the doxology come from?

The wording closely echoes 1 Chronicles 29:11–13 — David's prayer at the dedication of the temple: "Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty... Yours is the kingdom, O LORD." The early church appears to have appended a liturgical praise response to Jesus's prayer, borrowing the language from David's temple dedication. The earliest external evidence is the Didache (a Christian liturgical document, ~AD 100), which records the Lord's Prayer with a shorter doxology: "For thine is the power and the glory forever."

Over the next several centuries, copyists incorporated the liturgical ending into manuscripts of Matthew. By the time the Byzantine textual tradition was standardized (the basis for the KJV), the doxology was firmly in the text. Most modern translations (ESV, NIV, NASB, NRSV, CSB) now omit or footnote it.

What's beautiful about this finding is what it reveals about the early church. The earliest Christians couldn't pray Jesus's prayer without ending in praise. The prayer Jesus gave ended at "deliver us from evil." The church added a doxology because they couldn't sit silent with that ending. It became part of liturgy first, then part of manuscript tradition — not the other way around.

Reformed theology has no difficulty here. The text of Matthew, as originally given, didn't include the doxology. But the doctrine the doxology proclaims — that the kingdom, power, and glory belong eternally to God — is taught throughout scripture (1 Chronicles 29, Psalms, Revelation 4–5, Romans 11:33–36). Honest textual criticism preserves the original text without losing the truth.

Jesus taught the prayer. The church couldn't stop praying.

(See ep10 — Mark Ends in Silence — and ep30 — Let He Who Is Without Sin — for the textual-criticism mini-thread on what's in your Bible that wasn't in the earliest copies.)

📖 Passages: Matthew 6:9–13, Luke 11:2–4, 1 Chronicles 29:11–13