by Brad H. Young
© 1984, Gospel Research Foundation Inc.
Softcover, 46 pages, $7.99

Concise, powerful, to-the-point—the Prayer that Jesus taught us to pray is better understood in the light of Jewish faith and practice. Jesus was Jewish, after all. Jewish prayers, worship, and practical living breathe fresh meaning into the revered words of the Lord’s Prayer. 

Brad Young invites the reader to explore the Jewish roots of the Lord’s Prayer through the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and more. The First-Century perspective of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom of God pervade the application of this prayer in daily life. Identity, holiness, forgiveness, and freedom and the request for our daily bread are themes that make this prayer relevant for its own time in history, and for all time.

Dr. Brad H. Young (PhD Hebrew University, under David Flusser) is the founder and president of the Gospel Research Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is emeritus professor of Biblical Literature in Judaic-Christian Studies in the Graduate School of Theology at Oral Roberts University. Young has taught advanced language and translation courses as well as the Jewish foundations of early Christianity to graduate students for over thirty years.

“The Gospels give abundant evidence of the centrality of prayer in Jesus’ own life, from his baptism to his crucifixion. Today, a new generation of disciples is learning, as did the disciples of old, the necessity and the
power of prayer. We struggle with prayer, as did they. We, too, ask, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’

Can the time-worn and perhaps overly-familiar words of the “Lord’s prayer” be more than a kind of spiritual pacifier for us today? Are there hidden in these simple words concepts that can stimulate and challenge us? Happily, the answer to both questions is yes, as the reader of this booklet by Brad Young will discover.”

— Dwight A. Pryor, founder and former president of the Center for Judaic-Christian Studies

 

Order The Jewish Background to the Lord’s Prayer ($7.99)