Tertullian and Epiphanius both report that the Lord’s Prayer they found in Marcion’s Evangelicon—located at Evangelicon 10: 2-4—was the very prayer their own congregations recited. Yet Tertullian, almost in passing, adds that Marcion’s copy opened with the plea “Let Thy Holy Spirit come.” That clause later vanished from the canonical Matthew and Luke, showing that the wording preserved by the Marcionite Church is the earliest, unedited version. At the same time, the forms familiar today are products of subsequent interpolation.
The primitive wording never entirely disappeared. Gregory of Nyssa and, centuries later, Maximus the Confessor still quote the Spirit-invocation, proving it lingered on the fringes of the wider Catholic world even after official manuscripts dropped it. Two Greek minuscules—162 (GA 162, 9th c.) and 700 (GA 700, 11th c.)—continue to read ἐλθέτω τὸ πνεῦμά σου τὸ ἅγιον (“Let Thy Holy Spirit come”), providing direct manuscript support that aligns with the Marcionite original.
Modern scholarship confirms the priority of this text. Dieter Roth, Jason BeDuhn, Markus Vinzent, and Matthias Klinghardt judge the Spirit-line authentic to early Luke and to Marcion. Adolf von Harnack, Jason BeDuhn, Theodor Zahn, and Paul-Louis Couchoud—drawing on Tertullian—add that Marcion’s version also softened the final petition from “lead us not” to “suffer us not to be brought,” ensuring the Father could never be cast as an instigator of tests. Such judgments only make sense if the Marcionite wording predates later redactions.
The Lord’s Prayer in the Testamentum (128 C.E.)
Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Let Thy Holy Spirit come upon us, and cleanse us;
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And suffer us not to be brought into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen.
What made that Spirit-petition so threatening? Its very placement—before bread, forgiveness, or deliverance—declares that Christian life begins with a direct gift from the Father Himself. By asking, “Let Thy Holy Spirit come upon us, and cleanse us,” the disciple affirms that purification is an inner work of the Spirit, not a reward for Torah observance or priestly ritual. It also completes the Father-Spirit relationship without ever naming Yahweh, underscoring Marcion’s insistence that the good God acts only through His own Spirit and never through punitive judgments. For later editors, this line was a triple liability: it highlighted a reading uniquely championed by Marcionites, it bypassed episcopal control by implying the Spirit descends simply upon request, and it stirred charismatic expectations that unsettled an increasingly institutional church. The most straightforward remedy was to excise the clause, harmonizing Luke with Matthew, steering prayer language closer to Hebrew Bible precedents, and silencing a bold theological assertion that no longer fit post-Marcionite priorities.
This is not a Marcionite revision of Matthew or Luke; it is the parent text. Later editors then excised the Spirit-line, changed “day by day,” substituted “sins” with “debts” or “trespasses,” and re-hardened the final petition before appending a doxology to Matthew.
Later Edits and the “Yahweh Problem”
Why “suffer” and not “lead”? Tertullian quotes the line as ne patiaris induci nos in temptationem—“do not allow us to be brought into temptation”—not “do not lead us.” His wording reflects the passive Greek μὴ εἰσενεχθῆναι in the Marcionite text: the disciple prays that the Father will not permit hostile powers to carry him into trial, rather than asking God to refrain from personally guiding him toward it. Harnack, BeDuhn, Zahn, and Couchoud stress that this permissive nuance suits Marcion’s theology of a wholly good Father, distancing Him from Yahweh, who openly “tests” and “hardens” in the Hebrew Bible.
The prayer’s frank language jars with Yahweh’s portrait in the Hebrew Bible—the deity who declares, “I create evil” (Isaiah 45: 7) and commands slaughter in Ezekiel 9:6. Rome’s discomfort resurfaced on 13 June 2008, when the Vatican ordered every Catholic hymnal to replace the bare name Yahweh with generic titles; Bishop Francis’s 2019 revision of the prayer (“do not let us fall into temptation”) advanced the same project, softening language that clashed once the Father came to be silently merged with Yahweh rather than with the God Paul and Marcion always preached.
Apostolic Warning and Imperial Suppression
Paul foresaw such distortions: “Though we or an angel from heaven preach any gospel other than that which you received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). His warning proved accurate when harmonisers stripped the Spirit-petition and altered the closing plea.
Hostility soon moved from ink to flame. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 8.2.1-2, recalls Diocletian’s 303 C.E. purge:
“We saw with our own eyes the houses of prayer levelled to the ground, and the divine and sacred Scriptures committed to the flames in the marketplaces.”
Soldiers mainly hunted the Evangelicon, containing this prayer. Constantine filled the vacuum with fifty hybrid Bibles after 325 C.E.—and, within a year of Nicaea, ordered the execution of his wife Fausta and eldest son Crispus, underscoring how power could cloak itself in piety. The Roman canon of 382 C.E. then established the edited text as the authoritative version. Yet patristic quotations, stray manuscripts, and the continuous witness of the Marcionite Church still safeguard the authentic words, unchanged since 128 C.E.
