Is ‘for thine is the kingdom’ part of the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible?

Two versions of one prayer

The Lord’s Prayer comes in two forms. Matthew sets it in the Sermon on the Mount, right after a warning not to pile up words “as the Gentiles do” (Matthew 6:7). Luke gives it when a disciple asks, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Luke’s is shorter. In its oldest manuscripts it opens with a single word, “Father,” and ends with the plea not to be brought into temptation. Neither Gospel, in its earliest copies, closes with a line of praise.

What the manuscripts show

Open the World English Bible, the translation quoted on this page, and you will find the line in the text.

Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

That is because the WEB, like the King James Bible of 1611, follows the majority of Greek manuscripts, most of them medieval. The oldest copies of Matthew, among them the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, stop at “deliver us from the evil one.” One of the earliest Greek copies with the familiar ending, Codex Washingtonianus, dates from about AD 400. Most modern translations print the line in a footnote.

Where the ending came from

The first trace is the Didache, a short Christian manual from around AD 100. It gives the prayer, tells believers to say it three times a day, and closes it with praise of God’s power and glory forever, with no mention of the kingdom (Didache 8.2–3). By the late fourth century a church handbook, the Apostolic Constitutions, had added the kingdom. Scribes who said the prayer every week in church then wrote the ending into their copies of Matthew.

The words themselves are older than the church. Closing a prayer with praise was a Jewish habit, and the model is David’s blessing at the end of his reign.

Yours, Yahweh, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty! For all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, Yahweh, and you are exalted as head above all.

The prayer as a whole grows from the same soil. Its opening echoes the Kaddish, still said in synagogues: may his great name be made holy, may his kingdom come.

Why churches end it differently

• Catholics. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate followed manuscripts without the ending, so the Latin West never prayed it. Since the reformed Mass of 1970, the priest adds a prayer for deliverance and peace after the last petition, and the people answer, “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and for ever.” In the Rosary, the prayer stops at “deliver us from evil. Amen.”
• Orthodox. The priest sings the ending aloud, expanded: the kingdom, the power and the glory “of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
• Protestants. William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526 brought it into English, and the King James Bible fixed the wording: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” Most Protestant churches still pray it that way.

So the line is neither a Catholic omission nor a Protestant invention. It is an ancient Christian response, said aloud in church, that moved from worship into the margins of Matthew and then into its text.