Piety as theater. The Sermon's middle chapter opens with a header for its first three sections: do not do your righteousness "to be gazed at" — and the verb is theathēnai, the root that gave Greek its theater. The audience-word is no accident, because the performers arrive one verse later: hypokritai — in ordinary Greek, stage actors, the masked professionals (Galilee knew them: the theater at Sepphoris stood an hour's walk from Nazareth). A textual note sits in verse 1: the later manuscripts read "do not your alms" (KJV), narrowing the header to the first example; the earliest read "your righteousness" — the umbrella over all three practices — and the critical text this translation follows keeps the umbrella. No trumpet before you (no evidence anyone literally trumpeted their giving — this is satire, drawn with one stroke); the left hand kept ignorant of the right; and the section's refrain: "your Father, who sees in secret, will repay you." This site's shelf already holds the name for that: El Roi, "the God who sees" — Hagar's coinage in the desert (Genesis 16:13). One more scribal gift declined: the KJV adds "shall reward thee openly" in all three refrains — the word is absent from the earliest witnesses, and its addition quietly ruins the point: the older text lets the secret stay secret.

Paid in full. "They have their reward" — apechousin, the standing formula on Greek commercial receipts: paid in full, account closed. The applause was the payment; nothing further is owed. The word recurs like a stamp at verses 2, 5, and 16 — three receipts, three closed accounts.

The inner room, and the babble-word. Against praying on the corners of the main streets ("so that they may appear to men" — watch that verb; verse 16 will play a whole pun on it), the instruction is architectural: the tameion — the storeroom, the one room in a Galilean house with a door that shut and locked. And against the pagan style: "do not babble on" — battalogēsēte, a word found almost nowhere before this verse and quite possibly built to sound like what it means (batta-batta…), glossed by the very next phrase, "their many words" (KJV "use not vain repetitions"; NIV "do not keep on babbling"; NWT "do not say the same things over and over again"). The theology underneath is the chapter's quiet engine: "your Father knows what you need before you ask" — prayer, in this Sermon, is not information transfer.

The most-recited text in human history. Its architecture is a hinge: an address, then three your-petitions (your name, your kingdom, your will), then three us-petitions (bread, debts, rescue) — heaven's agenda before ours. "Our Father, who is in the heavens" — Matthew's plural, kept as everywhere in this book. "Let your name be sanctified" (hagiasthētō — set apart, treated as holy): the KJV's "hallowed be thy name" is the same word wearing four centuries of polish (the NWT reads "sanctified" with us). "Let your will come to be" — genēthētō, the LXX's own verb from creation's "let there be." Then the hardest word in the prayer: ton arton hēmōn ton epiousion. This adjective appears nowhere else in Greek literature — Origen, the third century's best philologist, said plainly that the evangelists appear to have coined it. From epienai, "the coming (day)," it most likely means bread for the day ahead — asked for today: tomorrow's ration requested one sunrise at a time, the rhythm of the manna. The shelf tells the whole uncertainty: KJV "our daily bread"; Douay, translating the Vulgate of Matthew literally, prints the strangest word on any shelf — "our supersubstantial bread." And "forgive us our debts" (opheilēmata — Aramaic choba means both debt and sin; KJV "debts" with us; Luke's version says "sins"; the liturgy's "trespasses" comes not from the prayer but from verse 14, via Tyndale). The last petition pays this site's freshest echo: "rescue us apo tou ponērou" — "from the evil one," or "from evil": the same ambiguous genitive flagged at 5:37, unresolvable by grammar alone (KJV "deliver us from evil"; NIV "the evil one").

The famous missing doxology. "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen" (KJV, and Geneva before it) — is not in the earliest manuscripts. Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Bezae all end the prayer at "the evil one"; the early commentators who walk through the prayer line by line (Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian) show no knowledge of it in Matthew. Its pedigree is liturgical: the Didache — a church manual within living memory of the apostles — already appends a shorter form ("for yours is the power and the glory forever") when it prescribes this prayer three times a day, and the full triplet echoes David's blessing in 1 Chronicles 29:11. Worship wrote it; scribes, hearing it every week, eventually copied what their ears expected. The critical text omits it, and so does this translation — in the company, delightfully, of Douay: the Vulgate never had it, so on this most Protestant of lines, Rome and the critical editors agree against the King James.

Where "trespasses" came from. The prayer said debts; this two-verse coda — the only petition Jesus stops to underline — switches to paraptōmata, "missteps" (a stumble off the path, a false step). Tyndale rendered it "trespasses" here, the Book of Common Prayer carried his word up into the prayer itself, and English-speaking congregations have prayed a verse-14 word in a verse-12 slot ever since. The logic of the coda is a closed loop, stated without cushioning: forgiveness withheld below interrupts forgiveness from above — the one petition of the prayer whose terms the pray-er sets personally.

The Greek's own pun, kept. The gloomy fasters "make their faces disappear" — ash-smeared, unwashed, theatrically wrecked — "so that they may appear to men as fasting": aphanizousin… phanōsin, vanish to be visible, the wordplay sitting right in the Greek and kept in the English. The counter-instruction is festive camouflage: oil your head and wash your face — groom yourself like a man going to a banquet, so the fast belongs to God alone. And a small fidelity: verse 18 twice shifts to a different secret-word (en tō kryphaiō, "in hiding") than verses 4 and 6's en tō kryptō ("in secret") — the variation is the text's, so it is this translation's too.

Treasure that disappears — the pun's second act. The verb that vanished the fasters' faces returns for the treasure: moth and devouring (brōsis, "eating" — rust, worm, rot; KJV "rust") "make them disappear" (aphanizei — the same word as verse 16). And "thieves dig through" (dioryssousin) — through, not in: a Galilean burglar went through the mud-brick wall itself. Then the needle: "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" — the Sermon's compass; the heart follows the deposit.

The undivided eye, and the Aramaic ledger-word. "If your eye is undivided" — haplous: single, simple, sound (KJV "single"; NWT "simple"; NIV "healthy") — against the evil eye, which in Hebrew idiom is the stingy eye (Deuteronomy 15:9 warns against an "evil eye" toward a poor brother): the whole pair is about undivided generosity as much as optics, which is exactly why the next sentence is about divided service. "No one can be a slave to two masters" (douleuein — not moonlighting; ownership). "You cannot be slaves to God and to Mammon" — mamōnas, Aramaic for wealth/property (from the same root as amen: that in which one trusts), left untranslated by Matthew and by nearly everyone since (KJV "mammon"; NIV breaks ranks: "money") — not a Canaanite deity, but capital personified by the grammar of the sentence itself: only masters have slaves.

The anxiety drumbeat. Six times in ten verses: merimnaō — "be anxious, be pulled apart by care" (vv 25, 27, 28, 31, 34 twice). The KJV's "take no thought" is 1611 English in which "thought" meant anxious brooding — four centuries later it reads like a ban on planning, one of the shelf's best examples of a translation aging out from under its readers (ASV already corrects to "be not anxious"; TLB "don't worry"). The arguments are two creatures and a flower: "the birds of the heaven" — the Greek Bible's exact phrase from the creation account, where the Creator hands "every green plant for food" to everything that lives (Genesis 1:30): the feeding of the unemployed sparrow was on the record from page one. A textual footnote: the earliest witnesses ask only "what you will eat" in verse 25 — the "or what you will drink" of the later mass (KJV) drifts in from verse 31, where the question belongs. The cubit of verse 27 measures a puzzle: added to one's hēlikia — height, or lifespan? A cubit of height would be grotesque; a cubit of time is a mixed metaphor most readers hear as the point — worry cannot add the smallest unit to either (NIV "a single hour").

Solomon loses a beauty contest, and the pet word. "Study the lilies of the field" — likely the scarlet anemones that still carpet Galilee each spring — "not even Solomon in all his glory" (the gold-shielded, ivory-throned zenith of 1 Kings 10) "was clothed like one of these." Grass — oven fuel by tomorrow, in the klibanos — outdressing the richest king on the shelf; "will he not much more clothe you, you little-faiths?" One Greek word, oligopistoi — Matthew's pet name for disciples (it returns in the storm, 8:26, and on the water, 14:31): not faithless, just chronically under-supplied — a diagnosis with affection in it. Verse 33 carries one last variant: the earliest text says "seek first the kingdom, and his righteousness" — later scribes supplied "of God" (KJV), giving Matthew a phrase he almost never uses (his idiom, thirty-plus times, is "of the heavens" — the addition is well-meant and un-Matthean). And the Sermon's driest proverb closes the chapter: "Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" — tomorrow is a bad creditor; do not borrow from it.