The "Our" in Recovery
Starting with "Our Father" immediately reinforces the principle of fellowship—that no one has to recover alone.
Many 12-step meetings close with the Lord’s Prayer, hands joined in a circle. Here is where those words actually come from.
Where the Prayer Comes From
The Lord’s Prayer appears twice in the New Testament: a longer version in Matthew 6:9–13, set inside the Sermon on the Mount, and a shorter one in Luke 11:2–4, where Jesus gives it in response to a disciple asking, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Matthew’s is the fuller form most people recite; Luke’s is briefer, dropping lines like “your will be done.” A detailed comparison is offered by Bible Odyssey, a site run by the Society of Biblical Literature.
Jesus almost certainly taught in Aramaic, the everyday language of first-century Galilee, but no Aramaic original of the prayer survives. Both Gospels were written in Koine Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman world, so the prayer as we actually have it is a Greek text from the start — a point made in the Vatican Library’s own materials on the earliest manuscripts.
The Earliest Surviving Copies
The oldest known copy of the Lord’s Prayer is in Papyrus 75 (also called Bodmer Papyrus XIV–XV, or the Hanna Papyrus “Mater Verbi”), a Greek codex dated to about 175–225 CE that preserves Luke’s version. It was donated to the Vatican Library in 2007. Matthew’s fuller version survives in the great fourth-century codices — Codex Sinaiticus, held mostly at the British Library, and Codex Vaticanus. Sinaiticus, handwritten around 1,600 years ago, is the oldest complete New Testament in existence.
Why the Words Differ Between Groups
The English wording most meetings use came down a long chain: Greek to Latin, then Latin to English. St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate gave Western Christianity the “Pater Noster” (“Our Father”). In 1526, William Tyndale printed the first English New Testament translated directly from the Greek, and his choice of “trespasses” passed into the 1549 Book of Common Prayer — which is why so many recite “forgive us our trespasses.” Notably, the 1611 King James Version itself reads “debts,” not “trespasses,” so the familiar spoken wording actually follows the older prayer-book tradition rather than the KJV.
The other common difference is the ending. Many Protestants add the doxology — “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever” — but textual scholars such as Bruce Metzger concluded it was a later addition by the early church, not part of the earliest manuscripts of Matthew. It is absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and Luke never had it. A short form does appear very early, in the Didache (roughly 70–90 CE), which gives the prayer and then adds, “Pray thus three times a day.”
How It Became Part of 12-Step Meetings
The prayer entered recovery through the Oxford Group, the Christian fellowship where AA’s founders got their start in the mid-1930s. According to Alcoholics Anonymous’s own literature, the Oxford Groups customarily closed their meetings with the Lord’s Prayer, and the practice carried straight into early AA — documented in AA history as early as 1938–1939 — which had no literature of its own yet. In a letter dated April 14, 1959, co-founder Bill W. wrote that the custom “probably came from the Oxford Groups who were influential in the early days of A.A.” Today each group is autonomous, so some close with the Lord’s Prayer, some with the Serenity Prayer, and some with a moment of silence.