Old World Context: Debts and debtors were an ever-present reality for the poor who made up most of Jesus’s audience. A prayer about debts spoke to their everyday reality. The prayer did not ask forgiveness for earthly debts, however, but for debts owed to God. The real-world situation was applied to the vertical relationship with God. Rather than debts owed to Rome or one’s neighbor, these are debts owed to God for the blessings showered upon us. Even though they are heavenly debts, they parallel the worldly debts in that they also seem impossible to pay off. Jesus’s audience knew what it was like to be continually indebted, and they transferred that meaning to the Father as holder of eternal debts.
The difference with the heavenly debts was that they could be absolved by one’s actions. At this point, Jesus returns to a beatitude: “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. 5:7). (See commentary accompanying 3 Nephi 12:7.) We will obtain mercy as we show mercy. We will receive God’s forgiveness as we forgive others. Jesus equates the vertical and horizontal relationships and instructs us to act the same in both realms by demonstrating God’s behavior.
Book of Mormon Context: Mesoamerica did not have a money economy so the debt relationships of Jesus’s Old World audience did not exist in the New World. The Book of Mormon does not refer directly to debts, even though there is a hint that surrounding cultures practiced slavery. (See commentary accompanying Mosiah 2:13.)
Comparison: The 3 Nephi redaction deletes the following phrase (strikethrough):
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. (Matt. 6:11–12)
This verse appears both in Luke 11:13’s version of the Lord’s Prayer and in the Didaché, cited above. Joseph Fielding McConkie and Robert L. Millet have suggested that the omission is explained because Jesus’s apostles in the Old World really would have to go without purse or scrip, and therefore needed to pray that they would be given their daily bread. This suggestion is tempting but it requires that the Sermon on the Mount be directed exclusively to the twelve. Such a reading is improbable, since the sermon makes sense only when given to a assembled multitude. The exclusiveness of this reading seems to be derived from a particular reading of Matthew 5:1–2: “And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying.… ” In this reading, Jesus sees a multitude and purposely leaves them and speaks only to his twelve (“disciples”). However, while the twelve were certainly disciples, he had more disciples than twelve. Here, Jesus is not moving away from the multitudes who were assembling to hear him, but rather finding a good place to teach them. The multitude is all of his disciples, not just the twelve. Both the Old World and the New World sermons are given to a multitude of believers. It is a strained reading to assume that “give us this day our daily bread” resulted from the twelve’s missionary assignment.
John W. Welch proposes yet different reasons for the deletion: “Several reasons may be suggested why Jesus dropped the petition ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ in the Sermon at the Temple. Perhaps the petition did not fit the circumstances because Jesus knew he would spend the entire day with these people and would not take time for lunch. Perhaps it was omitted because Jesus wanted to supply a unique sacramental bread at the end of the day. Perhaps it was dropped because Jesus is the bread of life, and the people had already received their true sustenance that day in the appearance of Jesus.”
All of these reasons begin with the assumption that the text is a verbatim report of Jesus’s words that have not undergone any interactive alteration in Joseph’s translation. The data examined for the nature of the translation throughout this commentary suggest that this is not an accurate assumption. The removal of this particular phrase is suspicious in Joseph’s translation because the next phrase appears verbatim in 3 Nephi. If contextual differences between the Old World and the New explain the omission of “daily bread,” then “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” should also reflect the contextual difference that the New World lacked a money economy. (See commentary on verse 13 above.) In fact, if cultural context were the criterion for inclusion or exclusion, then certainly the need for daily bread would be constant in both societies, while indebtedness would be the variable.
As a final argument, “daily bread” symbolizes spiritual nourishment as well as physical. Jesus called himself the “bread of life” (John 6:33–35). Manna was “bread” from heaven (Ex. 16:15, John 6:31) that symbolized the Father’s protection and care. In the Sermon on the Mount where so much of the imagery is drawn from conditions of poverty, daily bread was an important concern. It is particularly important that “daily bread” follows the pleas for the coming of God’s kingdom. The kingdom lies in the future, but the need for bread is the present. The prayer hopes for the glorious fulness but requires immediate necessities of life.
Attempting to answer the question of dropping the phrase by invoking a Nephite context encounters the interpretive problems noted above. A more plausible reason is that Joseph may have read as improper the prayer that bread be simply given rather than earned by working for it. Joseph may have been attempting to reconcile this passage with God’s command: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Gen. 3:19).