Missionary pages aimed at Muslims usually end with a prayer for the reader to say aloud: a few lines asking forgiveness, declaring that God raised Jesus from the dead, accepting him as Lord, and sometimes renouncing Islam by name. The words are offered as the way into salvation. ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him also gave his followers a prayer, when one of them asked him to teach them how to pray. It is short, every church still recites it, and it holds none of the things the missionary’s prayer is built on. It has no cross, no resurrection, no confession that ʿĪsā is Lord, and no mediator. This page reads the prayer ʿĪsā taught, looks at how he himself prayed, and sets both beside the prayer Paul taught his churches and the prayer the Qurʾān teaches Muslims.

The prayer ʿĪsā taught #

Luke sets the scene. ʿĪsā had been praying, and when he stopped, “one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.”¹ Matthew gives the fuller form of the answer, in the Sermon on the Mount.

9After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11Give us this day our daily bread. 12And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. 13And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.²

Read it slowly and notice what it holds. It is addressed to one: “Our Father which art in heaven”. It praises His name and asks for His kingdom and His will. It asks Him for bread, for forgiveness and for protection. It is prayed by a community, “our” and “us”, which ʿĪsā plainly includes himself in when he teaches it. Every petition goes straight to God.

Now notice what it lacks. It does not mention ʿĪsā. It does not ask God to forgive “for the sake of” anyone’s death; it asks God to forgive “as we forgive our debtors”, and ʿĪsā adds at once that this condition is the point: “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you”.³ It does not say that the one who prays must first believe in the resurrection, or confess any creed about the one teaching it. A Jew of his day could pray every word of it. So can a Muslim, who calls on the same Lord of the worlds and asks Him for the same things, though a Muslim does not call God “Father”.

If the cross were the centre of the message, this would be the place to put it. A teacher who believed that forgiveness was impossible without his own blood, and who was asked directly how to pray, would surely have said so. ʿĪsā taught his disciples to ask God for forgiveness as plainly as they asked Him for bread.

How ʿĪsā himself prayed #

The Gospels show ʿĪsā at prayer far more often than they show him receiving prayer. “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.”⁴ He told his followers to pray in private and without show: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret”.⁵ He warned against piling up words: “for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”⁶

The fullest picture is the night in Gethsemane. Luke says that he “kneeled down, and prayed”. Matthew says more:

39And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.⁷

He fell on his face. This is the posture of Ibrāhīm, of whom Genesis says “And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him”, and of Mūsā and Hārūn, who “fell upon their faces” at the door of the tabernacle.⁸ It is the posture of a servant before his Lord, and it is the posture in which more than a billion Muslims pray five times a day. The man in Gethsemane, face to the ground, asking to be spared and then submitting his will to God’s, prays the way the prophets prayed, and the way Muslims pray. He is not the one being prayed to. He is the one praying.

“Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord” #

ʿĪsā knew that some would make him the object of their devotion while neglecting what he taught, and he warned against it in the same sermon that holds the prayer:

21Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.⁹

Calling him “Lord” is not enough. Doing the will of God is what counts. Paul taught the reverse. In his letter to the Romans, salvation hangs on exactly the confession ʿĪsā said would not suffice:

9That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.¹⁰

This verse, not anything ʿĪsā said, is the source of the missionary’s prayer. Paul addressed his first letter to the Corinthians to “all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord”, and said that Christ, at the right hand of God, “also maketh intercession for us”.¹¹ The letter to Timothy, written in Paul’s name, adds “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”.¹² ʿĪsā taught his disciples to pray to “Our Father” with no one in between. Paul put a mediator in the way and told his churches to call on the mediator’s name.

Even John’s Gospel, where ʿĪsā tells the disciples to ask “in my name”, keeps the direction of prayer: “And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you.”¹³ Ask me nothing; ask God. The prayer of the Gospels goes up to God. The prayer of Paul’s churches went increasingly to Christ, and in time to his mother and the saints as well.

Where the sinner’s prayer comes from #

No one in the New Testament says a “sinner’s prayer”. When the crowd at Pentecost asked Peter what they should do, he told them to repent and be baptised. The Ethiopian official in Acts was baptised by the roadside after a one-line statement of faith, and even that line is missing from the oldest manuscripts. Nobody is led through a set prayer of acceptance.¹⁴ The short prayer of personal acceptance, said once to “receive Christ”, took its modern shape in the revival preaching of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and spread through evangelical tracts after the Second World War. It is a recent custom built on Romans 10:9. The renunciation of Islam that some versions add is more recent still.

None of this makes prayer itself suspect. It means that the prayer missionaries offer Muslims as the gate of salvation is not the prayer ʿĪsā gave. His prayer is older, shorter and addressed to God alone, and Muslims already pray in its spirit.

The prayer the Qurʾān teaches #

The Qurʾān opens with a prayer, al-Fātiḥah, which Muslims recite in every unit of every prayer, at least seventeen times a day.

بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ ۝ ٱلۡحَمۡدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ ٱلۡعَـٰلَمِينَ ۝ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ ۝ مَـٰلِكِ يَوۡمِ ٱلدِّينِ ۝ إِيَّاكَ نَعۡبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسۡتَعِينُ ۝ ٱهۡدِنَا ٱلصِّرَٰطَ ٱلۡمُسۡتَقِيمَ ۝ صِرَٰطَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَنۡعَمۡتَ عَلَيۡهِمۡ غَيۡرِ ٱلۡمَغۡضُوبِ عَلَيۡهِمۡ وَلَا ٱلضَّآلِّينَ

“In the name of Allāh, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful. [All] praise is [due] to Allāh, Lord of the worlds — The Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Recompense. It is You we worship and You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path — The path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have earned [Your] anger or of those who are astray.”¹⁵

Set it beside the prayer of Matthew 6 and the kinship is plain. Both begin with God and His praise: “Hallowed be thy name”, “[All] praise is [due] to Allāh”. Both acknowledge His rule: “Thy kingdom come”, “Sovereign of the Day of Recompense”. Both turn on submission: “Thy will be done”, “It is You we worship”. Both ask for help and protection: “deliver us from evil”, “Guide us to the straight path”. Both are said in the plural, by a community standing before God together. Neither names a mediator.

The Qurʾān promises that God hears such prayer directly: “And when My servants ask you, [O Muḥammad], concerning Me — indeed I am near. I respond to the invocation of the supplicant when he calls upon Me.”¹⁶ And again: “And your Lord says, ‘Call upon Me; I will respond to you.’”¹⁷ It is the promise ʿĪsā made in the Sermon on the Mount, “Ask, and it shall be given you”.¹⁸

A Christian who prays the Lord’s Prayer and means it is already doing what ʿĪsā asked: speaking to God alone, praising Him, submitting to His will, and asking Him for forgiveness. The question this page leaves with the reader is a simple one. If that is how ʿĪsā prayed and taught his friends to pray, whose teaching put another name between them and God?

In short #

The prayer ʿĪsā taught is addressed to God alone and asks forgiveness directly, on condition of forgiving others (Matthew 6:9–15).
It mentions no cross, resurrection, creed or mediator.
ʿĪsā prayed alone, before dawn, and in Gethsemane fell on his face, as Ibrāhīm and Mūsā did (Mark 1:35; Matthew 26:39).
He warned that saying “Lord, Lord” was not enough (Matthew 7:21); Paul made that confession the condition of salvation (Romans 10:9).
The sinner’s prayer is a modern evangelical custom, not a practice of the New Testament.
Al-Fātiḥah follows the same pattern as the Lord’s Prayer: praise, God’s rule, submission, guidance, all addressed to God alone (al-Fātiḥah 1:1–7).

What ʿĪsā said about God and himself is on Who is Christ? ʿĪsā ibn Maryam in his own words. What he taught about sin and forgiveness is on Original sin: what ʿĪsā taught and what Paul added.

Luke 11:1 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 6:9–13 (KJV). The closing words, “For thine is the kingdom…”, are absent from the oldest manuscripts of Matthew and from Luke’s version (11:2–4), and modern critical texts treat them as a later liturgical addition. ↩
Matthew 6:14 (KJV). ↩
Mark 1:35 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 6:6 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 6:8 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 26:39 (KJV); Luke 22:41. ↩
Genesis 17:3; Numbers 20:6 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 7:21 (KJV). ↩
Romans 10:9 (KJV). ↩
1 Corinthians 1:2; Romans 8:34 (KJV). ↩
1 Timothy 2:5 (KJV). On the letters written in Paul’s name, see Two Pauls. ↩
John 16:23 (KJV). ↩
Acts 2:38; 8:36–38. Acts 8:37, the official’s confession in the King James text, is absent from the oldest Greek manuscripts and omitted by modern critical texts. ↩
Sūrah al-Fātiḥah 1:1–7. Qurʾānic verses are rendered after Saheeh International. ↩
Sūrah al-Baqarah 2:186. ↩
Sūrah Ghāfir 40:60. ↩
Matthew 7:7 (KJV). ↩