How to Pray for People

Eva:        Guys, that’s so sad. I’m going to sign off and pray for her.

Skylar:  Oh, good for you, honey. If I had a god, I’d totally do the same thing.

Bring It On (2011)

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here today for your enjoyment and edification, I present – a List of Things the Pauline Epistles Say Believers Should Pray For One Another. You know, in case you’ve never yet felt compelled to compile one of your own. Caveats first: I’m not including other bits of the New Testament, mainly because they don’t really specify things to pray for one another in the same way; and I’m not including things Paul says to pray for people outside the body of Christ, because that’s not what I’m interested in today. I’m also going to try to make the imminent deluge of passages a bit more navigable by underlining what I think are the key things being prayed for. Let’s go.

 

Someone praying, presumably. I never understood why putting your hands together like that should be the official position, but at least it’s a useful visual cue.

Part One: Things Paul Says He Prays For Others

Romans 1:10-12:

that somehow, by God’s will, he may now at last succeed in coming to them,

because he longs to see them, that he may impart to them some spiritual gift to strengthen them –

that is, that they may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.

2 Corinthians 13:7:

that they may not do wrong – and that for its own sake, not so that he himself might not seem to have failed.

Ephesians 1:16-19:

that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give them the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him,

having the eyes of their hearts enlightened, that they may know

what is the hope to which he has called them,

what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,

and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power towards us who believe.

Ephesians 3:14-19:

that according to the riches of his glory he may grant them to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in their inner being,

so that Christ may dwell in their hearts through faith;

that they, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,

that they may be filled with the fullness of God.

Philippians 1:9-11:

that their love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment,

so that they may approve what is excellent,

and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,

filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Christ Jesus, to the glory and praise of God.

Colossians 1:9-12:

that they may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,

so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him,

bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God,

being strengthened in all power, according to his glorious might,

for all endurance and patience with joy,

giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified them to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

2 Thessalonians 1:11-12:

that our God may make them worthy of the calling

and may fulfil every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power,

so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in them,

and they in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Philemon 6:

that the sharing of his [Philemon’s] faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ.

And a bonus one, which Paul says his buddy Epaphras prays on behalf of others –

Colossians 4:12:

that they may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.

Part Two: Things Paul Asks Others To Pray For Him

Romans 15:30-32:

that he may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea,

and that his service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints,

so that by God’s will he may come to them with joy and be refreshed in their company.

2 Corinthians 1:9-11:

that he may be delivered from deadly peril when he faces it again,

so that many will give thanks on his behalf for the blessing granted him through the prayers of many.

Ephesians 6:19:

that words may be given him to proclaim the gospel boldly.

Colossians 4:3-4:

that God may open a door to him for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ;

that he may make it clear, as he ought to speak.

2 Thessalonians 3:1-2:

that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honoured,

and that he may be delivered from wicked and evil men, for the faith is not everyone’s.

Hebrews 13:18-19:

because he is sure he has a clear conscience, desiring to act honourably in all things,

that he may be restored to them the sooner.

OK, that’s all the passages I can find in which Paul expressly says what his prayer for his addressees is, or asks them to pray for something in particular on behalf of him or those with him.¹ Now, let’s see whether you agree with me about the Recurrent Themes discernible in these extracts; in descending order of emphasis:

1)       Increased knowledge of God and the gospel

2)      Increased love and godly behaviour (to the glory of God)

3)      Preaching the gospel well

4)      Opportunity to see (and minister to) one another

5)      Deliverance from danger

Should ‘being strengthened’ make the list, you wonder? I did underline it a couple of times above. But take another look at that chunk of Ephesians 3: the strength in question is strength to comprehend the fullness of the love of Christ. So I’ve decided to subsume that aspect into Category 1. (That’s a bit blimey, isn’t it – the love of Christ is so mind-bogglingly vast that you actually need to pray for the strength to comprehend it.)

 

So yeah, not that sort of strength. Though I’m suitably impressed.

Here’s what I think, then: these are the things we should be praying for one another. These are the things the scriptures tell us to pray for one another, and so they’re the ones that ought to be our focus when we’re mentioning our brothers and sisters in our prayers.

This may not be news to you, but it has sort of been news to me. You may be familiar with what I like to call Prayer Point Culture. There are certain occasions – the end of a small-group Bible study is the most obvious – where you’re expected to provide a Prayer Point so that your spiritual siblings have a bit of direction as to how they can most usefully make intercession for you in the next little while. And because we’re all terrible show-offs at heart, you always want to come up with a good Prayer Point. Prayer Point Culture is the nebulous conglomeration of values and expectations that dictates which Prayer Points are the most acceptable. “My close relative is ill; please pray for her recovery,” is an acceptable Prayer Point. “I invited a friend to a church event; please pray that we would have good conversations about it,” is an acceptable Prayer Point. For some strange reason, “I have a lot of deadlines at the moment; please pray that I’d get everything done,” seems to be an acceptable prayer point. Good Prayer Points, as defined by such Prayer Point Culture as I have encountered, almost always relate to specific events in your life that are likely to be resolved one way or another after not too many more small-group meetings.

And then there are the lame prayer points. The boring ones. The ones that lack an obvious endpoint and are therefore frustrating by their very nature – like revising for an exam without knowing when you’re supposed to be taking it. “Please pray that I would grow in my knowledge of God.” “Please pray that I would increase in love and holiness.” That’s not the kind of Prayer Point you can present to the group while enjoying a pleasant degree of smugness that it’s a good one according to the standards of Prayer Point Culture (because, you know, Pleasantly Smug is quite clearly something we as Christians should be hoping to be). On the contrary, it just sounds like you couldn’t think of anything better to say. I’ve actually done that before: racked my brains for something specific to request prayer for, and, having come up empty, shrugged and suggested that people just pray for my sanctification. Until I can think of something better, you know.

What a fool I’ve been. What has sounded to me like an uninteresting default is, according to the scriptures, actually of greater importance than anything else I might put forward. Think again on that list of five Recurrent Themes that I identified above. First priority to pray for someone, that she would better know God and his love for her and the power with which he has effected that love. And then the better she knows that, the more she’ll be living in a manner consistent with her new identity as a beloved son of God,² increasing in the love and holiness that are the hallmark family traits: second priority. And then the more she does that, the more opportunity she’ll have to give a reason for the hope that is in her, so it matters that she should speak with such boldness and clarity as to enable others to get to know what she knows too: third priority. And then the more she grows in her gifting to speak the word of God – which, as I’ve argued fully elsewhere, every believer has in one way or another³ – the more other believers will be able to benefit from her ministry if she is able to meet with more of them: fourth priority. And then the more all this keeps happening, the more likely it is that there’ll be pushback against it from a world which still fundamentally hates God – pushback which must not prevail against the Church or silence the preaching of the gospel: fifth priority.

You don’t have to follow my little schema that closely, of course, but my challenge to you, sister or brother of mine, is that you let your intercessions on behalf of the saints be shaped by the priorities that the scriptures reveal on this front. If it is our intention that our prayers align with the will of God – which, hint, it certainly should be – then these are the things we should be asking him to do for our fellow saints. Not so much neat, acceptable Prayer Points with neat, obvious endpoints, as the ongoing struggle to know the Lord better, to be shaped after his likeness, to preach the gospel to the world, to fulfil our ministry to one another, and to not be overcome by evil.

And so these are also the things I ask on behalf of all my brothers and sisters who read this, knowing that God our perfect Father, having told us to ask such things, will not fail to grant them. Amen.

Footnotes

¹ Yeah, I think Paul probably wrote the book of Hebrews – either him or someone very familiar with his work. Fight me.

² I say ‘son’ deliberately. The idea is not just of being God’s offspring, but being his heir, which is why the Bible opts to describe us as God’s ‘sons’ rather than simply his ‘children’. Try Galatians 4 for the distinction: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+4&version=ESVUK. Plus, I don’t get the impression that, in the new creation, we’ll be meaningfully male and female any more, so since that’s where my inheritance is, I’m really not precious about expressing the status that grants me access to that inheritance in female terms.

³ I made that case in ‘On Spiritual Gifts’, under August 2019 in my blog archive.

KJV-Onlyists Might Not Be Quite As Crazy As You Think (Even Though They Are Still Crazy)

“As King James has written in his new Bible, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Doctor Who S11 E8, ‘The Witchfinders’ (2018)

The oldest complete manuscripts of the New Testament we have date from the mid-fourth century. You can go and see one of them, Codex Sinaiticus, in the British Library (well, most of it);¹ it’s called Sinaiticus because it was held at St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, such that it only came to the attention of the scholarly world in the nineteenth century. The other one, Codex Vaticanus, has been in the Vatican library since at least the fifteenth century, but nobody really twigged how important it was and published it properly until, again, the nineteenth century. That’s it for fourth-century manuscripts; from the fifth century, one major one we have is Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus; it gets its name (literally ‘rewritten codex of Ephrem’) from the fact that the Biblical text was erased and the pages reused for a Greek translation of some treatises by a big-deal Syriac theologion called Ephrem. A manuscript like this, with more than one layer of text, is called a palimpsest, and often takes some work to decipher the underlayer: the undertext of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus wasn’t fully deciphered until, you guessed it, the nineteenth century. And the last of the four great uncial manuscripts is Codex Alexandrinus, also fifth-century, which, after spells in Alexandria (whence its name) and Constantinople, was given as a present to King James I.

 

A bit of Codex Vaticanus - Matthew 8 if the caption on Wikimedia Commons is to be believed (I couldn’t be bothered to read it to check).

So was it used in the preparation of the King James version, then, you ask? Well, no: King James received it in 1624, more than a decade after the KJV hit the shelves in 1611. In short, of the four earliest complete New Testament manuscripts we have, none were available to the translators responsible for the Authorised version.

What’s more, if we consider also incomplete manuscripts, there are a whole bunch of papyri preserving small sections of the New Testament that are even earlier. The earliest NT manuscript, as scholars generally reckon it based on palaeography, is P52 (also known as Rylands Greek P457): it preserves a tiny chunk of the gospel of John and it’s widely considered to date from the second century. Just think of that: somebody sat down and wrote it probably less than a hundred and fifty years after Jesus had actually been walking about on Planet Earth, and now you can go and gawp at it in the John Rylands library in Manchester. There are loads of third- and fourth-century papyri too – fragments the lot of them, but still really valuable sources.² Once again, however, all this stuff was just sitting unknown in old rubbish dumps in Egypt until a pair of scholars called Grenfell and Hunt went and dug it up … guess when … yup, in the nineteenth century.³

So if the KJV translators didn’t have any of our oldest New Testament manuscripts, what were they working from? Well, that would be a little something scholars like to call the Textus Receptus (‘received text’). You might have heard of a chap called Erasmus who published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1519; one gets the impression that he was actually far more interested in publishing the Latin New Testament that he put with it, but it was the Greek edition that proved the biggest hit. Subsequent Greek New Testaments, including Robert Stephanus’ (whose influence can be seen very strongly in modern Bibles, because he was the first to introduce chapter and verse numbers), generally followed Erasmus’ text pretty closely rather than drawing on independent research – and that’s how we get this consistent and recognisable entity called the Textus Receptus.

You’ll be wondering, then, if everyone was drawing so heavily on Erasmus, where was he getting his version of the text from? Well, from such manuscripts as he could get his hands on at the time. And what we can tell about the manuscripts he could get his hands on at the time is that, as well as being later than the four great uncials I mentioned above,⁴ they followed a different textual tradition to them.

Although divisions of this sort can get pretty messy, especially when you’re working across multiple books of scripture, it’s nevertheless the case that by and large, those earliest complete manuscripts follow a textual tradition called the Alexandrian text-type, after Codex Alexandrinus, while the Textus Receptus follows a different one, which goes by many names, but is often called the Byzantine text-type. It’s also known as the ‘majority text’, because once you start bringing later manuscripts into the equation, a big (and I mean big) majority of them follow this text-type. (The papyri are often too fragmentary to be reliably classified as one text-type or another.) You see the issue, then: do we follow the tradition reflected in the oldest manuscripts under the assumption that the older they are, the closer they’re likely to be to the ‘original’; or do we follow the tradition reflected in the most manuscripts, under the assumption that the more witnesses you have to a reading, the more likely it is to be accurate?

Now don’t get me wrong: the differences between the two traditions aren’t ginormous. It’s not as if one tradition says Jesus never died on the cross or adds in a whole extra section about his troubled teenage years or something; in most cases where the two differ, there’s minimal impact on the meaning of the text. To illustrate, with differences picked out by underlining:

Matthew 15:5-6

Alexandrian text:        But you guys say: Whoever says to his father or mother: What you might have been helped by from me is a gift (to God), shall not honour his father; and you guys treated the word of God as of no effect on account of your tradition.

Byzantine text:           But you guys say: Whoever says to his father or mother: What you might have been helped by from me is a gift (to God), shall not honour his father or mother; and you guys treated the law of God as of no effect on account of your tradition.

Luke 24:53

Alexandrian text:        And they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Byzantine text:           And they were continually in the temple praising and blessing God.

Not that big of a deal, right? But not all the differences are so negligible. Here are a couple of examples that people get really het up about.

The End of Mark

In the Alexandrian text-type, the gospel of Mark ends with the women fleeing from the tomb and saying nothing to anyone. The tomb is empty, and an angel has told them that Jesus has been raised, but the book ends without any actual appearances of the resurrected Christ being mentioned. In the Byzantine text-type, there are an extra twelve verses which recount very briefly Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene and her reporting it, his appearance to two disciples on a walk (road to Emmaus?), a third appearance to his disciples including the Great Commission, the ascension, and the birth of the Church.⁵

 

A depiction of Mary Magdalene by Piero di Cosimo, apparently. I wonder whether that’s an Alexandrian or a Byzantine text she’s reading. Thanks to Idontfindaoriginalname on Wikimedia Commons, copyright as specified here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Even apart from the textual-traditions thing, I can see why people think verses 9-20 are a later addition: the story resumes slightly awkwardly in verse 9, and what follows does feel exactly like what you’d get if you distilled down the endings of the other synoptic gospels into a quick little cap-off to reassure readers of Mark that the story did in fact end the way they thought it did. But on the other hand, if you’re going with the accepted theory that Mark was written first and served as a source for the others, what do you make of him not actually recording that Jesus really did rise from the dead? Isn’t that, ahem, kind of an important bit of the story? Was Mark mysteriously struck dead mid-pen-stroke? Or is he attempting some kind of literary technique? Did the other gospel writers look at what he’d done and go, oh crikey, he missed a bit, I’d better write my own version sharpish?

Paul wrote that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, our faith is worthless.⁶ So how badly do we need those last twelve verses of Mark? Badly enough to privilege one manuscript tradition over another?

The Trinity

Compare the following versions of 1 John 5:7-8:

Alexandrian text:        For there are three who bear witness, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and the three are as one.

Byzantine text:           For there are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three who bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three are as one.

You ever get frustrated that a doctrine as fundamental as the Trinity is never really made explicit in scripture? God never says, oh hey guys, by the way, just to be clear, I’m one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, don’t confound the Persons or divide the Essence; the Godhead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal – all clear any questions?⁷ Nope, we have to piece together the doctrine from the fact that the Father, Son, and Spirit are all treated as God, and yet God is, very emphatically, one. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something a bit more concrete to lean on than merely that tension irresolvable by any other means – something like the Byzantine form of this verse, for instance?

Again, the text-critic thing to say here is that the Byzantine version looks like a later addition, precisely because the doctrine of the Trinity took a little while to develop, but once it settled into its place among the central tenets of the faith, someone saw a good opportunity, in a verse already about three things being as one, to slide in a more explicit reference. But are we happy thinking about the Trinity in that way – as coming out of later theological development by humans rather than straight from the scriptures God himself inspired? How badly do we need the longer form of this verse? Badly enough to insist on only using the one widely-available English translation of the Bible that works from the Byzantine tradition, rather than the Alexandrian?

Most modern scholars take the approach that the Alexandrian tradition, because of the antiquity of its witnesses, is the most reliable, but they’re also happy to cherry-pick variants from other traditions if they think they seem more authentic in any particular instance: so most modern Bible translations end up reflecting what’s called an “eclectic” underlying text. Passages like last twelve verses of Mark and the longer form of 1 John 5:7-8 do not typically make the cut as worth including in the main text. So you can see how someone who takes the view that the majority text is more reliable might view this as a bit of an attack on some pretty fundamental Christian doctrine.

What I’ve outlined above certainly doesn’t account for all the strands and justifications of KJV-Onlyism that there are out there. The folks who think His Majesty’s translation committee were legit divinely inspired, for instance, need to calm down. But I hope I’ve shown why at least some KJV-Onlyists might not be quite as crazy as you think they are. How badly do we need Mark 16:9-20 as a witness to the resurrection? How badly do we need the longer version of 1 John 5:7-8 as a witness to the Trinity? If you conclude that we need them badly enough to keep them in the main text, the KJV is kind of your only option as far as English Bible translations go.

If you were wondering where I stand on all this – well, I dunno, really. And, as annoying a conclusion as it is, I’m not sure we really need to decide. Elsewhere in scripture, we don’t construe it as a problem to hold two variants of what’s essentially the same passage alongside each other, and affirm the truth and inspired-ness of both; compare Kings and Chronicles, for instance, or certain NT quotations of OT passages. Maybe Mark is fine with or without its ending, the presence and absence thereof each achieving a different effect; just as, say, the imperatives in Isaiah 6:9-10 achieve a different effect to the indicatives in the NT quotations of it, like Matthew 13:14-15. Maybe we can think of the theological development that prompted some copyist to add a bit into 1 John 5:7-8 as akin to, say, the theological development that prompted some copyist to substitute Satan in 1 Chronicles 21:1 for the LORD in 2 Samuel 24:1, or to miss out any equivalent of the second part of 2 Samuel 7:14 in 1 Chronicles 17:13. Maybe the earlier versions do present theological problems, and maybe the attempts to solve those problems that we see in the later versions don’t make said later versions any less valid – any more than the theological problems they present make the earlier versions any less valid.

Maybe we don’t need to be scared of this stuff. Maybe we can be confident enough in the gospel revealed to us by faith to wrestle honestly with the particulars of the scriptures through which we grow in that faith. Maybe textual variation is a chance to think harder and push deeper and find a fuller understanding of God.

Or maybe I’m just as crazy as those KJV-Onlyists. In this as in all things, you can make up your own mind.

Footnotes

¹ Or – particularly in the present circumstances – you can check it out online: http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/.

² The Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, https://www.nestle-aland.com/en/home/ – widely considered the best critical edition – comes with handy English and German guide-sheets to the relative dates of different manuscripts. The only problem with them is that they keep falling out of the book when you’re reading it.

³ Again, you can check ’em out online: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/.

⁴ ‘Four great uncials’ is a technical term for those four manuscripts; ‘uncial’ means they’re written purely in capital letters.

⁵ Take a look for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+16&version=ESVUK.

⁶ 1 Corinthians 15:17.

⁷ That’s the Athanasian Creed I’m quoting. Go on, have a cheeky rewatch of St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies, you deserve it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQLfgaUoQCw.