Dr. Robert Fowler
Four Thursdays: April 21, 28, May 5, 12, 2022
7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. $40.00
Class will be offered on Zoom
There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament. The one that ‘everybody
knows’ is Matthew’s version, which is recited in church every Sunday. The version that ‘nobody knows’
is in Luke’s gospel. This course will consider the strong possibility that Luke’s version is more original
and therefor authentic than Matthew’s. Once we set aside Matthew’s editorial embellishments to the
prayer, we will be in a position to understand better its language, including key terms such as father,
kingdom, daily bread, debt forgiveness and escaping trial.
About the Professor: Until his retirement in 2019, Robert Fowler was Professor of Religion in the
Department of Religion at Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio, where he taught for 39 years. At
BW, he taught mostly Bible courses, but a variety of other subjects as well. A native of Kansas, he earned
a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. in Bible from the Divinity School of the
University of Chicago. In academic circles he is probably best known for his literary-critical studies of the
Gospel of Mark: Loaves and Fishes: The Function of the Feeding Stories in the Gospel of Mark (Society
of Biblical Literature) and Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of
Mark (Trinity Press International). In the years approaching his retirement, he was honored to be invited
to Rome for the Fall 2016 semester, where he taught a graduate-level course on the Gospel of Mark at the
Pontifical Biblical Institute.
