The Lord's Prayer
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40 free The Lord's Prayer trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Lord's Prayer, or Our Father, may be the best-known prayer in the world: a few short lines that Jesus gives his followers in the Gospels, learned by heart by children for two thousand years and said in thousands of languages. Familiar as it is, most people who can recite it have never looked closely at what each line asks for, or where its old-fashioned vocabulary comes from. This quiz starts with the text itself, line by line, in the traditional wording most churches teach. It then moves to the two Gospel accounts and what Jesus says just before and after, the way different churches pray and translate it, and the surprising places it turns up, from the pop charts to the cinema to a video game. The early questions are pitched for children, Sunday classes and youth groups; later ones suit adults who know their Bible. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so it works for a family quiz night, a confirmation class or a quick test of what you remember.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before clocks were common, which workers recited the Lord's Prayer to time steps in their work?
Cooks
Cooks used the prayer as a kitchen timer, so an old recipe might say to simmer a broth for the length of three recitations.
Q 02In the Lord's Prayer, which food do worshippers ask God to "give us this day"?
Bread
Bread here is usually read as shorthand for sustenance in general: whatever a person needs to get through to tomorrow.
Q 03In the 2002 film Spider-Man, which villain attacks Aunt May while she is saying the Lord's Prayer?
Green Goblin
Green Goblin is Norman Osborn's alter ego, and his attack on Aunt May in the middle of her prayer leaves her in hospital.
Q 04Cliff Richard's 1999 UK number one "The Millennium Prayer" set the Lord's Prayer to which famous tune?
Auld Lang Syne
Auld Lang Syne first carried the prayer's words in the finale of a Christian musical, Hopes & Dreams. Cliff Richard then recorded it as a Christmas single.
Q 05In Matthew, Jesus teaches the Lord's Prayer during which address that also contains the Beatitudes?
Sermon on the Mount
Sermon on the Mount is the name for Matthew chapters 5 to 7, and the prayer sits in the central chapter, inside a warning against praying to impress.
Q 06Which heavy metal band named a 1982 song about a condemned prisoner after a line of the Lord's Prayer?
Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden closed the album The Number of the Beast with "Hallowed Be Thy Name", written by bassist Steve Harris and later covered by Dream Theater and Machine Head.
Q 07In which Catholic devotion is the Lord's Prayer said before each set of ten Hail Marys?
The Rosary
The Rosary calls each set of ten a decade, opens it with an Our Father and traditionally closes it with a Glory Be.
Q 08"Baba Yetu", the Grammy-winning Civilization IV theme, is the Lord's Prayer sung in which language?
Swahili
Swahili gave composer Christopher Tin his words for the first piece of video game music ever to win a Grammy, awarded in 2011.
Q 09Pater Noster, the Lord's Prayer in Latin, also names which machine with a chain of cabins like prayer beads?
An elevator
An elevator of this kind, the paternoster, never stops: riders step on and off open cabins as they circle slowly up and down the building.
Q 10Which word, taken into English from Hebrew, do most Christians say at the very end of the Lord's Prayer?
Amen
Amen is commonly rendered as "so be it", which turns the whole prayer into something the speaker signs their name to.
Q 11The Lord's Prayer asks that God's will be done on earth just as it is in which place?
Heaven
Heaven appears in the opening line too, where it marks the Father being addressed as distinct from human fathers on earth.
Q 12Which word ends the last request of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, a plea to "deliver us" from something?
Evil
Evil is ambiguous in the original Greek, which can equally mean "the evil one", so many modern Bibles make the line a plea for rescue from the devil.
Q 13In the traditional Lord's Prayer, what do worshippers ask God to "lead us not into"?
Temptation
Temptation translates the Greek peirasmos, which can also mean a test or trial, so some read the line as a plea to be spared hard testing.
Q 21Which pope approved a new Italian wording for one line of the Lord's Prayer?
Francis
Francis had said on Italian television that the old line was a poor translation: a person falls on their own, without being pushed by God.
Q 22Which reformer's Small Catechism of 1529 asks "What does this mean?" of each line of the Lord's Prayer?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther wrote it for the head of a family to teach at home, and under the request for food he listed clothing, shoes, house, money and faithful neighbours.
Q 23Because the Lord's Prayer is in Matthew and Luke but not Mark, scholars often trace it to which lost document?
The Q source
Q 14In the Lord's Prayer, what of God's is asked to "come" just before the line about his will being done?
Kingdom
Kingdom here also means kingship: the Greek word behind it covers both a realm and the act of reigning, a double sense the English loses.
Q 15In the Lord's Prayer, what does "hallowed" mean, an old word that also gave Halloween its name?
Holy
Holy is the sense: to hallow is to honour something as sacred, and Halloween is the eve of All Hallows, the feast of all the saints.
Q 16Which word does William Tyndale's 1526 Lord's Prayer use where the King James Bible has "debts"?
Trespasses
Trespasses passed from Tyndale into the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which is why most English speakers still say it while Scottish Presbyterians do not.
Q 17The Lord's Prayer line about God's will echoes what Jesus himself prays in which place before his arrest?
Gethsemane
Gethsemane is where, in Matthew, he prays three times and uses the prayer's own words about God's will while three apostles sleep nearby.
Q 18Right after the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, Jesus says God's pardon depends on which duty?
Forgiving others
Forgiving others is the one request he stops to comment on: pardon people their wrongs and the Father will pardon yours, refuse and he will not.
Q 19In Luke, the Lord's Prayer answers a request to teach prayer as which preacher taught his followers?
John the Baptist
John the Baptist evidently gave his own disciples a set form of prayer, but unlike the one Jesus taught in reply, its wording has perished.
Q 20Which everyday language of first-century Galilee do historians think Jesus used to teach the Lord's Prayer?
Aramaic
Aramaic was the common speech of the villages where he grew up. The prayer itself survives only in Greek, the language the Gospels were written in.
The Q source, named from the German Quelle, is a hypothetical collection of sayings. Rival theories have Luke simply taking the prayer from Matthew.
Q 24Just before the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, where does Jesus tell his followers to go when they pray?
Their own room
Their own room, with the door shut, is the place he names. The King James Bible calls it a closet, and the point is to pray where nobody is watching.
Q 25Before the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, Jesus faults which people for praying on street corners to be seen?
The hypocrites
The hypocrites, he says, love to stand praying in synagogues and on street corners, and being noticed is the only reward they will get.
Q 26Before the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, Jesus says pagans expect to be heard in prayer because of what?
Their many words
Their many words are wasted, he says, because the Father already knows what people need before they ask.
Q 27The 1963 US Supreme Court case Abington v. Schempp ended official Lord's Prayer recitation in which places?
Public schools
Public schools in Pennsylvania opened each morning with Bible verses by law, and student Ellery Schempp protested in 1956 by reading from the Quran instead.
Q 28Sister Janet Mead's rock version of the Lord's Prayer lost an inspirational Grammy to which singer?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley won with a recording of the hymn How Great Thou Art. Mead gave her royalties from the hit's overseas sales to charity.
Q 29The nun Janet Mead, whose rock Lord's Prayer was a US top-five hit in 1974, came from which country?
Australia
Australia had never before produced a record that sold a million copies in the United States. Mead taught music at a school in Adelaide.
Q 30In 2015, UK cinemas refused a Church of England Lord's Prayer advert due to run before which franchise's film?
Star Wars
Star Wars was expected to draw families before Christmas, but the agency that sells cinema advertising cited its policy against religious and political adverts.