Jesus Christ · In His Own Words
Jesus on the Father
Jesus called God “Father” more than any teacher His hearers had known — not a title of national origin, the way the Old Testament calls God Father of Israel, but an address of first-person intimacy He then handed to His disciples as their own. “Our Father.” “Abba.” “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Every strand resolves the same way: “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). This page gathers the Father-thread across the Gospels — some of it fully told elsewhere on the site, some of it told here for the first time.
Abba and Patēr
— how often, and how intimately, Jesus's Gospels name the FatherJohn alone carries more “Father”-language than Matthew, Mark, and Luke combined — counted from this site's tagged Greek text (TAGNT), not a concordance estimate. John is the Gospel of the Father.
Spoken by Jesus once in the Gospels — in Gethsemane, at His hour of greatest anguish — and carried, untranslated, into two of Paul's letters. The Spirit puts the Son's own address into the believer's mouth.
OPEN THE WORD STUDY →3× in the whole New Testament — floor-verified, not a popular estimate.
“Our Father” — the Address Itself
— Matt 6:9 — before He teaches them to ask, He teaches them who they are askingBefore Jesus teaches His disciples to ask for anything, He teaches them who they are asking. Not “My Father” — the address He alone uses of Himself (see John 20:17 below) — but “Our Father”: a family word, offered to a room full of ordinary fishermen and tax collectors, inviting them to pray the way He prays. The rest of the prayer stands on that one address.
So then, this is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name.Why “Our,” not “My.”Ancient commentators noticed this immediately: Jesus never once prayed “Our Father” for Himself — He prayed “My Father.” Teaching His disciples to say “Our Father” folds them into a family He did not need to join. A disciple never prays this prayer alone, even in a closet, because the word itself is corporate.
Old Testament, new address.The Old Testament already called God Father — of the nation, corporately (see “New and Inherited” below). What is new here is the register: personal, intimate, and taught to ordinary individuals as their own address.
Prayer begins with a demonstration of our belief in God and a blessed act of faith at the moment when we say, 'Father, who art in heaven.' For we are thereby both adoring God and demonstrating our faith, and this form of address is the result.
Tertullian· On Prayer (220), Matt 6:9
We say not My Father, but Our Father, for the teacher of peace and master of unity would not have men pray singly and severally, since when any prays, he is not to pray for himself only. Our prayer is general and for all, and when we pray, we pray not for one person but for us all, because we all are one.
Cyprian· Catena Aurea (compiled by Aquinas, 258), Matt 6:9
Our Father, who art in heaven. By calling Him Father, let them confess themselves to be His sons. Hallowed be thy name. Not in you, but in us. For if because of sinners the name of God is blasphemed among the nations (Rom. VIII), on the contrary, because of the righteous it is sanctified.
Jerome· Commentary on Matthew (420), Matt 6:9
As our Father in heaven: so in heaven as to be every where else, for the heaven cannot contain him; yet so in heaven as there to manifest his glory, for it is his throne ( Ps. ciii. 19 ), and it is to believers a throne of grace: thitherward we must direct our prayers, for Christ the Mediator is now in heaven, Heb. viii.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), Matt 6:9
Did it consist only of hints or directions for prayer, it could only be used as a directory; but seeing it is an actual prayer — designed, indeed, to show how much real prayer could be compressed into the fewest words, but still, as a prayer, only the more incomparable for that — it is strange that there should be a doubt whether we ought to pray that very prayer.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), Matt 6:9
The petitions that follow, and the forgiveness clauseMatt 6:10–15
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done… Give us this day our daily bread… forgive us our debts… lead us not into temptation— each petition is its own study, told in full at the Lord's Prayer page; this hub does not re-argue them. One thing is worth naming here, because it doubles back on the address itself: of all seven petitions, Jesus stops immediately after the prayer to re-emphasize only one — “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (6:14–15). The Father a disciple has just addressed is the same Father whose forgiveness is now tied to the disciple's own.
The Father Who Sees, and the Father Who Cares
— Matt 6:1–8, 25–34; 7:7–11Three neighboring passages in the same chapter already carry full treatments elsewhere on the site. Together with the address of 6:9, these complete the chapter's portrait: a Father who is watching (unseen, but seeing), listening (before the request is even formed), and providing (down to the smallest bird). One chapter over, the same Father's-care motif continues: “how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him” (Matt 7:7–11).
“I and My Father Are Not Divided”
— John 5:17–23Defending a Sabbath healing, Jesus does not merely claim God as His Father the way any Israelite might — He claims that His own work is continuous with, and identical in kind to, the Father's own ceaseless work. His accusers heard it correctly: “making himself equal with God” (5:18). The Father's own purpose, He says, is that the Son receive undivided honor (5:23) — a claim about how the Father Himself relates to the Son's identity, not only a claim the Son makes about Himself. This passage has its own full treatment, built specifically around it, one click away.
But Jesus answered them, “To this very day My Father is at His work, and I too am working.” Because of this, the Jews tried all the harder to kill Him. Not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. So Jesus replied, “Truly, truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing by Himself, unless He sees the Father doing it. For whatever the Father does, the Son also does. The Father loves the Son and shows Him all He does. And to your amazement, He will show Him even greater works than these. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom He wishes. Furthermore, the Father judges no one, but has assigned all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.So I work — I am constantly employed in the same way, governing and supporting all things, comforting the wretched, and saving the lost; and to me, in this respect, there is no sabbath.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), John 5:17
Many are brought to marvel at Christ's works, whereby he has the honour of them, who are not brought to believe, by which they would have the benefit of them. He proves his equality with the Father, by specifying some of those works which he does that are the peculiar works of God.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), John 5:20
That all men may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father — Either willingly, and so escaping condemnation, by faith: or unwillingly, when feeling the wrath of the Judge.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), John 5:23
Mutual Knowledge — “No Man Knoweth the Son, but the Father”
— Matthew 11:25–27This is arguably the highest claim about the Father-Son relationship anywhere in the three Synoptic Gospels — a claim of exclusive, reciprocal, personal knowledge between the Son and the Father, in language that reads remarkably close to John's Gospel.
What is not in dispute is the shape of the claim itself: the Father is fully known only by the Son, and the Son alone decides to whom He will reveal the Father — which He then does, in the very next breath, to “all that labour and are heavy laden” (11:28). The highest possible claim turns immediately into the widest possible invitation.
At that time Jesus declared, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was well-pleasing in Your sight. All things have been entrusted to Me by My Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.Two things worth naming.First, the prayer opens with thanksgiving — “I thank thee” — even over the hardness of the “wise and prudent” who rejected Him; ancient commentators read this as praise, not resignation. Second, “even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight” (11:26) shows Jesus resting His own ministry's outcome in the Father's good pleasure, the same posture He will take again in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36, below).
It is as if He had said, 'Yes; but there is a brighter side to the picture; even in those who have rejected the message of eternal life, it is the pride of their own hearts only which has blinded them, and the glory of the truth does but the more appear in their inability to receive it.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), Matt 11:25
He exults in spirit when He says to the Father, 'I thank Thee, O Father, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent.' He, moreover, affirms also that to no man is the Father known, but to His Son; and promises that, as the Son of the Father, He will confess those who confess Him, and deny those who deny Him, before His Father.
Tertullian· Against Praxeas (220), Matt 11:25
All things are delivered to me — Our Lord, here addressing himself to his disciples, shows why men, wise in other things, do not know this: namely, because none can know it by natural reason: none but those to whom he revealeth it.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), Matt 11:27
All things are delivered unto me of my Father — He does not say, They are revealed — as to one who knew them not, and was an entire stranger to them save as they were discovered to Him — but, They are 'delivered over,' or 'committed,' to Me of My Father; meaning the whole administration of the kingdom of grace.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), Matt 11:27
All things are delivered unto me of my Father — This is a great truth, and the key of the science of salvation. The man Christ Jesus receives from the Father, and in consequence of his union with the eternal Godhead becomes the Lord and sovereign Dispenser of all things. All the springs of the Divine favor are in the hands of Christ, as Priest of God, and atoning Sacrifice for men: all good proceeds from him, as Savior, Mediator, Head, Pattern, Pastor, and sovereign Judge of the whole world.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), Matt 11:27
Matt 11:27–28 is already treated alongside John 14:6 at the “No One Comes to the Father But by Me” section of Jesus on Himself; this hub gives it its own full original treatment as a Father-focused text.
“He That Hath Seen Me Hath Seen the Father”
— John 14:6–11Philip asks to be shown the Father; Jesus's answer collapses the distance between seeing Him and seeing the Father entirely. This is the single clearest identity-claim in the material this hub surveys, and it already has two full homes on the site.
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.Jesus replied, “Philip, I have been with you all this time, and still you do not know Me? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?The disciples followed him, and Christ tells them that they followed the road, and, while they continued following him, they would never be out of their way. (1.) As truth is opposed to figure and shadow. Christ is the substance of all the Old-Testament types, which are therefore said to be figures of the true, Heb. ix.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), John 14:6
He that hath seen me hath seen the Father — Could any creature say these words? Do they not evidently imply that Christ declared himself to his disciples to be the everlasting God?
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), John 14:9
The High-Priestly Prayer
— John 17John 17 is the clearest statement in the Gospels that the Father-Son relationship of love predates creation itself — the same move that carries doctrinal weight at the doctrine of God's Trinity locus. Jesus prays tothe Father, in front of the disciples, for the disciples by name, and for “them also which shall believe on me through their word” (17:20) — every future believer, prayed for before the cross.
I have glorified You on earth by accomplishing the work You gave Me to do. And now, Father, glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I had with You before the world existed.Father, I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, that they may see the glory You gave Me because You loved Me before the foundation of the world.With this pre-existent glory, which He veiled on earth, He asks to be reinvested, the design of the veiling being accomplished — not, however, simply as before, but now in our nature.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), John 17:5
That which He calls glory then is the love wherewith He was loved with the Father before the foundation of the world. And in that glory He loved us too before the foundation of the world.
Bede· On the Gospel of Luke (735), reproduced in the Catena Aurea on John, John 17:24
The Father of the Prodigal
— Luke 15 — Jesus's fullest picture of the FatherThree parables answer one accusation. The lost sheep (15:3–7) and the lost coin (15:8–10) both end the same way — the finder throws a party — before Jesus tells the longest and best-known of the three, the parable usually called the Prodigal Son, though the father is at least as much its subject as either son. This is not abstract theology. Jesus is explaining His own behavior — why He eats with sinners — by explaining His Father's heart. No page anywhere else on the site treats Luke 15 as its own subject; this is the hub's other major original contribution.
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around to listen to Jesus. So the Pharisees and scribes began to grumble: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”The accusation the whole chapter answers.
The younger son, and a father who does not wait to be reached
The son has rehearsed a confession, and a request to be made a hired servant (15:18–19). He never finishes either. The father sees him “a great way off” — while the son is still trying to close the distance himself — and closes it first, running, which no dignified man in that culture did. The kiss lands before a single word of the son's prepared speech.
So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still in the distance, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.Christ chooses those who stand. Rise and run to the church. Here is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He who hears you pondering in the secret places of the mind runs to you. When you are still far away, he sees you and runs to you. He sees in your heart. He runs, perhaps someone may hinder, and he embraces you. His foreknowledge is in the running, his mercy in the embrace and the disposition of fatherly love.
Ambrose of Milan· Exposition of the Gospel of Luke (397), Luke 15:20
The Father stands and awaits your return from your wandering. Only turn to him, and while you are still afar off, he will run and embrace your neck. With loving embraces, he will enfold you, now cleansed by your repentance.
Basil of Caesarea· Letter 46 (379), Luke 15:20–24
16 . [3.] Here were feet of mercy, and those feet quick-paced: He ran. This denotes how swift God is to show mercy. The prodigal son came slowly, under a burden of shame and fear; but the tender father ran to meet him with his encouragements. [4.] Here were arms of mercy, and those arms stretched out to embrace him: He fell on his neck.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), Luke 15:20
'Our Father who art in heaven,' is this Thy portraiture? It is even so (Jer 31:20). And because it is so, I wonder not that such incomparable teaching hath made the world new.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), Luke 15:20
The robe, the ring, the feast — and the confession that finally gets spoken
The confession does get spoken — but after the kiss, not before it, and the father cuts off the request to be made a hired servant entirely. He answers instead with three gifts that restore, not merely forgive: a robe (honor), a ring (authority, sonship), and sandals (a son's shoes, not a slave's bare feet) — then a feast.
The son declared, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let us feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again! He was lost and is found!’ So they began to celebrate.He now comes back to his Father and cries, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.' Every day in its prayer, the church testifies that the younger son has returned to his Father's house and is calling God his Father.
Peter Chrysologus· Sermon 5 (450), Luke 15:21
The elder son, and a father who leaves the feast to plead, not command
The parable does not end with the younger son's homecoming. The father — mid-feast — goes back out, a second time, to a second son who will not come in. He does not order him inside. He pleads. The elder son's complaint (“thou never gavest me a kid”) is met not with correction but with reassurance: “thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” The parable's last word is an open invitation, not a verdict.
The older son became angry and refused to go in. So his father came out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look, all these years I have served you and never disobeyed a commandment of yours. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours returns from squandering your wealth with prostitutes, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ ‘Son, you are always with me,’ the father said, ‘and all that is mine is yours. But it was fitting to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”came his father out, and entreated him — 'Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him' (Ps 103:13). As it is the elder brother who now errs, so it is the same paternal compassion which had fallen on the neck of the younger that comes forth and pleads with the elder.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), Luke 15:28
He, then, will receive you, His own son, back, even if you have squandered what you had received from Him, even if you return naked — just because you have returned; and will joy more over your return than over the sobriety of the other; but only if you heartily repent — if you compare your own hunger with the plenty of your Father's 'hired servants' — if you leave behind you the swine, that unclean herd — if you again seek your Father, offended though He be, saying, 'I have sinned, nor am worthy any longer to be called Thine.'
Tertullian· On Repentance (220), Luke 15:29
But the father does not rebuke him as a liar, but commending his stedfastness with him invites him to the perfection of a better and happier rejoicing.
Augustine of Hippo· Catena Aurea (compiled by Aquinas, 430), Luke 15:31
Where Scripture is silentLuke 15:32
The parable never tells us whether the elder son goes in. Jesus leaves the ending open — aimed, in its original setting, directly at the Pharisees and scribes muttering in Luke 15:1–2, who are being invited, mid-story, to finish it themselves.
“Abba, Father” — Gethsemane and the Believer's Own Cry
— Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6Gethsemane, hours before the arrest — the only place in the Gospels the Aramaic word itself is preserved on Jesus's own lips. The Greek text keeps Abba ho patēr, transliterating the Aramaic and then translating it, a doubling found nowhere else for an ordinary address. This is not spoken in serenity; it is spoken at the point of greatest anguish. The intimacy of the address does not exempt Jesus from asking, urgently, that the cup pass — and the prayer's shape, request followed by full submission, is the same shape Jesus had already taught His disciples to pray: “thy will be done” (Matt 6:10).
“Abba, Father,” He said, “all things are possible for You. Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.”The believer's own cry.Paul's Gentile, Greek-speaking churches did not speak Aramaic. The untranslated word traveling into Rome and Galatia this way is itself evidence that Jesus's own address to the Father became, very early, the church's own inherited prayer-word — not merely a biographical detail about Jesus, but something handed on.
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”The site's one existing “Abba” mention sits inside the doctrine of salvation's adoption teaching, cited to Rom 8:15; this hub keeps the word study here and points there for the doctrine itself.
“Abba” honestly — the word, the popularization, and the correctionJeremias & Barr
Abbais Aramaic, an emphatic/determined form of the ordinary family word for “father.” It was used by both small children and grown adult sons of their own fathers — it is not, by itself, a “toddler word” the way “Daddy” specifically is in English, and it was not standard liturgical vocabulary for addressing God in the prayer literature that survives from Jesus's own setting, which is part of why Mark preserves it untranslated: it stood out.
Joachim Jeremias argued, across several works, that Jesus's use of abba to address God was without precedent in surviving Jewish prayer and signaled an intimacy unlike anything around Him. The popularization that followed — turning abbainto “Daddy,” a warm, almost babyish address — became a fixture of mid-to-late-20th-century preaching and devotional writing, often credited to Jeremias even where his own argument was more careful than that.
James Barr published a direct challenge, commonly cited as “Abba Isn't Daddy.” Barr argued from the Aramaic and later rabbinic evidence that abbawas used by grown adults of their own fathers as ordinary, respectful address — not a toddler's babble-word — and that “Daddy” over-translates an intimate family term into something closer to baby talk than the word ever carried. Modern Hebrew's own everyday word for “dad” is abba, spoken by adults their whole lives — evidence in the same direction.
Both belong here, and neither erases the other. Barr corrects a translation and a register, not the underlying fact that abbais genuinely, distinctively intimate — family language, not formal or liturgical language, still without clear precedent as an address to God in the surviving evidence from Jesus's own setting. Abbais warm, familial, and unprecedented as address to God — but it is the address of a grown son who trusts his father, prayed by Jesus in His own hour of greatest anguish, not a child's first word repurposed for worship.
New and Inherited
— the Old Testament already called God FatherThis is not a Christian innovation. The Old Testament already calls God Father — of Israel, corporately, and reverent-distant in register.
Is this how you repay the LORD, O foolish and senseless people? Is He not your Father and Creator? Has He not made you and established you?As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him.Yet You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us. You, O LORD, are our Father; our Redeemer from Everlasting is Your name.When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.The same verse Matthew later applies to the infant Jesus's return from Egypt (Matt 2:15).
Nowhere does an Old Testament prophet address God as abbain personal prayer, and nowhere does an Old Testament text claim the kind of reciprocal, exhaustive Father-Son knowing Jesus claims in Matthew 11:27. What is genuinely new in Jesus's teaching is not the bare metaphor — it is the intimacy, the invitation, and the exclusive mutual-knowledge claim: (1) He addresses God as Father in the first-person-intimate register, abba, where His contemporaries did not; (2) He extends the address to His disciples as an invitation into a family, not merely a national metaphor; (3) He claims a uniquely exclusive knowledge of, and relationship to, the Father that He alone can mediate to others (Matt 11:27; John 14:6). The metaphor is inherited; the intimacy, invitation, and exclusivity are His.
Positions, Named Graciously — Who May Call Him Father?
— a real, long-running question, presented by name rather than adjudicatedIs God “Father” of every human being, or only of those who come to Him through Christ?
- Universal / creational fatherhood. God is Father of all humanity as Creator and sustainer — Paul, preaching to Greek philosophers at Athens, quotes their own poets approvingly: “For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28); Malachi asks, “Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us?” (Mal 2:10 — spoken there about covenant-breaking among Israelites specifically, worth naming honestly). This reading reached its most totalizing modern form in 19th–20th-century liberal Protestantism. Orthodox and evangelical theologians have long criticized readings along this line for detaching the Fatherhood of God from the cross, from repentance, and from the exclusivity Jesus Himself claims in Matt 11:27 and John 14:6.
- Covenant / adoptive fatherhood. The majority evangelical reading: God is Father, in the saving, adoptive, intimate sense Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, to those who have received Christ — John 1:12–13 (“as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God”), held together with John 20:17's careful distinction (below). Creational fatherhood is affirmed but held distinct from covenant fatherhood. This reading coheres with the site's Christ-centric confessional spine — all come to the Father through Christ (John 14:6) — without a house verdict stamped on the page; it is simply where the weight of the texts above leads.
- A narrower, related question: who may pray “Our Father”?Some read the Lord's Prayer as addressed to Jesus's own disciples specifically (“when ye pray,” Matt 6:9, spoken to the Twelve and those who would follow); others treat it as a model prayer offered generally.
The distinction never dissolved — John 20:17John 20:17
Jesus never says “our Father” of Himself and the disciples together. He says “my Father, and your Father” — holding the two relationships as genuinely distinct even while both are real. This is the clearest textual guardrail against collapsing Jesus's unique, natural sonship into the believer's adoptive sonship.
“Do not cling to Me,” Jesus said, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and tell My brothers, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.’”Where It Points
Everything above resolves the same way the site's confessional spine requires: “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6) is not one motif among several in this material — it is the frame the whole subject sits inside. The Father is knowable, in the site's own confession, only because the Son has made Him known (Matt 11:27; John 14:9), and the invitation to call God “Abba” is extended to the believer specifically through the Spirit of adoption received in Christ (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6) — not as a bare universal privilege available apart from Him.