πατήρ

For about half a century now, a particular claim has circulated in Christian preaching and Sunday school: the Aramaic word Abba, which the New Testament records Jesus using when He addressed His Father, is the baby-talk word for “Daddy.” Jesus, on this reading, was teaching us to call God by the most intimate diminutive — the toddler’s first word for the parent leaning over the crib.

The claim has a noble pedigree. The German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias proposed it in the 1960s, and his work was influential enough that “Abba means Daddy” entered the standard repertoire of evangelical preaching. The intimacy it suggested resonated with twentieth-century pieties looking for a warmer, more personal God.

The trouble is that the claim is overstated. Subsequent scholarship — most notably the work of the Oxford Hebraist James Barr — has shown that Abba in first-century Aramaic was simply the ordinary word for “father.” Small children used it, certainly. So did grown sons. So did adults of advanced years addressing their elderly parents. Abba is not baby-talk; it is family-talk. Its emotional register is closer to “Father” than to “Daddy.”

This matters for the same reason every word in this book matters: when the New Testament gives us a word for God, we should know what the word actually meant in the language it came from. Pater in Greek and Abba in Aramaic are the New Testament’s names for the First Person of the Trinity in His eternal relation to the Son, and in His new relation to the believer adopted through that Son. The intimacy of those names is real. It just is not infantile.

This chapter is about that word.

The Word

The Greek word is πατήρ (patēr), pronounced in the academic Erasmian convention as pah-TAYR, with the accent on the second syllable. The genitive form is patros (πατρός), and the standard NT inflection follows the third declension pattern.

The word family includes:

Patria (πατριά) — family, lineage, the descent line that bears the father’s name. Used at Ephesians 3:14-15 in Paul’s wordplay between God the Father (Patēr) and every family (patria) named from Him.

Patrios (πάτριος) — paternal, ancestral, traditional. Used at Acts 22:3 (“educated… according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers”) and elsewhere for the inherited traditions of the people.

Patrikos (πατρικός) — paternal, from the fathers. Used at Galatians 1:14 (“zealous for the traditions of my fathers”).

Propatōr (προπάτωρ) — forefather. Used at Romans 4:1 (“Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh”).

Abba (ἀββά) — the Aramaic word transliterated into Greek and preserved in three New Testament texts: Mark 14:36 (Jesus in Gethsemane), Romans 8:15 (the cry of the adopted believer), and Galatians 4:6 (the Spirit’s testimony in the believer’s heart). In each case the NT writers preserve the Aramaic and then translate it with the Greek patēr — “Abba, Father!” The double form keeps the original force of Jesus’s address even for Greek readers who never spoke Aramaic.

The etymology of patēr runs back through one of the oldest and most stable Indo-European roots. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form is *pH₂tér-, and it surfaces in nearly every IE language family with remarkably little change: Latin pater, Sanskrit pitár-, Persian pidar, German Vater, English father. The word is so stable across millennia that linguists routinely use it as a textbook example of the IE family’s preserved core kinship vocabulary. Whatever else may have changed in the four thousand years since the first Indo-European speakers, the word for father did not.

The Septuagint background is essential for understanding the New Testament’s use of patēr. The LXX uses patēr to render Hebrew av (אב), the ordinary Hebrew word for father, applied to human fathers throughout the Old Testament and occasionally — but only occasionally — to God. The OT does speak of God as Father in several passages:

Deuteronomy 32:6 — “Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?”

Isaiah 63:16 — “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 of old is your name.”

Isaiah 64:8 — “But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

Jeremiah 3:4 — “Have you not just now called to me, ‘My father, you are the friend of my youth’?”

Malachi 1:6 — “If then I am a father, where is my honor?”

Malachi 2:10 — “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?”

These references establish that the Old Testament knows God as Father, especially in the corporate-covenantal sense (God as Father of Israel) and in the creational sense (God as Father of all who are made by Him). But the Old Testament’s use of Father for God is comparatively rare — perhaps a few dozen passages across the entire Hebrew Bible.

In the New Testament, the situation changes dramatically. Patēr applied to God appears more than 250 times — the great majority in the gospels (where Jesus is constantly addressing or referring to His Father) and in the Pauline epistles (where the theology of adoption develops the believer’s filial relationship). This explosion in the Father-language of the New Testament reflects Jesus’s distinctive practice of addressing God as Father in His own personal prayer life (Mark 14:36; Matthew 11:25-27; the Lord’s Prayer; the High Priestly Prayer of John 17) and His teaching the disciples to do the same.

The shift from rare to dominant usage is one of the most striking lexical changes between the Testaments. The Father whom the Old Testament occasionally invoked has, in Christ, drawn near enough to be the constant address.

Range of Meaning

Patēr in the New Testament covers a meaningful range:

An earthly human father. The ordinary use. The father of the prodigal son (Luke 15:20). The fathers and mothers of Ephesians 6 (“honor your father and mother”). The father in the household codes of the Pauline epistles.

A spiritual father or mentor. 1 Corinthians 4:15 — “though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” Paul speaks of his apostolic relation to the Corinthian church as a paternal one. The NT also forbids the abuse of the title in religious authority (Matthew 23:9 — “call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven”). The two passages are not contradictory; the prohibition concerns titles claiming ultimate authority, while Paul’s claim concerns the formative spiritual relationship he had with those he led to faith.

An ancestor. Acts 7:2 — Stephen addresses “our father Abraham.” Hebrews 7:10 — Levi was “still in the loins of his ancestor (literally, his father) when Melchizedek met him.” The OT pattern of calling forebears “fathers” continues into the NT.

The founder of a tradition or way of life. John 8:39 — Jesus tells His critics, “if you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did.” Romans 4:11-12 — Abraham as “the father of all who believe.” A spiritual or religious paternity, parallel to the genealogical.

God as Father of all in creation. Ephesians 4:6 — “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” A universal divine fatherhood, grounded in the creation of all humanity by the one God. This sense of God’s fatherhood is real but limited; it does not by itself imply the saving relationship that comes only through adoption in Christ.

God as Father of Christ. THE dominant New Testament usage. “My Father” on the lips of Jesus. “The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 15:6; 2 Corinthians 1:3; Ephesians 1:3; Colossians 1:3; 1 Peter 1:3). The Father is, before all else, the Father of the eternal Son.

God as Father of the believer through adoption. Romans 8:14-17; Galatians 4:4-7; Ephesians 1:5. The believer is not the Father’s child by nature (only the Son is that) but by adoption in Christ, through the work of the Spirit. The cry “Abba, Father” is the Spirit’s testimony in the believer’s heart.

The father of the devil’s people. John 8:44 — “You are of your father the devil.” Used negatively and polemically. The same word that names the eternal Father can be used to name the spiritual paternity of those opposed to God.

The dominant usage — by a wide margin — is the sixth one: God as the Father of Jesus Christ. The seventh — God as the believer’s Father through adoption — is derivative of it and is the principal pastoral application of the doctrine.

Where You’ll Meet It

Matthew 6:9. “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.’” The Lord’s Prayer’s opening, in Greek: Pater hēmōn ho en tois ouranois. The most-prayed sentence in human history.

Three words bear attention. Pater — the relational name. Not “God” or “Lord” but Father, the address of a child to a parent. Hēmōn — “of us,” the corporate possessive. The prayer is not the individual address of a private worshipper but the corporate address of the baptized. The “our” includes every believer who has ever prayed these words. Ho en tois ouranois — “the one in the heavens.” Not a spatial location but a confession of transcendence and rule. The Father is not bound to earth; He rules from above the heavens, and yet He hears the prayer of His children below.

Luther’s catechism opens its explanation of these words with one of the most concise statements of the gospel in the Lutheran tradition: “With these words God tenderly invites us to believe that he is our true Father and that we are his true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask him as dear children ask their dear father.” The invitation is sheer grace; the confidence is the fruit of the gospel.

Matthew 11:25-27. “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

A passage of striking Christological exclusivity. Knowledge of the Father is through the Son. The Father has handed all things over to the Son; the Father is known truly only by the Son and by those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. This text — sometimes called the Johannine thunderbolt that landed in Matthew — establishes that there is no neutral access to the Father apart from Christ. Every claim to know God truly that bypasses the Son is, on this verse’s witness, mistaken.

John 14:6. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus’s most direct statement of His exclusive mediation. Combined with Matthew 11:27, this verse establishes the New Testament’s principle of Christological access: the Father is reached through the Son and through no other way. Confessional Lutherans take this verse with full seriousness against modern proposals — both inside and outside the church — that there are multiple legitimate paths to the one God. There are not. The Father is reached through Christ alone.

Romans 8:14-17. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.”

The classical New Testament text on adoption. Three things to notice. First, the cry “Abba, Father” is the same address Jesus used in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36); the believer’s address of the Father is the address Christ Himself uses, extended to the believer by the Spirit. Second, the Spirit is the agent of adoption; the believer does not adopt himself but is adopted by God’s act and bears witness to it in the cry of prayer. Third, the consequence of adoption is inheritance: the adopted son is heir of God and fellow heir with Christ. The full implications of this inheritance are treated in Chapter 18 of this volume (klēronomia).

Galatians 4:4-7. “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”

The most explicit Trinitarian statement of adoption in the New Testament. The Father sends the Son to redeem; the Father sends the Spirit of the Son into the believer’s heart; the Spirit produces the cry “Abba, Father” which is the believer’s relational address to the Father. Father, Son, and Spirit are each present and each have their role. Adoption is the work of the Trinity from beginning to end. The believer is not adopted into a generic deity but into the specific filial relation Christ has with His Father.