On Translating the Lord's Prayer

Should the sixth petition of the Our Father be translated as “Do not let us fall”? by Jason Bermender

And is the English rendering “do not lead us into temptation” bad theology? Here’s why the answer to both questions is “no”.


The complicated context of Pope Francis’ confusing remarks about the “Our Father” by Christopher R. Altieri

The Holy Father’s remarks, made to the Italian bishops’ TV magazine program, invoked a drawn-out and at times acrimonious controversy under the tent of French […]

Fr. Hunwicke: 1 and 2

Dr. Fleming has some remarks:

The problem does not like in the perfectly correct translation of the Greek into Latin “inducas,” and English “lead into,” but with the word “temptation,” which no longer should be used to translate the Latin tentatio.

....
There are many temptations in the NT and a careful examination of a few passage would convince any serious reader that conventional interpretations of the sentence in the Lord's prayer are erroneous.

[In Luke 10] The nomikos (not a professional lawyer but a man learned in Jewish law) wants to put Jesus to the test—the verb ekpeirazein reminds us of the tests to which Satan subjected Him. This requires a bit of explanation. The verb—and its simpler uncompounded form (peirazein)—are typically translated by the English “tempt,” but the meaning of that word has changed so much since the early 17th century that it is quite misleading. To “tempt,” in this and other passages including the Lord’s Prayer, is not to entice or trap but to put something or someone to the test in order to find out what they are. A closer English word might be “assay,” as in “The chemist assayed the ore to determine whether it was gold or iron pyrite.”

I can only just summarize the argument of what I have written in the past on the Lord’s Prayer. As in all uses of the word peira (temptation) and the related verbs peirazein and ekpeirazein, the context is not to be sought in instances of temptation—the diabetic in the candy store, the married man in the single’s bar—but in the testing of Job and in Jesus’ own “temptations” in the wilderness, which are nothing but Satan’s attempt to find out who and what he is.......

By not recognizing the meaning of “temptation.” we then fail to connect the passages in which our Lord is “tried” by his adversaries both human and diabolical. We compound the error by thinking that the “evil” we pray to be delivered from is either misfortune or sin, when in fact the Evil One is the devil himself. The result is that we do not understand the final two clauses of the Lord’s prayer, which might be summed up as something like: “Do not expose us to the trials that Job and Jesus were put by the Adversary and deliver us from the Evil one that seeks out destruction.”