"Lead us not into temptation"

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I actually agree with the Pope…that line has always annoyed me. I prefer something closer to ‘don’t let us fall into temptation’ but then again I can live with the standing translation of the Lord’s Prayer as no doubt the Pope is now saying he can, or soon will be, seeming to say that (?) … anyway …the joys of a loose lipped quick on the draw Pope. Not unlike come to think of it being led into temptation. Or would that be falling into it. Perhaps a synod is in order?
 
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So far, I have been able to find several newly implemented changes (another poster kindly informed me that the Spanish and Portuguese versions have been that way for some time, so I edited my post to be more accurate), the English translations of which are the following, followed by the Greek translation from a free website(link below):

French:

“Do not let us enter into temptation.”
Ας μην τεθεί σε πειρασμό.

Italian:

“Don’t abandon us to temptation.”
Μην μας εγκαταλείψει σε πειρασμό.

Spanish and Portuguese (not a new change, but different from what we consider to be the traditional translation, and different from the Greek literal meaning):

“Don’t let us fall into temptation.”
Ας μην πέσουμε στον πειρασμό

The traditional (in the United States):

“Lead us not into temptation.”
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃςἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν

http://www.etranslator.ro/english-greek-online-translator.php

This isn’t perfect. I cannot confirm the translations. People are going to get on here and tear me to shreds. Fine. My point is that they do not translate into the same words. The translation was accurate as it is.

This is not a matter of making a more clear translation. It is about taking the words of Jesus Christ and saying he should have said something different because we want him to have said something else. It is saying that he was wrong to say something unsettling to us, it is not just saying that the translations are wrong.

We cannot do this. God is God and we are not. He didn’t mind unsettling people with his words. See John 6. He was Truth, not Conciliation.

(Thank you BartholomewB for informing me about the longer history of the Spanish and Portuguese versions. I updated the post for clarity.)
 
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FollowChrist34 said:
I actually agree with the Pope…that line has always annoyed me.
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My previous post was not in response to this. I had been working on that one for a while, and hadn’t seen yours.

I think it is perfectly valid to be uncomfortable with it. Please don’t be personally offended by my directness about what I believe.

I tried to really investigate it, and I cannot get past the weight of all of the exegesis of the Fathers and the Popes and the Saints and all of the hundreds of years of agreement, and then suddenly, because in our generation we are uncomfortable with it, we think we can change it.

How could we? Our only real argument for change is that it is confusing to people who haven’t investigated the great weight of history invested in it, and that it is uncomfortable to us to consider that we are, at times, facing trials and tests that he allows, in his wisdom, for our good. But the alternative is that he wants to keep us from all suffering but doesn’t have the power to. That is much, much worse, and infinitely untrue.

If you don’t consider the accuracy of the current translation and the unique nature of the Our Father as the words that Jesus taught us, those reasons seem good enough.

That is why I think it is important to really discuss this deeply, so people can see that it is much more than just a little thing that people are making a big deal out of. It is a big deal that poeple are trying to make little.

That is never, ever, a good idea.
 
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Teek.―I don’t have the knowledge of Greek that would enable me to follow your analysis in detail. However, in principle I think you’re very much on the right track. To demand this particular change in every language, as the Pope seems to be doing, might be to give too much weight to pastoral concerns and too little to the Word of God.

I have a query about one small point you mention in your latest comment. I have some knowledge of both Spanish and Portuguese, from my time in Latin America, and it’s my impression that “Do not let us fall into temptation” is by no means a newly implemented change in either language. I tried to find a source on the internet that would enable me to trace the development of the Our Father in both languages, but sadly I found nothing.

I don’t have a Bible in Spanish but I do have a Brazilian edition of the Jerusalem Bible, printed in the 1980s, and curiously the wording is different in Matt 6:13 and Luke 11:4. Luke’s words translate as “Do not let us fall …” but Matthew’s as “Do not expose us to temptation.”
 
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Cool! What version of the Bible is it?

I put the Spanish and Portuguese version based on comments from this thread. I thought that they meant that was newer, but I was just assuming that, it seems, because that is not what they said. (I edited the post to be more specific. Thank you!)

If that is the case, however, it still remains that these are not accurate translations from the Greek. There are a lot of Bible translations that differ in content, but that does not necessarily validate all of the variations.
 
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Pope Francis said “it is I who fall, it is not God who throws me into temptation”. I was pondering this.

Temptation causes us to fall. Temptation occurring itself is not falling. We can be quite victorious, with God’s grace, through all sorts and levels of temptation and trial. We come out of it better men and women, sharper weapons for doing battle for the Lord—refined. If I am put to the test I can give glory to God by remaining faithful, or I can fall. Being brought to temptation is not the same as God throwing us in, abandoning us, letting us fall. It is God allowing us to grow and be more—overcome, be victorious.

If we do not remain steadfast in temptation/being tested/under trials, we do fall. And God does pick us up and fix us up and renew us. And then we march on into the next battle.

It seems to me that people have conflated temptation with sinning.

Obviously God has allowed us to be tempted, tried, and tested. It is the only way for us to freely choose to love Him! It’s a gift! A gift that allows us to even have personhood!

I’m not seeing how the idea that God is a part of our opportunities to excercise free will for good or for evil is untrue or unavoidable.

God does not tempt us to do evil. But he doesn’t stop us either. Being controlled isn’t freedom. He allows us to be tempted. If he didn’t, we would never, ever be tempted. It happens: therefore he allows it. That can’t really be argued against without saying God is not omnipotent.

He allows it, and he is good. So our being put to the test, tried, tempted is for our good! But our spirits are willing, our flesh is weak—so we pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver is from evil.” Not AND deliver us from evil. It’s not saying God tempts us even as it is currently worded.

So then, why does it need changed?

Most importantly, though, what is driving me crazy about that is that there is a part that IS a poor translation. The Greek does not mean “daily bread.” It means “super substantial bread.” It is Eucharistic, which was understood from the beginning by the Early Fathers.

Why don’t we start by fixing what actually is a bad translation?!?
 
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Teek said:
French:

“Do not let us enter into temptation.”

Ας μην τεθεί σε πειρασμό.

Italian:

“Don’t abandon us to temptation.”

Μην μας εγκαταλείψει σε πειρασμό.

Spanish and Portuguese (not a new change, but different from what we consider to be the traditional translation, and different from the Greek literal meaning):

“Don’t let us fall into temptation.”

Ας μην πέσουμε στον πειρασμό

The traditional (in the United States):

“Lead us not into temptation.”

καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃςἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν

Online English Greek Translator

This is not a matter of making a more clear translation. It is about taking the words of Jesus Christ and saying he should have said something different because we want him to have said something else. It is saying that he was wrong to say something unsettling to us, it is not just saying that the translations are wrong.

We cannot do this. God is God and we are not. He didn’t mind unsettling people with his words. See John 6. He was Truth, not Conciliation.
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The Italian, Spanish, & Portuguese sound to me like what Pope Francis is getting at. Are you saying those are wrong, and only the traditional US translation is right?
 
angel12 said:
Are you saying those are wrong, and only the traditional US translation is right?
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No. I am saying that the literal translation of the Greek does not mean those things. I have not found a single Greek scholar that believes the translation “Lead is not into temptation” is inaccurate. (Though some say “Bring us not into temptation” is more accurate, and some use to the test/to the trial/into temptation.)

That doesn’t make the changes “wrong,” as in bad or evil. Objectively, they are not as accurate. Subjectively, they say good things, things that are not false. They are not “wrong”.

It depends on the focus, or the priority.

To me, the most important purpose of the Church is to preserve, protect, and teach the Truth of God’s full revelation to us, for all
People, in all times, until Christ returns.

With this as the priority, we have no right to change what we have been given to mean something else, even if the something else is good.

If your priority is to reach as many people as you can and bring them to truth, you would see Christ’s words as a stumbling block for the less well catechised. Naturally you would want to make it more acceptable. That desire is not wrong.

My question is do we really have a basis that warrants changing an accurate translation of the words of Jesus Christ to something new?

James 1:13-14 says: 13 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; 14 but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

What the varied alternative translations are saying is that the Our Father needs to be changed because James said God tempts no one, and so therefore Jesus could not have actually said “lead us not into temptation,” even though he said it in Matthew 6:13
“13 And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.”

We can do exegesis on the meaning, catechesis on a proper understanding of what is meant, BUT CAN WE CHANGE THE WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST?

If you argue there is a better, more reliable source to consider, tell me about it!

If they were saying, “It needs to be changed because it is a bad translation and the Greek actually means…,” then it needs to be done! But that is not the case here!

If they were to say “We want to change the wording to reflect a truer sense of what he must have meant,” that is honest. And I would argue a terrible idea.

They say, “It is a bad translation, because God isn’t like that, so we need to change the original words of Christ.” That doesn’t make sense!

That is not acceptable, if your goal is to protect, preserve, and hand on the faith unadulterated.

I am not saying that those versions are bad in and of themselves, or that it would be wrong to pray that way! I am saying that Jesus told us to pray in these words…and those are not accurate translations of what he said.

If I am wrong, then please correct me. I am convinced that this is the truth of what is currently happening.
 
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Any other prayer, if you want to make it more fitting to the times, it’s different. This one, this one is the one that the priest prefaces by saying one of the following:

Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us.
or Jesus taught us to call God our Father, and so we have the courage to say:
or Let us ask our Father to forgive our sins and to bring us to forgive those who sin against us.
or Let us pray for the coming of the kingdom as Jesus taught us.

We should only change it if it is not accurate to what Christ said. Who cares what we want him to have said? He is God!
 
Teek said:
I’m not seeing how the idea that God is a part of our opportunities to excercise free will for good or for evil is untrue or unavoidable.

God does not tempt us to do evil. But he doesn’t stop us either.
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The verb “to lead” is the pastoral problem that Francis wants to fix. As those two priests said on the thread that got taken down, too many people think it means that God is doing more than just allowing us to be exposed to temptation. I can see why pastoral concerns would point to replacing the verb “to lead” by something else. On the other hand, the words that Jesus spoke are there in the Gospels and we have to be faithful to that. Our liturgists seem to be in a double bind.

The link (below) shows a newer edition than my old Jerusalem Bible, which is in a slightly smaller format, 5¼ × 8 in. I use it more or less constantly, in fact, for the extensive notes, all translated, I think, from the first and second French editions produced by the Dominican fathers at the French Biblical School in Jerusalem (EBAF).

http://www.paulus.com.br/loja/biblia-de-jerusalem-grande-encadernada_p_3113.html
 
BartholomewB said:
I can see why pastoral concerns would point to replacing the verb “to lead” by something else. On the other hand, the words that Jesus spoke are there in the Gospels and we have to be faithful to that. Our liturgists seem to be in a double bind.
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No kidding! Which is probably why it is a good thing it is not up to me. With my way of thinking, there is such an unequal distribution of weight between “fidelity to Christ’s words” and “pastoral care” that it isn’t even a question. I’d be stepping on toes all over the place!!

We have one God. The rest is in service to Him. Even serving others is ultimately only important because it is service to him, and it is elevated because it is the service to him that he desires. But it is still ultimately about serving him above all things.
 
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Teek said:
My point is that they do not translate into the same words. The translation was accurate as it is.

This is not a matter of making a more clear translation. It is about taking the words of Jesus Christ and saying he should have said something different because we want him to have said something else.
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I’ve been thinking about this question, over the past few days. Something dawned on me today: perhaps Pope Francis is making an implicit plea for dynamic equivalence over formal equivalence here? After all, one really can’t make the claim that “lead us not into temptation” isn’t the literal translation of the text. Yet, to call it a “bad translation” and then provide a “better” seems merely to say that the phrase would be rendered differently, if it were spoken today.
 
Well, I hope that is what he meant. He isn’t always as clear in his meaning as someone like me could really use—I tend to over analyze and that can go all over the map when something unclear is said.

This is not a common approach to Biblical exigesis. The usual, in my experience with Catholic theology, is to take what Jesus said and make fhe English translation as clear as possible based on what he said, or what the words of scripture are. If they aren’t clear, we look at the sociological/anthropological context of his time to better understand what he said. But we always stick with what he said.

It usually is not the preferred approach to take what we think he meant and change his words to sound like what we meant. We don’t often take a cultural look at our own time and use that to better understand what Jesus said 2000 years ago in a different culture and in a different language.
Gorgias said:
to call it a “bad translation” and then provide a “better” seems merely to say that the phrase would be rendered differently, if it were spoken today.
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I can see where this would be tempting. I’ve considered that as well.

I haven’t been able to accept that, either. Do we think Jesus did not know what he was saying, or how it would be interpreted throughout the ages?

The one example of doing what is being proposed here that I know of is the Protestant understanding of John chapter 6. You often hear the argument that Jesus was using an expression of the time or a metaphor and what he meant was…

And yet, that is not what he said, and so Catholics have always put more weight on what he actually said than on what is easier to hear or easier to understand. “This is my body…”. “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood…”

I’ve always really appreciated that we don’t reinterpret Jesus through our culture, but try to live in our culture according to the teaching of Jesus.
 
I don’t understand the argument against the current translation:

“Do not let us fall into temptation…”

The same argument could be made here: God doesn’t let us fall into temptation.

“Do not abandon us to temptation…”

God doesn’t abandon us to temptation.

Is it REALLY necessary for a non-English speaking Pope to question the translation?
 
This article brings up an extremely important point about the Liturgy.


Quote from article:
This is significant because – forgive me, but repetita iuvant – the Bishops were translating an official liturgical text, and liturgical texts have their own authority. The Church at prayer, in her official public worship, is a source of faith that is both chronologically and ontologically prior to any written record of Christ’s words and deeds – and the words the Latin Church prays officially and publicly, are: ne nos inducas in tentationem.

Translators have a job: to translate text.

If the text they are translating is in Latin, their job is to translate the Latin text – and though that task might benefit from consultation of other, older texts that are the putative source of the words they are charged with rendering, the translators miscarry in their duty when they ignore the text they are supposed to translate.
 
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Teek said:
It usually is not the preferred approach to take what we think he meant and change his words to sound like what we meant.
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I’m gonna take a guess that, based on this statement, you’re not very old. 20s? 30s, maybe?

One of the big fights of mid-20th century was between the two styles of translation. It was very popular, back then, to make the case that it was important to bring the texts into the 20th century, so that they could be understood by contemporary readers. The big fight, then, was between those who wanted fidelity to the words in the original texts (literal equivalence) and those who wanted to make the narratives sound more ‘natural’ to 20th century ears (dynamic equivalence).

Echoes of that fight continue on, today. You remember the change in some of the prayers of the Mass a few years ago, don’t you? The translation of the prayers from what had been translated into English in the 1970’s (which tended toward ‘dynamic equivalence’) was modified back toward what the prayers actually said (in other words, a greater adherence to ‘literal equivalence’). And oh, the fireworks! Oh, the wailing and beating of breasts! People complained that the new translations were so hard to understand and so hard to say (“hey! what in the world is ‘consubstantiation’, anyway?!?”)…! The battle lives on, my friend.

In our Bibles we see the fallout of those battles. The NAB, while not totally off the deep end of dynamic equivalence, does have places where it takes the text and – rather than preserving the text – “interprets” it to make it easier for modern ears to hear. The RSV-CE, while not totally preserving every last word literally – rather than dumbing down the text – provides us some literal details (and in the process, asks us to understand them in context).

Take a look at the way the sums of money are mentioned in the parable of Matthew 18:21-35. The RSV-CE literally translates “ten thousand talents” and “100 denarii”, while the NAB offers “a large sum” and “a much smaller amount.” Even in its footnotes, the NAB simply says that “the difference between the two debts is enormous.” The RSV-CE challenges us to find out what the scope of the two numbers is. (Hint: one talent is something like “15 years of wages”, while one denarius is "one day’s wages.)

If you really want to see dynamic equivalence run amok, go find a “Good News Bible.” (It is a version that’s approved by the USCCB, by the way.) Take a look at the difference between what it says that Gabriel’s message was to Mary (in Luke 1), and compare it to what the RSV-CE says:
Good News for Modern Man:
“Peace be with you! The Lord is with you and has greatly blessed you!”
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RSV-CE:
"“Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!”
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Theologically speaking, there’s a world of difference there!

And that’s the battle: do we translate what’s actually written in the original texts, or do we ask scholars to retranslate every 50-100 years or so, in order to keep up with current modes of speech (and trust them to get the theology right each time)?
 
Anthony Esolen comments here:

“No, I believe that the Greek means what it means, and what it means is accurately rendered as “lead us not into temptation,” exactly the same in Matthew as it is in Luke.
The words of Jesus, as words, are clear. Their implications are profound. They are hard for us to fathom. They strike us as strange. That is as it should be. Let them stand.”
 
What is the difference if God leads us to temptation or He literally allows Satan to lead us into temptation? I’m perplexed! From what I understand, Satan can do nothing that is outside God’s will. Moreover, God can bring good out of any evil committed by Satan.
 
Gorgias said:
The big fight, then, was between those who wanted fidelity to the words in the original texts (literal equivalence) and those who wanted to make the narratives sound more ‘natural’ to 20th century ears (dynamic equivalence).
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That has always been the big fight in translation. That is why there is a ridiculous amount of variation in different Biblical translations.

Here is a great link for anyone who wants to know more about literal and dynamic equivalence. Bible Translations Guide | Catholic Answers

They can vary widely, which is why this one example from the Our Father is a problem. Look at the number of different variations listed in the following link for Matt 6:13.

http://biblehub.com/matthew/6-13.htm

There are 25 versions compared. There are only four different versions of the “lead us not” portion.

17 use a variation of “lead us not into”, 6 use “do not bring us into”, 1 uses “let us not yield to”, and 1 uses “do not allow us.” (“Yield” was from God’s Word Translation, and “allow” was from the New Living Translation.)

23/25 use lead/bring—which is the accurate translation.

Now look at Psalm 51:5

http://biblehub.com/psalms/51-5.htm

There are 9 very different phrases used, from “born a sinner,” to “in evil I was formed in the womb,” to “the pain of my iniquity caused me to writhe,” to “surely I was sinful at birth,” to “I was shaped in iniquity.”

These are all very different understandings of what was meant. In this case the Greek meaning is uncertain and debatable. Therefore, the interpretation of the verse is somewhat more flexible for a “pastoral” redefinition.

The uniformity of the translations is very clear for Matthew 6:13. There is little to no ambiguity in what Jesus Christ said.
 
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