The Pope and the Lord's Prayer
Part of series The Lord's Prayer
Here's what I posted on Facebook:
Pope Francis feels that "Lead us not into temptation" of the Lord's Prayer might better be translated "Do not let us fall into temptation." "Foul!" cries R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, going on to say the Pope can't change the very words of Jesus. Actually, the original Aramaic which Jesus spoke can be rendered as "cause us not to enter" or "allow us not to enter." So as I suggested in the handbook on Matthew for translators, "Don't cause us to enter into temptation" or "Don't let it happen that we are tempted to do wrong" are reasonable ways to translate. As for "temptation," the Greek word can be either "temptation" or "testing." Jesus did not actually speak English.
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I have just had to deal with this phrase in a damaged Australian Aboriginal language with no memory of a good word for temptation. They came up with 'path to sin' as a translation of temptation i.e. there is a path which leads to sin although it is not itself sin. The Aboriginal Christians also felt uneasy that God might 'lead' them into temptation, into this path, when we so desperately want to trust God's leading. In the end, with my little discussion of the Greek, they came to Phil's suggestion above, 'allow us not to enter'. They fully understood this from their own experience. Left to ourselves, we go where temptation will happen and we fall into sin. Our prayer to God is that God will not let us go there. So our final translation was rather like the Pope's: 'don't let us go down the path to sin'.