Pope Francis stated this week that there may be a need for updating the Lord’s Prayer…
The short… he feels there are certain aspects of it that are poorly translated; specifically “and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” he feels implies that God, not Satan, leads people into temptation.
I don’t know… this sounds more like a personal opinion on the meaning than an issue with the translation. I’ve always taken it to mean a plea of help, in a sense, away from temptation altogether and never gave any thought to the idea of The Lord being the one leading us into that.
What do you think?
As reported by Michael Knowles for The Daily Wire:
“A father doesn’t do that,” insists Pope Francis. “He helps you get up right away. What induces into temptation is Satan.” Francis suggests rewriting the final verse to read, “Do not let us fall into temptation” to better explain the role of Satan as tempter. But as Spencer Klavan, lecturer in Ancient Greek at Oxford University, points out, this translation neglects the original text.
While peirasmos, the word for “temptation” in Ancient Greek, may be open to alternate interpretations, who precisely does the leading is not. Peirasmos connotes not only “temptation” but also “trial” and “testing,” as in “to test one’s mettle.” It is in all of these senses, two paragraphs before St. Matthew relates the prayer, that Jesus is “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be [tempted/tested] by the Devil.” In both cases, while the Devil does the tempting, God leads the way to the trial.
[…]
Some conservative Catholics have grown increasingly uneasy with Pope Francis’s public statements. In September, a group of conservative Catholics publicly released a “filial correction” to Francis accusing the pope of heresy. Philip F. Lawler, editor of the conservative Catholic World News, laments, “Pope Francis has made a habit of saying things that throw people into confusion, and this is one of them. It just makes you wonder, where does it stop, what’s up for grabs? It’s cumulative unease.”