Has the Lord’s Prayer really been lost in translation?
Cutting-edge ecofriendly Pope Francis has once again made a news splash, this time by endorsing a change in the traditional, familiar form of the Lord’s Prayer. In the latest of a series of interviews with a Catholic TV station in Italy — one actually owned by the countr y’s conference of bishops — His Holiness was confronted right off the bat with an old theological poser: why does the Lord’s Prayer, in the received form, ask God the Father not to “lead us ... into temptation”?
As generations of clever Sunday School students have noticed, this language seems to imply something awkward about God. Namely, that he has a taste for throwing nasty curveballs at his children. The author and vendor of worldly, sinful things is supposed to be Satan. But here we have a prayer, perhaps the most revered single text in all major Christian traditions, that is supposed to represent the authentic words of Jesus on Earth.
And this prayer seems to contain a request for the Lord to please stop sending us all those delicious brown liquors and Internet porn videos. What, if anything, went wrong here?
You don’t get to be Pope without having answers to questions like that. The interview was conducted in Italian, but the vulgarlanguage rendering of “Lead us not into temptation” used there has the same denotation, and the same theological problem, that it does in English texts. Francis immediately told his interlocutor that “Lead us not into temptation” is “not a good translation.”
Advocating t he more familiar position that it is the devil who leads us into temptation, and not God, the Pope observed that the French church r ecently amended its official rendering of the difficult line. Where French Catholics used to pray “Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation” — which could be written as “Subject us not to temptation” in English — they now say, more passively, “Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation” (“Do not let us enter/fall into temptation”).
The Pope t hinks t hat other national branches of the Church could benefit from such a change. Which serves to remind us that, not so long ago, Catholics everywhere said the Pater Noster in the same language. This, in turn, makes it interesting that the Pope characterizes the problem with Matthew 6: 13 as a “translation” issue. The current Roman Missal and the fourth- century Vulgate give the plea in essentially the same words: “ne nos inducas in tentationem.”
You don’t have to know Latin too well to see that “Lead us not into temptation” is not only a good, natural English translation of these words: it is about the only good, natural transl ation possible. The new French version is a straightforward emendation. ( They are editing Jesus!)
So congratulations to the 21st- century super- Pope for spotting a problem with the words that everybody in the world of Latin Christianity was taught for a couple thousand years. Of course, the New Testament was written down in Greek, not Latin, but there is no real sign of help in the Greek text. To the degree there has been any controversy about the “original” wording of Matthew 6:13, it is over possible alternate meanings of “peirasmos,” the noun normally rendered as “temptation.”
It could mean something more like “test” or “trial.” Asking God not to test us still seems slightly out of line. But you will find some modern theologians spinning this as more of a plea for the Lord not to treat us too roughly in an end- times situation.
Many solutions to the lead- us- not problem have been tried. St. Augustine i nsisted on an ultra- fine distinction between “bei ng tempted” and “being led into temptation.” Some Protestant reformers more or less grasped the nettle and said, yes, God does lead some people into temptation: deal with it, you miserable weaklings. ( Calvin, for one, came fairly close to this view. Bucer ran it into the end zone and spiked it.)
The Catechism of t he Council of Trent, which some would still regard as the ultimate refinement of Catholic doctrinal tactics, solved the problem in a slightly different way. It naturally did not plead, as today’s Bishop of Rome does, that the Vulgate was botched. I read in a 19th- century English translation of the catechism: “The sacred Scriptures sometimes express the permission of God in language which, if understood literally, would imply a positive act on the part of God.” It is not really God who leads us into temptation. That is just a careless manner of human speaking. He lets Satan do the job.
This hints at the real unsquareable theological circle, the issues of determinism and omniscience and theodicy, lurking behind the ancient controversy over the language of the Lord’s Prayer. How can God really be absolved of ultimate responsibility for the nature and weakness of his creatures, or for the existence of sin?
The Pope, in his risky appeal to a fictitious “translation” problem — to the idea that something must have gotten mangled in a journey from Aramaic to Greek to Latin and modern languages — is reducing a huge issue to more comfortable dimensions, tractable to the ordinary believer. Surely nothing could be more traditional, or more Catholic, than that.