Temptation – do we really blame God for leading us right into it?
The Pope has changed the words of the Lord’s Prayer. At least, he has changed the translation into Italian of one phrase. His decision is as Bishop of Rome and boss of the Italian bishops; he is not speaking infallibly ex cathedra to the whole Church.
Out goes the Italian equivalent of “Lead us not into temptation” and in comes something like
“Do not abandon us to temptation.” Pope Francis has made a thing of adjusting this language, to avoid misunderstanding. “I’m the one who falls. But it’s not God who pushes me into temptation,” he said on television a couple of years ago.
No doubt the ambiguous language was the fault of the original translators of the Gospel according to St Matthew and to St Luke into Latin from their original Greek. The Latin says ne nos “lead us not”; the Greek says
if that helps. Elsewhere in the New Testament that verb means “bring”. For centuries, biblical commentators have pointed out that God does not tempt us.
I do wonder how many people were put off by the existing translation. Pretty soon, any half-instructed child realises that old-fashioned language means something adrift from today’s. So the Book of Common Prayer has “judge both the quick and the dead”, and of course quick means not “fast” but “living” (as in “cut to the quick”).
The real problem comes when the language of prayers that are known by heart is updated. It is a familiar piece of the theatre of embarrassment when someone who seldom goes to church attends a funeral or wedding and at last finds a part of the proceedings in which he can join, beginning confidently: “Our Father...” Then the trouble starts. In an older version, the prayer continues “which art in heaven”. It didn’t mean that in the 16th century Cranmer thought that God was inanimate, but simply that the relative pronoun which could refer to people as well as things. Something similar survives in “The girl that I marry” (from Annie Get Your Gun).
“Hallowed be thy name”, continues the Lord’s Prayer. Is that to be changed because some children mishear it as “Harold be thy name”? And what of thy? No one says thee, thou or thy (unless they live north of the Trent).
The Church of England has an updated form that says things like “Forgive us our sins” (instead of “Forgive us our trespasses”). I don’t know that version by heart. Catholics, oddly enough, follow a mitigated form of the Reformation Protestant version. I think that is because in their services before that period they used Latin.
Anyway, the Catholics of England and Wales have already announced that they do not intend to follow the Pope’s lead on this matter. It’s not that they dislike the Pope, but that bishops of different realms make up their own minds. I’m happy to use the current version, except when I go to Spain, which years ago adopted the equivalent of: “Do not let us fall into temptation.” When in Rome…