If you have been paying attention to the news and especially the internet it has been aflame with articles and commentary about he Holy Father proposing a change to the Our Father or Lord’s Prayer.  His proposal is to change the words “and lead us not into temptation” to the words “do not let us fall into temptation.”   The Holy Father states that this not a good translation and seems to say the Lord would lead some one to temptation to cause them to fall.

This is not a new argument.  The prayer as it now stands is taken from the Latin Vulgate which was itself translated from several texts written in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.  What we do know is that the Latin Vulgate which is the current standard which has been translated into the other languages.  One thing that we must remember is that no certified text of the original written texts exist.  All the documents we have are copies.

The interpretation of the ancient text has been a subject of debate for centuries.  Some theologians have argued that the original phrasing was lost in translation as it morphed from different languages.

The argument that asking God to not lead us into temptation seems strange when God is love and only wants our good.  I have read in several articles form a number of reliable sources that the Holy Father put it this way “Do not let me fall into temptation because it is I who fall, it is not God who throws me into temptation and then sees how I fell,” he told TV2000, an Italian Catholic TV channel.  “A father does not do that, a father helps you to get up immediately.”

Now I readily admit I am not a scholar of languages and I trust the Church in the translation that we are supplied.  The Roman Missal that is the accepted Missal for the Roman Catholic Church is written in Latin.  What we use is an English translation.  We all know how much consternation was caused by the changes to the English translation of the Roman Missal.  In fact if you noticed we went from using a Sacramentary to a Missal for the Mass.  In that change the directive was to make the English a literal translation of the Latin.

So where do we stand? In an article published in the LA Times they state: Last month, the Catholic Church in France agreed to switch from the French equivalent of “Do not submit us to temptation” to “Do not let us enter into temptation.” The pope said he was impressed with the new wording.”  Citing a biblical scholar Massimo Grilli, a professor of New Testament studies at Gregorian University in Rome.  According to Grilli the entire quandary results from the translation of a single Greek word “eisenènkes.”  The article goes on to state that the wording was already being reevaluated in the larger Church. “The Spanish have already switched to ‘Don’t let us fall into temptation,’ ” he said. In 2008, the Italian bishop’s conference switched to “Don’t abandon us to temptation,” although many priests have stuck with the old version during their services.”  The French and the Portuguese have embraced the new wording as well.

Before we get too exercised here we need to remember that the Our Father we commonly pray is already different from the words contained in the Gospels (See Matthew 6: 9-13 and Luke 11: 2-5).  Also the ending of the prayer For thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever, Amen was added at some point and the origin is uncertain.

So just know that the tinkering with the Our Father has been going on for a long time.