Lead Us Not: An Old Debate

In December 2017 Pope Francis said on Italian television that the usual Italian wording of “lead us not into temptation” was “not a good translation.” One Italian paper put the obvious question in its headline: did the Pope want to change the Our Father?

The question is real, and it is very old. Christians have stumbled over this line for as long as we have records of them explaining it.

Two verses

The difficulty starts in the Bible itself. James writes: “Let no man say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God,’ for God can’t be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one.”¹

Then Matthew, two chapters before the prayer: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”² The Greek word for “to be tempted” there belongs to the same family as peirasmos, the word at the end of our petition, which means testing and trial as well as temptation.³

So the Bible says both things. God tempts no one, and the Spirit leads the Son into the place of testing. Our petition sits between those two verses.

The first to flinch

The oldest Christian commentary on the Lord’s Prayer that survives was written by Tertullian in Carthage, around the year 200.⁴ He quotes the line and explains it at once: “that is, suffer us not to be led into it, by him (of course) who tempts; but far be the thought that the Lord should seem to tempt.”⁵

Half a century later Cyprian, bishop of the same city, wrote his own book on the prayer. His text of the petition does not say “lead us not” at all. It reads: “And suffer us not to be led into temptation.”⁶

The same unease traveled north into the young languages of Europe. A small handbook of the faith, copied at the monastery of Weißenburg in the ninth century, writes out the prayer in Old High German and explains each petition. It keeps the words, endi nigileidi unsih in costunga, “and lead us not into temptation.” Then it explains that God leads no one into evil, but that when God forsakes someone, that person is at once in temptation; so what we ask is that he not forsake us.⁷ Otfrid, a monk of the same house and the first German poet we know by name, retold the Gospels in rhyme about 868.⁸ When he reaches this line he does not use the verb “lead.” He prays that God’s care may not forsake us in the danger of the adversary.⁹ About a century later Notker, the great teacher of St. Gall, kept the words and glossed them at once: do not let us be tempted according to our sins.¹⁰

Two of these teachers kept the words and explained them. The poet changed them. That is very nearly the shape of the argument today.

England had its own version. In 1543 Henry VIII’s formulary, A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, printed the petition as “And let us not be led into temptation.” It explained that Christ teaches us to pray “that he will not suffer us to be led into temptation, that is to say, that when we be tempted, he will give us grace to withstand it.”¹¹ The King’s Primer of 1545, which every schoolmaster was ordered to teach, has the same line.¹² Four years later the first Book of Common Prayer went back to “And leade us not into temptacion.”¹³

2017

So the debate of 2017 was an old one. The Pope spoke in a television series on the prayer, broadcast on December 6, 2017. As Il Post reported his words, he said: “it is I who fall; it is not he who throws me into temptation to see afterwards how I have fallen. A father does not do that; a father helps you get up straight away.”¹⁴

The French bishops had just acted. From the first Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2017, French Catholics were to pray ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation, “do not let us enter into temptation,” instead of ne nous soumets pas à la tentation, “do not subject us to temptation.”¹⁵ In November 2018 the Italian bishops approved non abbandonarci alla tentazione, “do not abandon us to temptation.”¹⁶ It came with the new Italian Missal in Advent 2020 and became obligatory at Easter 2021.¹⁷

The German bishops kept their words. Their commission on doctrine gave its answer on January 25, 2018. Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung stays close to the Greek of Matthew and Luke, they wrote, and there are weighty reasons against a change. Among them, the fact that the same text is prayed across churches and countries in the whole German-speaking world is “not the least important argument.”¹⁸

Both sides at their best

Those who changed the words are not embarrassed by Jesus. They want to protect what he meant. If the people in the pews hear “God, please do not trap us,” the translation has failed them. They stand in a long line that runs from Tertullian and Cyprian through Weißenburg to the King’s Primer. They have James on their side. And in Gethsemane Jesus himself tells his friends: “Watch and pray, that you don’t enter into temptation.”¹⁹

Those who kept the words are not careless about how they sound. The German bishops wrote that the petition does not carry “the suspicion that God could want a person to fail,” but faith in his justice and mercy. And it is worded so that even “the abysmal experience that God is testing a person beyond their strength” is given a voice.²⁰ Some nights feel exactly like that. A prayer that has words for those nights is not a mistake. They have the wilderness on their side, and the Greek.

Where I stand

I do not know which side is right. I find myself between the two, leaning first one way and then the other. It is confusing in the Bible, and I think we have to be able to live with that.

So my book shows both positions and gives no answer. We do not pray this line because we have understood how God governs the world. We pray it because we have not. The church has prayed it with a question mark beside it since at least the year 200, and it has kept praying.

I wrote this note with the help of an AI model, as I did the book. Every quotation in it was checked against its source.

Footnotes

1. James 1:13. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

2. Matthew 4:1. ↩

3. Greek πειρασθῆναι (peirasthēnai), Matthew 4:1, and πειρασμόν (peirasmon), Matthew 6:13, in The SBL Greek New Testament, ed. Michael W. Holmes (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010), github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. ↩

4. Karlfried Froehlich, “The Lord’s Prayer in Patristic Literature,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Supplementary Issue no. 2 (1992), pp. 71–87, at p. 72, archive.org. Froehlich dates Tertullian’s treatise “just around 200 A.D.” and Cyprian’s to 250. ↩

5. Tertullian, On Prayer 8, trans. S. Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (1885), tertullian.org. The Latin reads id est, ne nos patiaris induci, ab eo utique qui temptat. ↩

6. Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer 7, trans. Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1885), ccel.org. The Latin reads et ne nos patiaris induci in tentationem. In chapter 25 Cyprian adds that “the adversary can do nothing against us except God shall have previously permitted it.” ↩

7. The Weißenburg Catechism, in Elias von Steinmeyer, ed., Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler, 2nd ed. (Berlin and Zürich, 1963), p. 29, lines 28–31, TITUS transcription: Nileitit got eomannan in ubilo thohheinaz, uzzar thanne her then man farlazzit, so ist her sar in costungom. The paraphrase is ours. Steinmeyer dates the hands of this part of the manuscript to the first decades of the ninth century (1st ed., Berlin: Weidmann, 1916, p. 35). ↩

8. Arthur F. J. Remy, “German Literature,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1909), newadvent.org. Remy gives Notker’s dates as about 952 to 1022. ↩

9. Otfrid, Evangelienbuch II.21, 37–38, ed. Oskar Erdmann, 6th ed. by Ludwig Wolff (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973), TITUS transcription: Ni firláze unsih thin wára in thes wídarwerten fára. The paraphrase is ours. ↩

10. Notker, Oratio dominica, in Paul Piper, ed., Die Schriften Notkers und seiner Schule, vol. 2 (Freiburg and Tübingen: Mohr, 1883), p. 633, archive.org: Daz chit . nelâzest tu únser gechórot uuerden . nah unseren sundon. The paraphrase is ours. ↩

11. A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man (1543), in Charles Lloyd, ed., Formularies of Faith Put Forth by Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII (Oxford: University Press, 1856), pp. 334, 350–352, spelling modernized by the editor, archive.org. ↩

12. The King’s Primer and the King’s Injunction of May 6, 1545, in Edward Burton, ed., Three Primers Put Forth in the Reign of Henry VIII (Oxford: University Press, 1834), pp. 457–459, spelling modernized by the editor, archive.org. ↩

13. The Booke of the Common Prayer (1549), Matins, transcribed by Charles Wohlers, justus.anglican.org. ↩

14. “Il Papa vuole cambiare il «Padre nostro»?”, Il Post, December 11, 2017, ilpost.it. The Pope’s words are quoted as Il Post reported them; the series was Padre nostro on TV2000. The translation is ours. The Italian: «non è una buona traduzione … sono io a cadere, non è lui che mi butta nella tentazione per poi vedere come sono caduto, un padre non fa questo, un padre aiuta ad alzarsi subito». ↩

15. Manuella Affejee, “France : une nouvelle version du « Notre Père » à partir du 3 décembre,” Vatican News, November 16, 2017, vaticannews.va. Translations ours. ↩

16. Conferenza Episcopale Italiana, “72ª Assemblea Generale: Comunicato finale,” November 15, 2018, p. 2, chiesacattolica.it. ↩

17. Giulio Viviani, “Una parola alla nostra gente in occasione della nuova edizione del Messale,” Archdiocese of Trento, September 2020, p. 1, diocesitn.it. ↩

18. Glaubenskommission der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, Zur aktuellen Diskussion über die Vaterunser-Bitte „Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung“, press release no. 010a, January 25, 2018, pp. 1–2, dbk.de. The translation is ours; the German reads nicht das unbedeutendste Argument. ↩

19. Matthew 26:41. ↩

20. Same statement, pp. 4–5, translations ours. The German: nicht der Verdacht, Gott könne wollen, dass ein Mensch scheitert; die abgründige Erfahrung, Gott prüfe einen Menschen über seine Kraft hinaus. ↩