Tempting? - or testing?

Jesus said, And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. Matthew 6:13 (NRSV)

A friend approached me with a query. His church had adopted a new version of the Lord’s Prayer, and he was puzzled by one of the requests. (I can’t resist saying, well, at least his church still said the Lord’s Prayer – a practice which I get the feeling is becoming more and more rare.) He had no problem with the language being updated, but he felt that the essential meaning had been changed.

What was his problem? Well, all his life he had been praying “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”, but suddenly now he was expected to pray “do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one”. Which is very different. Had he been praying wrongly all those years? If he had, surely it was because the church had led him to do so!

This is just one example of how new Bible translations sometimes seem to say something completely different from what we are used to.

So, while I am no expert on the original Bible languages (or on anything else, come to that), I thought it might be helpful to briefly explain why this happens. (You may know all this anyway – in which case I won’t be in the least offended if you skip this blog!)

The fact is this: Unless you are familiar with Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek (plus a little bit of another language called Aramaic) you cannot read the Bible except via a translation. That’s just the way it is. You are totally dependent upon language-scholars whose minds are soaked in these languages.

This being the case, two important factors come into play.

First, the experts sometimes discover through further study that the way a Hebrew or Greek word was understood in the past was in fact somewhat misleading, and therefore needs to be changed.

And second, every language changes gradually as the years and the centuries go by, and therefore translations need to be revised. (We English-speakers today don’t talk today the way Shakespeare talked, and not even the way Dickens talked. I’ve just been reading a novel by Jane Austen (1775-1817), and it’s striking how different her English is from ours today – little things like “surprised” being spelled “surprized”, for  example – really quite surprizing, you could say.)

My friend’s problem with the Lord’s Prayer is wrapped up in a Greek word which, putting it in English letters, is spelt peirasmos (say “pay-raz-mos”).

The question is: Does peirasmos mean “temptation” in the sense of “seduction to do wrong”, or does it mean “testing” in the sense of “trial” or “being given a hard time”? And the general opinion among those who know the Greek is that it’s the second option: so Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray “Don’t bring us to a time of hard testing”.

(One commentary I looked at told me that the word peirasmos occurs thirty-six times in the New Testament, and in all but two it clearly means “testing” rather than “temptation”.)

The Jews believed, and Jesus also taught, that before the end of the world there would be a time of severe trouble, as the forces of evil gather their strength and work havoc on the earth (Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 24 is full of this). In the Lord’s Prayer, then, Jesus is preparing them – and us, of course – to be always ready and, indeed, to pray that we might be spared this fate.

There’s another important consideration too. The more you think about the translation “lead us not into temptation” the more odd it seems. Why would God lead anybody into temptation! Indeed, how could a perfect and holy God do such a thing? Jesus’ brother James explicitly says: “When tempted, no one should say ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone…” (James 1:13).

And so… however unfamiliar the new translation may seem to be, there can be little doubt that it is more accurate. We have to get used to it, accepting that just as Jesus, the living Word of God, is both divine and human, so too the Bible, the written Word of God, is both divinely inspired and also humanly written.

Of course, scholars can get things wrong, and may sometimes mislead us. Some, sadly, seem to believe virtually nothing in the Bible at all. But let’s not be unduly suspicious! – especially when we’re talking about scholars who have a strong belief in the inspiration of scripture. They are our friends, and we should be thankful for them and pray for them. The more accurate they can make our Bible translations, the better we will come to see and know Jesus.

After all, if it weren’t for them we simply wouldn’t have a Bible, would we? Imagine that!

Thank you, Father, for your written word, the Bible. And thank you for people who devote their lives to understanding it, explaining it, and working to ensure that we have it in the best possible translations. Through their work, enable us to get to know Jesus, your living Word, better and better. Amen.