Pope Francis says he wants to change the wording of the Lord’s Prayer as the text implies God “induces temptation” and is a mistranslation of the original Greek text.
The offending phrase, says the pontiff, is “lead us not into temptation” - he prefers “do not let us fall into temptation”, BBC News reports.
The implication in the Lord’s Prayer as it now stands is “awkward” for Christians, as it seems to attribute blame to God, says Sky News. The pontiff made his remarks during an interview with TV2000, an Italian Catholic TV channel, on Wednesday.
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The Lord’s Prayer is considered a perfect summary of the Gospels, but there are differing opinions about how to translate the Greek used in the original New Testament. The Spanish have switched the phrase to “don’t let us fall into temptation”, while the Italians say “don’t abandon us to temptation”, The Times reports.
The French solution is to use “do not let us fall into temptation” - a translation favoured by the Pope, because it implies the fault would be human, according to the Daily Mail.
The original text was written in Aramaic, the language believed to have been spoken by Jesus.
New editions and translations of the Bible have been plagued with errors, The Daily Telegraph reports. The 1611 version of Robert Barker’s King James Bible mistakenly omitted the word “not” from one of the Ten Commandments, which read: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”