Pope Francis changing things again

The Italian saying is Traduttore, Traditore,  or "translator, traitor": That no translations really are accurate. Part of it is because the word one uses to translate is not equivalent, and sometimes it is because the nuance and cultural background of the word is not in the translation.

For bible translations, often there is a lot of controversy: Do you use "gender neutral" pronouns? Ah, but what if the verse is prophetically pointing to Christ, not just a generic person, and the gender pronoun obscures this? Or how do you translate "give us this day our daily bread" for cultures where bread is not eaten (here in the Philippines, that word used is the generic for "food" which obscures that it is a reference not just to regular food, but to spiritual food and to the Eucharistic bread).

then there are the "hard sayings" so beloved of militant atheists, who often take them out of a cultural context, or pretend they are to be taken literally when they are allegories, but others times there are "hard words" that are really just not politically correct in today's merciful world (compare and contrast: Who am I to judge vs "millstone").

So the Pope is busy changing the Our Father, insisting that God never leads people into temptation.

Uh Matthew 4:1 anyone?

Not my area of expertise, but on the other hand, why is Francis busy upsetting people when no body is really upset with the original translation and it doesn't have to be done?

Is this merely Francis' hubris showing again, or is this a "wag the dog" way to change the subject at a time when the US Catholic bishops (who he shut up last year) are again trying to get rid of the problems of corrupt bishops? 

So one has to be amused when he is corrected, not by a bishop (who are supposed to be the teachers of the faith) and not by theologians and other experts in biblical studies, but by Professor Mary Beard (of Caligula fame) in the Times literary supplement.,,,

“Not a good translation” was what puzzled me. Now of course we do not know what Jesus originally said in Aramaic, but in the Greek of Mark’s gospel, what he says is: μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν μὴ is the ‘not’, ἡμᾶς is ‘us’.

The key verb (here used as a negative command) is εἰσενέγκῃς, coming from a nasty irregular Greek verb that would be be transliterated into English as ‘eisphero’, and it means ‘bring into’, ‘carry into’, ‘introduce into’. And εἰς πειρασμόν means ‘into a test’, ‘into a temptation’, ‘into a trial’.

Certainly no ‘falling’ here! Now, I admit, that my knowledge of Greek is not based in the New Testament, but I really think that Mark is pretty clear here, and it is along the lines of the old version.

Pope Francis may not like it theologically, but it looks as close as you can get to the earliest (Greek) version we have.

if you go to the comments, you get a lot of interesting comments.

The top comment notes that this part of the prayer is a reference to the Old Testament, where God sent the children of Israel into the desert to be tested and by the way also provided them with their daily bread.

headsup Lifesite news.

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update:

EWTN discusses the corrupt bishops here.