Andy Warren-Rothlin posted on MAP today about the Lord's Prayer (see Matt 6:9-15; Mark 11:25; Luke 11:1-4):
Do we translate what the Greek says ("Don't lead us into temptation") and end up with quite a weird thing to say about God, or what we think it probably meant when it was originally said in a semitic language with a causative permissive/obligative hiph'il/aph'el ("Don't let us fall into temptation")? And if the latter, how do we cope with the idea that the Greek that we have is, by any normal standards, a mistranslation? A very serious question of translation policy!
It's an old issue for biblical scholarship, dating back at least to an article in 1965:
But now, half a century later, the French Catholic church has started using a revised version of the prayer in liturgy, and it's reported that the Pope agrees:
Do we translate what the Greek says ("Don't lead us into temptation") and end up with quite a weird thing to say about God, or what we think it probably meant when it was originally said in a semitic language with a causative permissive/obligative hiph'il/aph'el ("Don't let us fall into temptation")? And if the latter, how do we cope with the idea that the Greek that we have is, by any normal standards, a mistranslation? A very serious question of translation policy!
It's an old issue for biblical scholarship, dating back at least to an article in 1965:
Carmignac, J., ‘“Fais que nous n’entrions pas dans la tentation”: La portée d’une négation devant un verbe au causatif’, Revue biblique 72 (1965) 218-26.
The French situation is reported here, and the news has even reached our local rag in Switzerland!
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