Lead Us Not Into Temptation

Of all the prayers Christians say, the one we say most often is the one Jesus himself taught us to pray. The Lord’s Prayer — sometimes called the Our Father, sometimes the Pater Noster, sometimes the Padre Nostro in Italian — has been on Christian lips in every century, in every continent, in every denomination, for two thousand years. Most of us learned it as small children. Many of us could say it before we could explain what most of the lines meant. It’s one of the few prayers that, even outside church, still has cultural recognition.

And right in the middle of it, in the version most English-speaking Christians have been saying their whole lives, there’s a line that says something a little troubling.

Lead us not into temptation.

The line is in Matthew 6:13 and Luke 11:4, in the two places the Lord’s Prayer appears in the Gospels. The Greek phrase is mē eisenenkēs hēmas eis peirasmon (μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν) — literally, do not bring us into peirasmon. The Latin Vulgate, which St. Jerome produced around the year 400, rendered this as et ne nos inducas in tentationem. Tyndale, working from the Greek in the 1520s, gave English readers and leade us not into temptacion. The King James Bible inherited Tyndale’s line essentially unchanged. And so the line has been said, in English-speaking churches, for five centuries.

But somewhere in the back of the mind of any thoughtful Christian who’s ever paid attention to what they were saying, a question quietly forms. Why am I praying for God not to lead me into temptation? Does God lead people into temptation? Does God do that? It doesn’t match the God we meet elsewhere in scripture. The book of James, just a few pages later in the same New Testament, says directly:

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, NIV)

So Christians, including the disciples who first heard the Lord’s Prayer from Jesus, were left with what looks, in English, like a contradiction. Do not lead us into temptation — but God doesn’t lead anyone into temptation. Do not tempt us — but God cannot be tempted by evil and does not tempt anyone. The same Bible, twenty or thirty pages apart, seems to say two different things.

The problem, it turns out, isn’t in the Bible. It’s in the English word temptation.

To get there, we have to go back to the Greek word the Gospel writers actually used. The noun is peirasmos (πειρασμός). The verb is peirazō (πειράζω). In English Bibles, both have been translated, at one time or another, as temptation / tempt. But this is one of those cases where a single English word has been doing too much work and obscuring too much of the underlying Greek meaning.

Peirasmos in first-century Greek means several things at once, depending on context. It means testing — the way an examiner tests a student, or a metallurgist tests gold, or a soldier is tested by combat. It means trial — a hard ordeal that reveals character, like the trials of Job. It means probation — a period during which someone’s faithfulness is on the line. And, yes, in some contexts, it can also mean temptation — an enticement to do wrong. But temptation in the modern English sense — being lured by attractive options to do something sinful — is just one slice of a much wider Greek word. Peirasmos covers all of it: testing, trial, ordeal, probation, and yes, sometimes temptation.

You can see the range working in the New Testament itself. In the book of James, just a few sentences before the verse we already quoted, the same word group is used in a very different sense:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. (James 1:2-3, NIV)

The Greek for trials of many kinds is peirasmois poikilois. Same word as in the Lord’s Prayer. And here it doesn’t mean enticement to sin at all — it means the hard testings of life that build endurance. A few verses later, James tells us God cannot be tempted by evil. Same root. Different shade. James can use the word for trials we should welcome in verse 2, and for temptation God does not do in verse 13, because the Greek word holds all of that range — and the meaning is fixed by context.

This is the lexical key to the line in the Lord’s Prayer. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray do not bring us into peirasmon, he wasn’t asking the Father not to do something James later says God doesn’t do anyway. He was using a word that, in its broader sense, meant testing, ordeal, severe trial. He was teaching his disciples to pray to be spared that — the kind of hard testing that breaks faith. The modern English word temptation — narrowed over centuries to mean enticement to do wrong — has lost almost all of that breadth. We hear temptation and think of small moral choices. The disciples heard peirasmon and thought of much bigger things.

To understand what those bigger things were, we have to step into the world the first disciples lived in. First-century Judaism was full of expectation — and not just any expectation. There was a specific expectation, deeply embedded in Jewish prophetic and end-times writing, that before God’s kingdom finally came in fullness, there would be a time of intense testing. The prophets called it various things. The day of the Lord. The labor pains of the Messiah. The great tribulation. The hour of trial. It was thought of as a singular ordeal — a peirasmos in the most loaded sense — that would precede God’s final breaking-in. Daniel had written about it. Isaiah had written about it. The Jewish writings from the centuries between the Old and New Testaments — many of which the disciples would have known — were full of it.

And the New Testament, in several places, talks about this same ordeal using exactly the word peirasmos. The book of Revelation, written to a church facing imperial persecution, has the risen Christ saying to the church in Philadelphia:

I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. (Revelation 3:10, NIV)

The Greek for hour of trial is hōras tou peirasmou — the hour of the peirasmos. With a definite article. The great testing. Peter, in his first letter, uses the same word to describe the kind of fiery trial (peirasmos) the early Christians were already going through — persecution, suffering, the kind of testing that would prove or break faith. Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 3:5, worries that the tempter (using the verb form, peirazō) might have tested his readers beyond what they could bear. The word, in this loaded sense, was everywhere in the early church. It described the kind of hardship that came with following Jesus in a hostile world, and it described the larger end-times testing the prophets had warned about.

Read against that background, the line in the Lord’s Prayer changes its shape. Do not bring us into peirasmon isn’t — or isn’t only — a prayer about resisting small daily temptations. It’s a prayer asking the Father to spare his people the great ordeal. To not let them be brought into the testing that would prove too much for them. To deliver them from the hour of trial. It’s, in a real sense, a prayer for protection from what was coming.

The American biblical scholar Raymond Brown — a Catholic priest who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City for most of his career, whose two-volume The Death of the Messiah is one of the most respected modern treatments of Jesus’s passion, and who served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission — wrote a famous article in 1961 called “The Pater Noster as an Eschatological Prayer” (a scholarly way of saying the Lord’s Prayer is about the last days, not just daily piety) that established this reading in modern scholarship. Brown’s argument was that every line of the Lord’s Prayer, read in its original first-century Jewish setting, points beyond ordinary daily piety to the larger drama of God’s kingdom coming. Hallowed be your name — that the name finally be honored in the way the prophets promised. Your kingdom come, your will be done — that the reign of God we explored in Chapter 9 finally arrive. Give us this day our daily bread — that we be sustained, the way the wilderness Israelites were sustained with manna, while we wait. And lead us not into peirasmon — that we be spared the great testing, the ordeal that would prove too much for ordinary faith. Brown’s reading has been refined and debated for sixty years, but the basic insight has held up. The Lord’s Prayer was, from the start, a prayer about the kingdom that is coming, and the line about peirasmos belongs squarely in that frame.

There’s a contemporary controversy I should mention here, because it touches on this chapter directly. In 2017, Pope Francis publicly expressed concern about the standard Italian translation of the Lord’s Prayer — e non ci indurre in tentazione, and lead us not into temptation. He said, in an interview on Italian television, that it wasn’t a good translation, because it suggested a God who induces temptation. It is not God who pushes us into temptation, the Pope said — a father does not do that. In 2018, the Italian bishops voted to adopt a revised translation. The Holy See confirmed it. And on the First Sunday of Advent, November 29, 2020, Italian Catholic congregations began praying a new version of the line: non abbandonarci alla tentazione — do not abandon us to temptation. The French Catholic bishops had made a similar change in 2017: ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation, do not let us enter into temptation.

The change drew responses from across the Christian world. Some welcomed it as a long-overdue clarification. Others — including some Catholics, many Protestants, and most Anglicans — pushed back, arguing that the Pope was changing a translation that had served the church faithfully for centuries, or that the Greek really does say lead us not and we shouldn’t soften the prayer to make it more theologically comfortable. The Anglican Communion and most Protestant denominations have kept the traditional wording. The Catechism of the Catholic Church continues to discuss the line in terms of both meanings.

I have no business adjudicating that debate. What’s worth noticing, though, is that every side in the conversation agreed on the underlying problem — that the modern English (and Italian, and French) word temptation is too narrow to carry the full Greek peirasmos. The Pope’s concern was real. So was the concern of those who pushed back. The deeper recovery isn’t to argue about which translation is right but to remember that the Greek word, in Jesus’s mouth, was always doing more work than any of the modern words can do.

What Jesus actually taught his disciples to pray, when we put the word back where he put it, is something like this:

Father in heaven — when the testing comes — when the great ordeal arrives — when the trial that proves faith is set in front of us — do not bring us into it. Spare us. Carry us through. Deliver us from the evil one who would push us past what we can bear.

That’s a richer prayer than do not let me give in to small moral temptations, though it includes that. It’s a prayer for protection through hardship of all kinds — the ordinary daily trials of life, and the great testing the prophets warned about, and the day-to-day pull toward giving up faith under pressure, and everything in between. The Greek word carries all of it. The disciples praying it for the first time would have heard all of it. And when persecution came — when their friends were thrown to lions, when the temple fell, when their families turned them out — they prayed this line knowing what they were asking. Father, do not let us be brought into the testing that would break us. Deliver us from the evil one.

Reading this yourself

Try praying the Lord’s Prayer once, slowly, with this in mind. When you come to the line and lead us not into temptation, don’t change the words — they’ve served Christians for centuries and they don’t need to be replaced for your private prayer. But let the Greek behind them open up in your mind. Do not bring us into the testing. Spare us the ordeal. Don’t let us be put through what we cannot bear. And deliver us from the evil one — the one who actually does push us toward what we cannot survive. The next line in the prayer is its own answer: but deliver us from evil. The whole couplet is one petition, with two halves. Do not bring us into the testing. And rescue us from the evil one who would. It’s one of the boldest things to pray, and the shortest, and the most ordinary, and the one Jesus’s own followers needed most. Every single one of them, in the years after Jesus said it, would be tested in ways the modern word temptation cannot quite reach. The prayer was given for those moments, and it’s still given for ours.

Two thousand years of Christians have prayed this prayer in English, and Italian, and French, and Latin, and every other language the church has spoken. The line in the middle has felt, in modern ears, like a slight wobble — a prayer that almost seems to suggest God might lead us into something we shouldn’t be led into. The wobble isn’t in what Jesus said. It’s in the word temptation, which has narrowed across the centuries until it cannot carry what peirasmos carried. The Greek word always meant more. It meant the testing, the trial, the ordeal, the time of hardship that the prophets warned about and the apostles lived through. Jesus taught his followers to ask the Father to spare them that — and to ask, in the same breath, for deliverance from the one who wanted to put them through it. The English translation isn’t wrong. It’s just narrower than what was originally said. The deeper reading is the one Jesus’s first disciples heard. The prayer asks the Father to spare us the testing. The prayer asks the Father to keep us. And the Father — who, as James reminds us, cannot be tempted by evil and tempts no one — is the same Father who hears that prayer, two thousand years on, every time we say it.