Could you possibly send me a copy of your recent posting on PEIRASMOS. I seem to have mislaid it and want to go over it in a bit more detail. I am really enjoying this look at the Lord's Prayer. Have you read Tom Wright's book on it? The Lord and His Prayer. He sees everything in the light of the Exodus. Tom suggests the following possibilities for this phrase:
"let us escape the great tribulation, the great testing, that is coming on all the world" OR
"do not let us be led into temptation that we will be unable to bear" OR
"Enable us to pass safely through the testing of our faith"
I don't think any of these actually answer the question. Moreover, Ben Crick suggested that all that mattered was how it felt when you prayed it! A lovely application of postmodernist reader response theory to prayer. But there is also the whole problem of dealing adequately with the text. If the text attempts to delimit the meaning (which I think every text does) by its choice of vocabulary and syntax, then we cannot say that our reading is OK as long as it feels OK. The benefit of b-greek for me is trying to get at the root of what the original Greek meant and then moving over to apply that to our theology.
I still don't think I am convinced we are there either with PEIRASMOS or with EISENEGKHIS. I hope a more detailed perusal of your posting on PEIRASMOS might get me closer!
Pete Phillips,
Cliff College, Sheffield, England
p.m.phillips@cliff.shef.ac.uk
http://champness.shef.ac.uk/