Eis Peirasmón

On the Quest for the Lost Message of Redemption and Damnation Contained in the Lord’s Prayer

Federico Elmetti

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781666749472
  9781666749489
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666749496
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

For the past two thousand years, theologians and biblical scholars have been furiously debating the correct interpretation of the sixth petition of the Lord's Prayer ("and lead us not into temptation"). Despite all the hypotheses proposed, no convincing solution has been found to date. In fact, every single attempt has crashed against insurmountable difficulties. Even within the church, the debate on this topic is far from settled. Recently, both France and Italy approved new translations that deviate substantially from the two-thousand-year-old traditional Latin version. Since God cannot be the one leading us into temptation (Satan is), it becomes necessary to reformulate the petition by hiding God's responsibility under convoluted permissive constructs. But can any of these interpretations have any exegetical justification? This book is an ambitious and reckless attempt--from the point of view of an outsider, of a theoretical physicist--to rethink the Lord's Prayer from the beginning, and with it, to come closer, if possible, to the authentic message of Christ. As a result of a rigorous, deductive, scientific approach that minimizes any hermeneutical bias, the meaning of the sixth petition will spontaneously emerge and appear to the reader in its simplicity and elegance.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: God Does Not Lead Us into Temptation
• Chapter 2: The Sermon on the Mount
• Chapter 3: Eisphérō
• Chapter 4: To Lead or to Allow to Go?
• Chapter 5: The Lord’s Prayer in Different Idioms
• Chapter 6: Causative vs. Permissive
• Chapter 7: The Permissive Construct in Biblical Greek
• Chapter 8: Can God Lead Man Astray?
• Chapter 9: The Permissive Sensitivity in the Old Testament
• Chapter 10: The Causative Form of “to Enter” in the Old Testament
• Chapter 11: The Theory of the Divine “Cardiodynamic”
• Chapter 12: Divine Justice and Free Will: the Choice between Good and Evil
• Chapter 13: God and the Necessary Evil: the Examples of Noah and Lot
• Chapter 14: The Relationship between God and Satan: the Example of Job
• Chapter 15: Critique of the Church Fathers
• Chapter 16: The Concept of Temptation in the Old Testament
• Chapter 17: The Concept of Temptation According to the Evangelists
• Chapter 18: The Big Misunderstanding
• Chapter 19: Lead Us Not into Peirasmós
• Chapter 20: But Deliver Us from Evil
• Chapter 21: Is It Ponērós or Ponērón?
• Chapter 22: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Extra-Biblical Tradition
• Chapter 23: The Active Interpretation
• Chapter 24: The Eschatological Interpretation and the Unsolved Problem
• Chapter 25: The Lord’s Prayer in the Gethsēmaní and the Problem of Trivialization
• Chapter 26: Agnus Dei
• Chapter 27: The Meaning of Peirasmós in the Sixth Petition
• Chapter 28: The Meaning of the Sixth Petition
• Chapter 29: The Secretary of Divine Mercy
• Chapter 30: The Lord’s Prayer, Corrected
• Appendix
• Bibliography