Emeritus Professor Bruce Wood is wrong to claim that “in both the Edwardine (1549) and the Elizabethan (1559) Book of Common Prayer” (BCP) the wording of the Lord’s Prayer is “let us not be led into temptation” (Letters, 10 June).
By the good offices of the Minster Library, I have now examined their two copies of the 1549 BCP, one published in March the other in May 1549, and their original 1559 version. In all three, in the services where the Lord’s Prayer is recited and especially in the catechism on which children were examined before confirmation, there is the traditional version “and lead us not into temptation”.
Professor Wood may be confusing the BCP with The King’s Book of 1543, where the petition is indeed “suffer us [let us] not to be led into temptation”, Henry VIII’s preferred rendering. All this can be checked by anyone using the Oxford World Classics edition of the different versions of the BCP, published in 2013.
The irony of Pope Francis agreeing with Henry VIII will not be lost on his detractors.
Harold Mozley
York
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