12.35 ὁ πονηρός: (a title for
the Devil, literally ‘the evil one’) the one who is essentially evil or in a
sense personifies evil—‘the Evil One, He who is evil.’ ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ ‘but rescue us from the Evil One’ Mt 6:13. (Johannes
P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English
Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains [New York: United
Bible Societies, 1996], 145)
β. ὁ
πονηρός the
evil one=the devil (who
is not defined as a sinner but as one who is morally destructive) Mt 13:19; J 17:15; Eph 6:16; 1J 2:13f; 5:18, 19 (κεῖμαι
3d); B 2:10; B 21:3; MPol 17:1; AcPlCor 2:2, 15) ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ εἶναι be a child of the evil one (ἐκ
3a, end) 1J 3:12a; cp. οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ πονηροῦ Mt 13:38, in case πον. is masc. here.—The gen. τοῦ πονηροῦ Mt 5:37; 6:13
can also be taken as masc. (it is so taken by Ps.-Clem., Hom. 3, 55 p. 51, 19;
21; Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Chrysostom; KFritzsche, JWeiss; s. also
Schniewind on Mt 6:13; Weymouth,
Goodsp.;—it is taken as a neut. [s. γ]
by Augustine: WMangold, De Ev. sec. Mt
6:13, 1886; BWeiss, Zahn, Wlh.; Harnack, SBBerlAk 1907, 944; PFiebig, D.
Vaterunser 1927, 92; Betz, SM 380f; 405–13; Mft., NRSV marg.); Lk 11:4 v.l.; 2 Th 3:3; D 8:2. These passages may also belong under. (William
Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early
Christian Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 851-52)
If Matt. 6:13a is so clearly a petition for help against the devil,
then we must understand ponērou in v.
13b. as masc. It is a prayer to be snatched out of this power (cf. K. G. Kuhn;
see bibliography). J. A. Bengel, Gnomon,
ad loc., considers the 6th and 7th petitions to be closely linked, a positive
and negative formulation of the same matter, which are therefore considered one
petition by some. He quotes Hiller on Matt. 6:13, “The evil one has not changed
his purpose since Adam’s temptation. He remains the evil one, and he is the
enemy of God and of Christ, and of all who believe on God and Christ.”
(iii) ponēros is also used
as a neut. noun (to ponēron), Lk.
6:45b; Rom. 12:9; 1 Thess. 5:22; Matt. 5:11; Acts 5:4 (v. l.); 28:21). It should be remembered, however, that several
passages in the NT trace evil to the devil. When in Matt. 9:4 Jesus accuses the
scribes, and in Matt. 12:35 the Pharisees, of evil thoughts, ponēros is also to be linked with the
devil. Elsewhere (Jn. 8:44) Jesus called them children of the devil. There is
no neutral zone between God and the devil, where evil as something purely
neutral could find its home. (E. Achilles, “Πονηρός,” in New International Dictionary of New
Testament Theology, ed. Lothar Coenen, Erich Beyreuther, and Hans
Bietenhard, 3 vols. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986], 1:567)
89. The question has been raised whether at
the end of the Lord’s prayer in ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ (Mt 6:13) the words ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ are to be understood as referring to
«evil» or to a personal «evil one» (the devil). Various reasons in favour of
the latter sense are given by J. -B. Bauer in Verb. Dom. 34, 1956, 12–15, and one of them is the use of the
preposition ἀπό
instead of ἐκ after ῥύεσθαι, which is predominantly used with ἐκ when the reference is to deliverance from
non-personal evils, and with ἀπό
when the reference is to personal foes. In the NT (leaving out of consideration
the text at present in question) ἀπό
is twice found with a personal object and once with a non-personal one, while ἐκ is never found with a person but seven
times with things. This is confirmed by the usage of the LXX: ἀπό with persons ten times, with things seven
times; ἐκ with persons ten
times, with things sixty times. This perhaps suggests, so far as this argument
is concerned, that Mt 6:13 is to be understood as referring to the devil. (Max
Zerwick, Biblical Greek Illustrated by
Examples [Scripta Pontificii Instituti Biblici 114; trans. Joseph Smith; Rome:
Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1963], 29.
