Jesus Never Talked About "Forgiving Sins"

The prescription that Jesus offered was more general and less judgmental

I act as a translator not a philosopher or historian, and, as a translator, the English Bible’s emphasis on “sin,” “evil,” Satan,” and “hell” is more an artifact of the beliefs of the translators than an accurate reflection of Jesus’s teaching. Appreciating oratory, I have always thought that Jonathan’s Edwards famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is an especially fine piece of work, reflecting, however, more the temperament of its time that Jesus’s own view.

In this essay, I will look specifically at the two words that Jesus used that are most translated as “forgive” and “sins,” primarily meaning “leave” and “mistakes” rather than “forgive sins.” Let me confess right up front, that I prefer Jesus’s meaning to the one evolving within Christianity, the former being broader, more inclusive, and more useful emotionally, especially in the way Jesus uses it. Modern Christianity may be coming to this thinking as well, many preachers today commonly referring to the Greek definition of the word “sin,” at least in passing.

“Letting Go” and “Leaving Alone”

Let us start with the word translated as “forgive,” aphiemi (Ἄφες), it being for more common, Jesus using it seventy-three times, making it a common verb for him, being translated many different ways in English Bibles, in the KJV, “leave,” most commonly, “forgive,” “suffer,” “let,” “forsake,” “let alone,” and thirteen other times as other English words. In other Greek works, outside the Bible and resulting works, it is never translated as “forgive,” but as "let fall," "send away," "give up," "hand over," "let loose," "get rid of,, "to leave alone," "to pass by," "permit," and "to send forth from oneself," meaning literally “to go from.” This second list is both more consistent, encapsulated in the English phrase “let go,” giving us a better sense of the verb’s meaning. Apiemi is the verb version of the noun meaning “letting go,” aphesis.

This verb is only used with the noun translated as “sins”—hamartia (ἁμαρτίας)—in fourteen verses in Jesus’s words. Compare this to the hundred and four verses in which Jesus uses the catchphrase, “truly, I’m telling you,” giving us a perspective as far as its importance in Jesus’s teaching.

This word has the sense of both leaving something alone and leaving a place. Apiemi is Jesus’s first word in the Gospel (Matthew 3:15), responding to John's concerns about who should be baptizing whom, saying, “Let it go.” It is first translated as "forgive" in the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:12) where it is applied to forgiving debts—though the Greek word for “debts” is translated as “sins” in many versions—reflecting the biblical translator’s fixation on the concept of sin.

There are other words in Greek at the time that are used for various ideas of "forgive," though perhaps not the modern Christian idea of the word. Many are based on the root, aidôs, which means "respect for others," "reverence," "compassion," and "forgiveness," a saintly form of forgiveness. Another root, sunchôreô, means "assent" or "concede," used to mean the economic forgiveness of debt.

Making Mistakes

The word most translated as “sin” in the Gospels is, as I have said, the noun hamartia (ἁμαρτίας), used in only 28 twenty-either verses of Jesus’s over 1,897 verses, meaning "missing the mark," "failure," “fault," and "error," having no sense of doing malicious evil. The adjective form, hamartolos (ἁμαρτίας), used in fifteen verses, meaning "erroneous" or "erring," also meaning” of bad character" in the sense of being a slave or low-born not evil. The verb, “to sin,” is the verb form, hamartano (ἁμαρτήσῃ), appearing in another seven verses, meaning “to miss the mark,” “to fail in one’s purpose,” “to err,” “to be mistaken,” "to fail in having," “to neglect,” and so on.

Jesus equates this concept with going into debt, stupid, but hardly a moral failing, in Luke 13:2 and Luke 13:4, in  Luke 13:2, using the adjective form of hamartolos, translated as "sinner," the word translated as "sinner" later in Luke 13:4 being a different word, opheiletes, meaning "debtors." In translating both words as "sinner" the KJV translators recognize that the Jesus mean the same type of people in the context of these verses, but what is hidden in that their shared meaning is not a reference to a sin against God, but the idea of making bad decisions, making mistakes leads directly to falling into debt. This idea of "mistake" is supported all the other words Jesus says must be "forgiven," the Greek word, paratoma, which means "blunders" in Matthew 6:14, translated as “trespasses,” the word, having no religious dimension.

A lot of things that Jesus says make much more logical sense when we replace "sin" with "mistake." For example, Jesus is translated as saying in John 8:21, that he is going away and that they would seek him and "die in [their] sins" because they cannot go where he is going. In looking at the translation, we must ask ourselves what sin have they committed in seeking him? However, it is easier to understand if Jesus is saying that they will die, "within their failure" because they do not know how to follow.

You should also know that there are well-known Greek words in Jesus’s time that did mean “sin,” in the sense of a moral failing, alitros, meaning “sin,” “sinner,” and “sinful.” However, Jesus never uses this term. It is impossible that Jesus and the Gospel's authors didn’t know it since it is common in written Grek along with alitria ("sinfulness"), alitêrios ("sinning"), and aleitês ("sinner"), all used in the NT.

Conclusion

The most general sense of the Greek phrase translated as "forgiving sin" is "letting go of failure," an idea that works more consistently with Jesus’s use of both words. To let go, we must realize that we are holding on to our and the mistakes of others in one way or another. We must accept we all will always make mistakes, our “error-prone” rather than “sinful” nature. We must let go of errors in the sense of not dwelling on them, not worrying about them—another theme of Jesus—but also in the sense of leaving them behind, that is, putting those behaviors in the past, the double meaning of "stop the habit of making" and "stop dwelling on past mistakes".