"Trespasses" and "Debt"

The concept of debt played a more important role in Jesus’s world than the frequency of the words describing it indicate. The most important of these words is used only once, in the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:12:

NIV: And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Listeners Heard: Also, let go for us those debts of ours, as even we ourselves let go of those debtors of ours. 

You might have learned as a child that the word here is “trespasses.” I learned it that way as well. That is how it appears in some Catholic Bibles. There is a reason for this that I will explain.

The Greek Words

The fact that the word for “debt” in the above verse is used only once is surprising because we think of the Lord’s Prayer as central to Jesus’s teaching. The Greek word used is opheilema, (ὀφειλήματα), which means simply "that which is owed," so"debt."

The word translated as "debtors” in that verse is opheiletes, (ὀφειλέτης), which means "a debtor," "a person who owes a debt" or "one who is under a bond." This word is also only used once, that is, in the Lord’s prayer. The idea of “one under a bond” is important because bond slaves were the most common form of slaves in the time of Jesus. Whenever we read “servants’” in the Bible, the Greek word means “slaves.” (See this article.) The word translated as “forgive” actually means “let go.” This means that the promise to let go debtors means that we will for free our slaves. Given how we live today, this promise may seem meaningless. However, slaves are even more common in the world today than when slavery was legal.

The actual slaves are held in foreign countries, but those using them are mostly Americans. They are women and children held as sex slaves, the topic of my recent post on “The Sound of Freedom.” While they are not “ours” in the sense that we own them, they are “ours” in the sense that they are created by our society that patronizes them. How? California, for example, recently voted down a measure for more serious sentences for sex traffickers because they sympathize more with the slave masters than the slaves themselves. California is our most populous state, and their voters keep electing such people.

Stumbling into Debt

A least in Jesus’s time, most slaves in his area became slaves through their own mistakes. This is the connection of “debt” to the word translated as “trespasses.” The Greek noun translated as “tresspasses” appears only two verses after the Lord’s Prayer, in Matthew 6:14:

KJV: For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
Listeners Heard: Because if you should let go for these people those blunders of theirs, he is going to let them go also for you, that Father of yours, the heavenly one.

The initial “because” here makes this seem like the answer to a question. Given the number of slaves in Judean society, it seems logical that the first thing people would ask about after hearing the Lord’s Prayer would be the promise of letting go of slaves. Many listening were slaves. Many were also the masters of slaves.

The Greek word here is paraptoma (παραπτώματα), and it means "false step", "slip", "blunder", and "defeat.” It also means a "error in the amount of payments." Again, the last definition is the key. In terms of these “blunders,” the “error” was much more than a miscalculation of a single payment. It was and is the miscalculation of the amount of debt a person could afford to repay. This is the blunder that led to slavery.

In the NIV version of Matthew 6:14, this word is translated as “sin.” This is another mistranslation, but an understandable one since the Greek word usually translated as “sin” means “mistake.” Blunders are a form of mistake. The false steps of paraptoma are also closely connected to the idea of stumbling. Jesus uses the humorous verb, skandalizo, that means “stumble” or “is tripped up,” frequently, at least in twenty verses, more than any verbs about debt or trespasses. It is this “stumbling” that connects his broader teaching to the idea of debt.

Debt as Obligation

Another word meaning “debt” is again used by Jesus only once. That Greek word is opheile, (ὀφειλὴν). It is a feminine noun meaning "one's due." The earlier noun was neuter, which in Greek are things, objects. Feminine nouns are often concepts more than things. The earlier debt was the amount itself. This word is the idea of being obliged to someone, owing them something that may or may not be monetary.

This points to an important point. In the ancient world, many debts were not monetary, but debts of family, favors, and honor. The verb root of these nouns is opheilo, (ὤφειλεν), which means "to owe," "to be bound," "to be obliged," and "to account for." Jesus uses this verb more than the nouns, but still in only five verses. The idea of being obliged to balance one’s obligations started with birth, that is, honoring our fathers and mothers. However, Judeans were also obligated to honor the Law of Moses. This means that breaking those laws created obligations of repayment, not the
”debts to society” that we think of today. The standard was equal restitution, “an eye for an eye, but by Jesus’s era, the lawyers had converted many forms of restitution into set monetary amounts.

The complementary idea to “owing” is another verb from the same root, opheleo, (ὠφεληθῇς,). Notice how similar it is to opheilo, “to owe.” But opheleo, means "to help," "to aid," "to succor," and "to be of use or service." These are the actions that create debts, and Jesus uses this positive word more often than any of the “debt” words, in eight verses. This aid was not charity, but aid given with the expectation of repayment. In the Bible it is usually translated more negatively as “to profit” from its meaning of "to enrich," and "to benefit." Jesus often seems to use it negatively. For example in its most famous verse, Matthew 16:26:

KJV: For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

All of these words come from another Greek verb that means “to heap.”

Application to Modern Debt

Biblical translators appear to be so strongly committed to the idea of “sin” that whenever they see the verb “let go” in connection with any negative, they want to translate it as “forgive.” But for Jesus, “letting go” was much more closely tied to getting past our old mistakes and blunders. The worst of such mistakes was falling into debt, which in Jesus’s time, meant people literally owing others their lives because without help, they would starve. Slavery was a better option than starving.

This is still true today in our much richer world. People still fall into debt. House debts, car debts, tax debts: all are mistakes. We may think the result is not slavery, but it would look very like it to those in Jesus’s era, especially regarding our tax debts. If we don’t pay our taxes, our freedom and property are forfeit. If we pay eighty percent of our income to those to whom we owe debt, are we only twenty perfect free? That amount of freedom was comparable to the freedom enjoyed by most slaves in Jesus’s time. In his era, slavery to the right people could be a path to worldly success. The second wealthiest and most powerful man in Galilee was a debt slave.

People also lose their freedom because of the debts to society for violating the law. The sad thing about modern imprisonment, as compared to the slavery of Jesus’s time, is that prisoners cannot do productive work, except educating themselves. They had debtors’ prisons in Jesus’s time as well. Marcus Juliaus Agrippa was imprisoned for a while for his debts in Rome, but he rose from prison to become the king of Galilee and Judea. However, most chose to be someone’s debt slave that go to prison because they has greater freedom and more opportunities.