One Word That Was Changed

Words to Know

Debt — money you owe to someone. If you cannot pay it, you can lose your house, your land, or your freedom. That last part was literal where I lived. A man who could not pay could be jailed until somebody paid for him, or sold, or have his children taken and put to work (2 Kings 4:1; Nehemiah 5:1–5; Matthew 18:25).

Trespass — an offense. Something wrong you did to another person. In old English it also meant walking on land that is not yours.

The Lord’s Prayer — the prayer I taught my followers. It is in Matthew 6:9–13 and in a shorter form in Luke 11:2–4. The two versions do not use the same words, and you will see why that matters before the end of this lesson.

Say the prayer.

You know it by heart because you learned it before you could read.

Say the part about forgiveness out loud.

Most of you just said this: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Now do something. Go get a Bible. The one in the drawer is fine.

Turn to Matthew, chapter 6, verse 12.

Read what it really says.

If it is a King James, an NIV, an ESV, an NRSV, or a NASB — which covers most of the Bibles in most American houses — it does not say trespasses.

It says debts.

Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Not sins. Not hurt feelings.

Debts. Money that one person owes another person.

I am being careful with you, so here is the other half. If you are holding an NLT, a CEV, a Good News Bible, or The Message, you will read sins or wrongs instead. Those four are not word-for-word translations. They are paraphrases — somebody read the sentence, decided what it meant, and wrote that down for you.

Which means somebody decided it meant sin.

Hold on to that. It is the whole lesson.

This was not a mistake.

Somebody might tell you the two words mean the same thing. In Greek they are not even close, and you can check this in any study Bible with footnotes. Here is the one fair objection, and you should have it: I spoke Aramaic, and the Aramaic word behind it, hoba, carries both meanings at once. So the choice may have been the writer’s rather than mine. But it was still a choice, and he made it twice, and he knew the other word.

The prayer in Matthew 6:12 uses the word opheilēma. It means a thing owed. It is the word for a bill.

Eight lines later, in Matthew 6:14, the same writer uses a different word: paraptōma. That one means a false step, a stumble, an offense against a person. ¹

Nobody knows who wrote the book we call Matthew. The name was attached to it later. But whoever he was, he had both words in front of him, and in the prayer he picked the money one.

And now the part I have to tell you myself, before somebody else does.

There are two versions of this prayer, and I am not going to hide the second one from you.

Luke 11:4 says forgive us our sins. That is the plain word for sin — hamartia. It is a different word from Matthew’s.

An honest reader should know that. So now look at the rest of Luke’s line: for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

Luke took the money word out of the first half and left it sitting in the second half.

That is what a change looks like while it is still happening. If this prayer had always been about sin, there would be no debtors left in it. Luke kept them, because they were there first.

Why it matters.

I lived in a place where debt was destroying families. I will show you that in Lesson 3.

So I taught a prayer that asked God to wipe out what people owed.

You have been saying a prayer about hurt feelings.

So who changed it?

This has names and dates in it, and you can check every one of them.

The thing to understand is that the verse on the page and the prayer in your mouth come down two different pipes.

The printed verse. The old Latin Bible of the western church says debita — debts. The King James translators followed it in 1611 and printed debts. So does your NIV. That pipe kept the money word for fifteen hundred years.

The spoken prayer. In 1526 an Englishman named William Tyndale printed the first English New Testament made from the Greek, and at Matthew 6:12 he wrote trespasses. In 1549 Thomas Cranmer assembled the Book of Common Prayer for the English church, and the Lord’s Prayer in it follows Tyndale: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. ²

That prayer book was read aloud in every parish church in England, every week, by law, for hundreds of years. Children learned it before they learned to read.

That is how a word gets into the mouths of millions of people who never chose it. Not a plot. A liturgy.

So the Bible on your shelf and the prayer you recite have never been the same sentence. One word got changed, in a printed book, by men whose names are known, four hundred years before you were born. And when it changed, the whole subject changed with it.

A prayer about the thing that was crushing my neighbors became a prayer about something you can settle by yourself, in private, that costs nobody anything.

Nobody hid this from you.

That is the strange part.

It is printed in your Bible. It has always been there. It takes one minute to find.

Nobody ever had a reason to point at it.

That is what all of these lessons are like.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 6:12

You will find: the word debts, not trespasses.

Then look up: Matthew 6:14, two lines later.

You will find: a different word — trespasses or sins, depending on your Bible. Two different words, two lines apart, on purpose.

Then look up: Luke 11:4, the other version of the prayer. It says sins in the first half and indebted in the second half. Ask yourself which half somebody was still in the middle of changing.

The Short Version

• I taught a prayer that asked God to cancel debts — money owed.
• The KJV, NIV, ESV, NRSV and NASB all print debts at Matthew 6:12.
• Luke’s version says sins, but keeps indebted in the second half — the older word showing through.
• The recited trespasses comes from Tyndale in 1526 and Cranmer’s prayer book in 1549, not from the Bible on your shelf.
• Changing one word changed what the prayer is about.

Think About It

1. Why would a church prefer a prayer about feelings over a prayer about money?
2. Who loses something if debts get cancelled? Who loses nothing?