Trespasses or Debts | Samuel Matthis

When Christians from different churches pray the Lord’s Prayer together, the voices can come apart at one line. Some say “forgive us our trespasses.” Some say “forgive us our debts.” Some newer services say “sins.”¹ For a moment the room sounds like a choir that has lost its place.

I do not think this is an embarrassment. Each word shows a different side of the same thing, and none of them alone is the whole.

Two Gospels, two words

Matthew wrote opheilēmata, debts, things owed: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.”² It is a word from the marketplace, and it is surprising to find it in a prayer. Ernst Lohmeyer, a German scholar who wrote a whole book on the Lord’s Prayer, noticed that in the Greek Bible the word has a religious sense only here, in Matthew.³

Luke chose the ordinary word for sin, hamartias. But look at the second half of his line: “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.”⁴ He changed the first noun and kept the debt in the second.

Two verses after the prayer, Matthew brings in a third word: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.”⁵ The Greek there is paraptōmata, a different word again.³

One word for both

Why would two Gospels differ like this? Lohmeyer pointed to Aramaic. Its word ḥôbâ has the same double sense as Matthew’s Greek. It means a debt, and above all in the Targums, the old Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, it became the most general word for sin. It came, he noted, from commercial life.⁶

If Jesus used that word, Matthew’s “debts” and Luke’s half-and-half both make sense. But Lohmeyer was honest about the limit: wenngleich wir nicht wissen, wie weit er schon in der Zeit Jesu geläufig war, “although we do not know how current it already was in the time of Jesus.”⁶ So this is a theory, not a fact. Even as a theory it points to something true. Owing and sinning are close relatives.

Tyndale’s word

The early English Bibles said “debts.” The Wycliffite translation has “forȝeue to vs oure dettis, as we forȝeue to oure dettours.”⁷ Then William Tyndale, in his New Testament of 1526, wrote: “And forgeve vs oure treaspases/ even as we forgeve them which treaspas vs.”⁸ John Macrae, writing for a Scottish church society in 1943, put it plainly: “of all the translators of the English Bible, Tyndale alone has used the word.”⁹

So in the English Bible, “trespasses” is Tyndale’s word. But the line as the Prayer Book has it is not his. “As we forgive them that trespass against us” came from the primers, small books of prayers for lay people. It is in Marshall’s Primer of 1535.¹⁰ The same words are in the formularies of faith put out by royal authority in 1537 and 1543,¹¹ and in the King’s Primer of 1545, which Henry VIII ordered every schoolmaster to teach children “next after their A, B, C.”¹² In 1549 the first Book of Common Prayer took the line into the church’s worship: “And forgeve us oure trespasses, as we forgeve them that trespasse agaynst us.”¹³ In the English Prayer Book, Macrae wrote, it “has never varied since.”¹⁴

The Bible’s word

The Bibles kept “debts.” Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible all have it, and so does the King James Bible of 1611: “And forgiue vs our debts, as we forgiue our debters.”¹⁵ The Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647 quoted the Bible’s words: “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” The Church of Scotland adopted that catechism in 1648, and the American Presbyterian synod of New York and Philadelphia in 1788.¹⁶ In 1943 Macrae found both forms in use in Scottish churches.¹⁷

So if you say “debts,” you are in the company of the King James Bible and the Westminster divines. If you say “trespasses,” you are in the company of Tyndale, the primers and the Book of Common Prayer. Both are good company.

Schuld

German has kept the double sense in a single word. The common German text says Und vergib uns unsere Schuld, wie auch wir vergeben unsern Schuldigern.¹⁸ Schuld is both debt and guilt. The great dictionary of the brothers Grimm gives its senses as zahlungsverpflichtung, vergehen, ursache: “obligation to pay, offense, cause.” Even where Schuld means guilt, the Grimms explain, a sense it has above all in the speech of the church, der nebenbegriff der drückenden verpflichtung zu einer sühne is noch im sprachbewusztsein lebendig: “the secondary sense of a pressing obligation to make amends is still alive in the feeling for the language.”¹⁹ A German speaker can hear both at once.

Which word helps us pray

So which word is right? I do not think we have to choose. Each one shows a side of the same broken relationship.

A trespass is a line crossed, a step onto ground that is not ours. It names the harm we do to someone else’s life. A debt is something owed and not paid. We owe God our lives and our love, and we owe our neighbors more than we give them. That is a debt of love, and it cannot be paid back in kind. A sin is the old plain name for both: turning away from God and from each other.

What the three share is that we cannot fix them ourselves. The trespasser cannot take back the steps. The debtor has nothing to pay with. Sin is real and serious, but it is not the center of the gospel. Grace is.

That is why this line is addressed to a Father, the one who is owed. In Matthew’s parable a servant who owes his king far more than he could ever repay falls on his knees and asks for time: “Lord, have patience with me, and I will repay you all.” The king does not give him time. “The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him and forgave him the debt.”²⁰

My book prints “trespasses” in its text of the prayer and gives a whole day to all three words. Whichever word you learned, pray it. Now and then, try one of the others. Each shows something your own word can hide.

I drafted this note with the help of an AI model. The footnotes are there so that you can check every line of it.

For example the ecumenical English text of the English Language Liturgical Consultation, Praying Together (1988), p. 10, archived copy. ↩
Matthew 6:12. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. The Greek words are from The SBL Greek New Testament, ed. Michael W. Holmes (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010), github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. ↩
Ernst Lohmeyer, Das Vater-unser (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1946; 5th printing 1962), p. 112, archive.org. ↩ ↩²
Luke 11:4. ↩
Matthew 6:14. ↩
Lohmeyer, Das Vater-unser, pp. 112–113. Lohmeyer spells the word ḥōbā. Translations from German in this note are ours. ↩ ↩²
Matthew 6:12, earlier version, in Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds., The Holy Bible … in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, vol. 4 (Oxford: University Press, 1850), archive.org. ↩
Matthew 6:12, in The New Testament … Published in 1526 … by William Tyndale, Reprinted Verbatim, ed. George Offor (London: Samuel Bagster, 1836), archive.org. The slash is Tyndale’s comma. ↩
John Macrae, “‘Debts’ or ‘Trespasses’,” Church Service Society Annual, 1943–44, pp. 8–10, at p. 8, archived copy. Macrae names the Wycliffite Bible, Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, the Rheims New Testament, the King James Version and the Revised Version as using “debts.” ↩
Marshall’s Primer (1535), in Edward Burton, ed., Three Primers Put Forth in the Reign of Henry VIII (Oxford: University Press, 1834), pp. 53–54 and 78, spelling modernized by the editor, archive.org. ↩
The Institution of a Christian Man (1537) and A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man (1543), in Charles Lloyd, ed., Formularies of Faith Put Forth by Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII (Oxford: University Press, 1856), spelling modernized by the editor, archive.org. ↩
The King’s Injunction of May 6, 1545, and the King’s Primer, in Burton, Three Primers, pp. 457–459. ↩
The Booke of the Common Prayer (1549), Matins, transcribed by Charles Wohlers, justus.anglican.org. ↩
Macrae, “‘Debts’ or ‘Trespasses’,” p. 10. ↩
Matthew 6:12, The Holy Bible (1611), as transcribed on Wikisource. For the other Bibles, see Macrae, p. 8. ↩
Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q105, with the editor’s headnote, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, pp. 698–700, ccel.org. ↩
Macrae, “‘Debts’ or ‘Trespasses’,” p. 8: “Both forms of the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer are used in our Scottish churches.” ↩
The common text of the German-speaking churches, as published by the Evangelical Church in Germany, ekd.de. ↩
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 9, ed. Moriz Heyne and others (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1899), s.v. “schuld,” cols. 1870 and 1879, woerterbuchnetz.de. ↩
Matthew 18:26–27. ↩