Forgive Us Our Debts and Deliver Us From Evil (4 of 9)

Churches split over whether to say debts or trespasses, and the argument is an artefact of translation.

The word Jesus used almost certainly meant both.

Why Do Versions Say Debts and Others Say Sins?

Because Aramaic did not require a choice.

Bailey’s position is that Jesus used the Aramaic word khoba, which carries the sense of debts and of sins together. Matthew renders it one way and Luke the other, and both are faithful to something the original held at once.

So the English disagreement is not a doctrinal difference. It is two languages splitting a word that did not need splitting, and the honest answer is that we need forgiveness for both.

That matters beyond the wording. A debt is owed to someone. Reading sin only as moral failure loses the relational half, and reading it only as debt loses the other.

Is Forgiveness Conditional?

The prayer ties the two together and does not explain the mechanism.

Jesus connects God’s forgiveness of his people with their willingness to forgive others, and the sentence immediately after the prayer in Matthew presses it harder rather than softening it.

Bailey adds something that goes further than the petition itself. Forgiveness must be offered even when it is not requested, and the model given is Jesus on the cross, forgiving people who had asked for nothing and were not sorry.

That removes the usual escape route, which is to treat repentance as a precondition for extending forgiveness. On this reading the offer does not wait.

How Often Is This Needed?

Continually, and the prayer’s structure says so.

Forgiveness sits in the same prayer as daily bread and is presented as the same kind of need. Not a transaction completed once but a recurring requirement, requested in the same breath as food.

Anyone who has treated forgiveness as a single event they have already had has misread the placement.

Does Forgiving Mean Abandoning Justice?

No, and Bailey’s formulation of the relationship is the most useful thing in the chapter.

Forgiveness and the struggle for justice are not opposites. His claim is stronger than compatibility: forgiveness purifies the struggle for justice.

That is worth sitting with. A campaign for justice run on unforgiveness curdles into something else, and usually into a demand for retribution wearing justice as a costume. Forgiveness does not stop the work. It keeps the work from becoming the thing it was opposing.

He also acknowledges the hardest case. Historic injustices are a special problem, and no formula dissolves them.

His observation about who manages it is uncomfortable and rings true. Those who truly suffer can forgive, because they know their own weaknesses. The people least able to extend it are frequently those with the least experience of needing it.

Is It Temptation or Something Else?

Probably something else, and the difference is substantial.

Lead us not into temptation is better rendered do not bring us to the time of trial. That is not a request to be kept from ordinary enticement. It is a request to be spared a testing that might break us.

And the verb can be understood as do not permit us to go, which changes the theological difficulty. The petition stops implying that God might actively lead someone into sin.

Bailey suggests the language reflects the classic request of a trusting pilgrim to a respected guide. Someone travelling unfamiliar country, asking the person who knows the road not to take them by a route they cannot survive.

What Is the Last Petition Asking?

Protection, from evil or from the evil one, and the Greek allows both.

Bailey does not adjudicate between them and there is no need to. He calls it a cry from the heart in every age, which is what it reads like.

The prayer ends there. It began with a Father in the heavens and it finishes with a request not to be destroyed. Nothing in between resolves the distance between those two, and the prayer does not pretend to.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount, following Bailey’s treatment. See also thy kingdom come and the bread that lasts.

Footnotes2

1. The debts and trespasses disagreement is a good example of a division that survives because nobody checks where it came from. Two English traditions are preserving two halves of one Aramaic word, and congregations have been quietly suspicious of each other's version for centuries over a distinction the original did not make.
2. That forgiveness purifies the struggle for justice rather than replacing it is the formulation to keep. It refuses both of the usual errors, which are treating forgiveness as a reason to stop pursuing justice, and treating the pursuit of justice as a reason to withhold forgiveness.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 10. Supports the identification of khoba as carrying both debts and sins, the argument that forgiveness must be offered before it is requested, the recurring nature of the need, the relationship between forgiveness and the struggle for justice, the rendering of the sixth petition as the time of trial, and the pilgrim and guide image. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 6:12-13, Luke 11:4, Matt 6:14-15, and Luke 23:34.

Where the sourcing stops: the reconstruction of the underlying Aramaic is an argument rather than a manuscript fact, since the Gospels reach us in Greek. The relationship between receiving forgiveness and extending it is a genuine theological difficulty and this post describes what the prayer says rather than resolving it.