Mat 9:2 Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.
This is the first mention of sin by Christ in the Gospels. I mention this because I have been waiting and waiting. Churches throughout history have made the focus of Christianity sin and redemption from sin, but Christ has laid out all his major themes by this point, and sin is not among them.
The word translated as "sin" is the Greek hamartia, which is a form of hamartano, which means "to fail in one's purpose," "to neglect," and "to be deprived of." It has no sense of
doing malicious evil in Greek. Best English translation? I would say, "failures" rather than what we commonly think of as the evils of "sin."
The word translated as "forgive" is aphiemi, which we have seen several times before. It means to "let go," "to leave," "to depart," "to give up a debt," "to leave on dying", "to pass by," and "to get rid of."
So the phrase works out to, "Child, take courage, your failures have left you."
2 Comments:
I was just wondering what you meant by this being the first mention of sin. I believe Jesus was talking about "sin" in the Sermon on the Mount. He uses the term in 5:29 "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away". Just wondering what your thoughts are. :) Thanks
People can translate different Greek words as "sin" in English, but in the King James Version (KJV), the translation of Matt 5:29 is "if your right eye offends you..." but--more importantly--the Greek term translated as "offend" is skandalizo, which is not translated as "sin" any of the 28 times it appears in the KJV. It means "to give offense," as in our term "scandal," which comes from it.
This is the first time the Greek term harmartia is used in the NT, and that term is almost always translated as "sin" in the KJV though it doesn't mean much like we have come to think of "sin" in modern Christianity, as I discuss in this post.
We use the KJV as the standard of English translation because it follows the Greek most closely and because most other English translations are derived from it in one way or another.
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