Towards the end of February, I posted a photo of a stack of books to illustrate that I was preparing to deliver another sermon. You can watch the version I did the following day in our YouTube service for the following Sunday:

In the live Sunday service, I edited it down a little bit (the whole segment on whether an examiner would have given Paul top marks for his ‘essay’ or marked him down for getting carried away on the praise of Jesus), but it gives a fairly good impression of the talk. One of the things I mentioned was that older versions of the Lord’s Prayer used the word ‘debt’ instead of ‘sin’ but, last week, I spotted that the ‘traditional language’ version for the Church of England actually says ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who sin against us’. Was I wrong?

It would be embarrassing if I was, as I built a lot on this word debt and another economic term: redemption. Nobody had mentioned it but I’ve since done a bit more follow up study, particularly with an article on the Desiring God website. It turns out that, as in many things, the answer is complex!

While modern Anglican liturgy uses ‘sin’, the traditional form (shared with Roman Catholics and Methodists) is ‘trespass’. It seems that a lot of that goes back to William Tyndale, who published an English New Testament in 1526 that made that choice. Ten years later, he was executed for his pains (the era of the Protestant Reformation makes contemporary British society look quite safe and mellow by comparison) and the King James Bible (1611) opted to use the word ‘debt’ in Matthew 6:12 as most later English translations still do. However, Cranmer’s 1549 prayer book, a strong inspiration for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer which is still the traditional Church of England liturgy, chose to use ‘trespass’ as, indeed, did later Roman Catholic translations into English (despite the Latin liturgy using debita).

Various other Christian traditions have habitually stuck with ‘debts’ in their traditional form so, while I was clearly wrong in terms of Anglican liturgy, I was still correct in the context of a church that draws from quite diverse denominational backgrounds, in terms of traditional language in English bibles and in how it was written in the original Greek.

By the way, Luke’s version (Luke 11:4) is also worth a look. Modern versions tend to contrast ‘forgive us our sins’ with ‘as we forgive those indebted to us’, indicating how both words hover around the same centre of meaning.