A sign reading, “No Trespassing.”
24 July 2023
Many people wonder about the word choice in different versions of the Lord’s Prayer. One version, favored by Roman Catholics and Anglicans, uses the phrase forgive us our trespasses. To the modern ear, trespass seems an odd word to use, with its primary present-day sense of entering a property without permission. Another version, favored by Protestants of the Reformed tradition, says forgive us our debts, which may sound even stranger, asking God to forgive one’s financial credit obligations. Many modern biblical translations simply use the word sin instead. Why the difference? It all has to do with translation and the history of these three words.
Trespass comes into English via the Anglo-Norman trespas. The French word originally meant passage or way, from tres- (intensifier) + pas (pace, step), and it is recorded by the early twelfth century. But by the late twelfth century it had acquired the additional meaning of a bypass or way around something, and this sense was extended to include a failure to observe a law by the early thirteenth. And by the mid thirteenth century, the French word had acquired the sense of a transgression of the law, misdeed, or sin.
Middle English borrowed trespas in these legal/theological senses by the late thirteenth century. Perhaps the earliest example we know of is from the life of Thomas Becket in the Early South English Legendary. The relevant lines read:
For it nas neuere lawe ne riȝt : double dom to take
For o trespas, ase ȝe wel wuteth : and sunne it were to make;
And vnwuyrþere þane a lewed Man : holi churche were so:
A lewed Man for o trespas : bote o Iuggement nis i-do.(For it was never correct law to undertake double jeopardy
For one trespass, as you know well, and it would be a sin to make it so;
And if it were unmerited then for a lay person, then it should be so for the holy clergy.
A lay person for one trespass, only one judgment should they suffer.)
The use of trespass in the text of the Lord’s Prayer is from William Tyndale’s 1525 translation of Matthew. The liturgy of the church maintains this sense, even though the sense has fallen out of common use elsewhere.
Debt also comes from the Anglo-Norman, where the word is dette, and it too dates to the twelfth century. From its earliest known uses, the word could mean either money that is owed or sin, transgression. The French word is from the Latin debitum, meaning money owed, a financial obligation.
English use of debt (spelled without the <b>, as in the Anglo-Norman) is recorded in both the financial and theological senses starting in the thirteenth century. And we see debt being used in the context of the Lord’s Prayer from its earliest known appearances in English. The following lines are from the Ancrene Wisse, a manual for anchoresses:
O þis ilke wise, we beoð alle I prisun her, ant ahen Godd greate deattes of sunne. For-þi we ȝeiȝeð to him i þe Pater Noster, Et dimitte nobis debita nostra. “Lauerd,” we seggeð, “forȝef us ure deattes, alswa as we forȝeoueð ure deatturs.”
(From this likewise, we are all in prison here, and owe God great debts of sin. Therefore, we call out to him in the Pater Noster, Et dimitte nobis debita nostra. “Lord,” we say, “forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors.”
In the sixteenth century, the <b> began to be artificially reintroduced into English spelling to conform to the Latin root.
Sin, on the other hand, has a much longer English pedigree. It comes from the Old English syn, which had much the same meaning as the present-day word. Here is the word being used in the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, c. 888, a translation that is commonly ascribed to King Alfred the Great:
Ac þæt is swiðe dyslic and swiðe micel syn þæt mon þæs wenan sceole be Gode, oðð eft wenan þæt ænig þing ær him wære oððe betere þonne he oððe him gelic. Ac we sceolon bion geþafan þæt God sie eallra þinga betst.
(But that is very foolish and a very great sin that one should think that about God, or again that anything was prior to him or better than him or like him. But we must acknowledge that God is the best of all things.)
There is a belief that sin comes from some archery term meaning to miss the target. This tale stems from confusion and misunderstanding of preachers giving Sunday sermons. The English word sin has no such etymology. The Greek αμαρτία (amartia or hamartia) does have its roots in hunting or warfare, where it literally means to fall short or miss the mark when shooting an arrow or throwing a spear. But in later use the Greek word would come to mean fault, transgression, failure, or sin. Αμαρτία appears quite often in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible and, of course, in the New Testament, which was originally written in that language, and as a result the etymology is given in many biblical commentaries and used by preachers as a sermon illustration. This use, however, is somewhat flawed and anachronistic. By the time the New Testament was being written, the hunting sense of αμαρτία was long obsolete. To early Christians αμαρτία would simply have meant a violation of God’s law and would not have conveyed a metaphorical sense of falling short, as an arrow falls short of its target.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 1992, trespas, n.; 2006, dette, n.
Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine, eds. The Old English Boethius, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, § 34, 320. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180 (2079), fol. 53r.
Horstmann, Carl, ed. “St. Thomas of Caunterbury.” The Early South English Legendary. Early English Text Society, OS 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 461–64, 119–20. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud 108.
Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. debeo. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, 77. Archive.org.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, trespas, n., dette, n.
Millett, Bella, ed. Ancrene Wisse. Early English Text Society 325. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 50. Archive.org. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, fol. 34r.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. trespass, n., debt, n.
Photo credit: Djuradj Vujcic, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.