Who Can Forgive Sins?

This note is interpretation, not translation. It asks one question, who can forgive sins, and it begins where the argument should begin: with every place the scriptures say that the sins of those who trust in Jesus have already been forgiven, and what the tenses of those verses say about how far the forgiveness reaches. Only after that does it take up the verse Rome builds the priest’s absolution on, John 20:23, and set it beside what Rome itself says. The reading at the end is Jon’s and is marked as his. Revelation opens with the point: Jesus is “the one who loves us, and who released us from our wrongs at the cost of his own blood” (1:5), and the next verse makes the released ones “priests serving his God and Father” (1:6).

Already forgiven. These are the verses that speak of believers’ sins as forgiven, and in each the tense is marked, because the tense is the point. With “all”: “having forgiven us all the trespasses” (Colossians 2:13, panta ta paraptōmata, an aorist participle, a finished act), and the next verse says when: “he wiped out the record that stood against us … and has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross” (2:14). In the perfect tense, which in Greek is a thing done whose result stands: “I write to you, children, because your sins have been forgiven you on account of his name” (1 John 2:12, apheōntai), the same form Jesus used to the paralysed man and to the woman, “your sins have been forgiven” (Luke 5:20; 7:48). As something held now: “in whom we have the redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of trespasses” (Ephesians 1:7), “in whom we have the redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:14), echomen, present. As done: “as God in the Anointed forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32); “as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13). Not counted: “blessed the man to whom the Lord will never count sin” (Romans 4:8, from Psalm 32:2); “not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Cleansed: “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from every sin” (1 John 1:7); “having made a cleansing of sins, he sat down” (Hebrews 1:3); “to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people” (Titus 2:14); the worshippers “once cleansed” have “no longer any consciousness of sins” (Hebrews 10:2). Washed: “you were washed, you were made holy, you were declared right” (1 Corinthians 6:11, three aorists); “the one who has bathed … is clean all over” (John 13:10, perfect). Carried away: “he himself carried our sins in his body onto the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). No condemnation: “there is now no condemnation for those in the Anointed Jesus” (Romans 8:1); the one who hears and trusts “does not come into judgment, but has passed over from death into life” (John 5:24, perfect). Declared right: “everyone who trusts is declared right from all the things from which you could not be declared right by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:38–39); “declared right now by his blood” (Romans 5:9).

In the Hebrew scriptures. The same “all” is there first. “Who forgives all your iniquity” (Psalm 103:3, lĕkhol avonēkhi); “as far as the east is from the west, he has removed our transgressions from us” (103:12); “you have thrown all my sins behind your back” (Isaiah 38:17, kol chata’ai); “you will throw all their sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19); “I have wiped out your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like a mist” (Isaiah 44:22); “the LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6, avon kullanu); and the covenant promise this book’s letters stand on, “their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34), quoted twice in Hebrews (8:12; 10:17).

Does “all” reach forward? The word “all” has no tense in Greek or Hebrew, so the question is settled by the verbs and by the time-words beside them. Reaching forward: Christ died “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8), “for the ungodly” (5:6), so every sin of every believer alive today lay in the future when the record was nailed to the cross (Colossians 2:14). “By one offering he has perfected for all time those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:14, eis to diēnekes, a perfect tense with a duration word); the one sacrifice is itself “for all time” (10:12), and he “sat down”, where “every priest stands daily serving and offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins” (10:11). “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more. Now where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer an offering for sin” (10:17–18): a future tense, and a door shut on further offerings. “Eternal redemption” (9:12, aiōnian); “once” (hapax, 9:26, 9:28; 1 Peter 3:18); he saves “completely” or “for all time” (eis to panteles, Hebrews 7:25). “The Lord will never count sin” (Romans 4:8) uses the strongest future denial Greek has, ou mē. “Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen? Who is the one who will condemn?” (8:33–34) are future tenses. And 1 John 1:7 is present: the blood keeps on cleansing. Reaching back only: two verses, and both need their setting. “The passing over of the sins previously committed” (Romans 3:25, progegonotōn) is about God’s forbearance in the ages before the cross, not a believer’s past against his future. “Having forgotten the cleansing of his former sins” (2 Peter 1:9, palai) looks back at a person’s conversion from where he stands afterwards, and says nothing about what came after it. Nothing in the Greek limits the forgiveness to the sins before a person came to trust; the only “former” and “previously” words are about something else.

Received by trust. How it is received is stated as plainly as what is received. “To him all the prophets testify, that everyone who trusts in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43); “through this one forgiveness of sins is announced to you, and in him everyone who trusts is declared right” (13:38–39); “forgiveness of sins and a share among those made holy by trust in me” (26:18). “A place of mercy through trust, in his blood” (Romans 3:25); “to the one who does not work but trusts in the one who declares the ungodly right, his trust is counted as righteousness” (4:5); “declared right out of trust, we have peace with God” (5:1); “by grace you have been saved through trust, and this not from yourselves, it is God’s gift” (Ephesians 2:8). At Capernaum the order is the same: “seeing their trust” comes first, and “your sins are forgiven” follows (Mark 2:5). The scriptures do not put a second step between the trusting and the forgiving.

Who can forgive sins? — Jon’s reading. Jon answers the question the way the scribes did: God only. God forgives sins against himself, through the good news and the finished work of Jesus, and a person receives that forgiveness by trusting it. People forgive sins against themselves. Nobody on earth has the power to forgive a sin against God, and the idea that a believer needs someone else to forgive what Jesus has already forgiven is, in his words, a method of control and deception.

Sins against God, and sins against us. The scriptures draw the line Jon draws. Eli puts it as a question: “If a man sins against a man, God will judge him; but if a man sins against the LORD, who will intercede for him?” (1 Samuel 2:25, mi yitpallel lo). The answer to that question is the one mediator: “there is one God, and one mediator between God and humans, the human Anointed Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5), who “always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25). David, whose sin was against Bathsheba and Uriah, says “against you, you only, have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4), and the son in the parable says “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you” (Luke 15:18, 21), holding both. God forgives the sin against himself: “I, I am he who wipes out your transgressions for my own sake, and your sins I will not remember” (Isaiah 43:25); “with you there is forgiveness” (Psalm 130:4); “who is a God like you, carrying iniquity and passing over transgression” (Micah 7:18); “to the Lord our God belong compassion and forgiveness” (Daniel 9:9); his own name, “carrying iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:7). The scribes said it too, “who can forgive sins but one, God?” (Mark 2:7; Luke 5:21), and they called what Jesus had just said slander against God (Mark 2:7; Matthew 9:3). Jon reads that as a false charge that proves his point: the scribes’ rule was right, and their mistake was about who was standing in front of them. Jesus did not correct the rule; he answered by doing the thing, “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:10), and the Son of Man is the one of Daniel’s vision, “with the clouds of the sky one like a son of man was coming” (Daniel 7:13), whom this book shows “coming with the clouds” (1:7), standing among the lampstands (1:13) and seated on the cloud (14:14). The text ties the two together itself. Jesus is charged with slander against God three times in the Gospels, and each time for claiming what belongs to God: for forgiving sins (Mark 2:7), for saying “I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of the sky” (14:62–64), and “because you, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:33). The charge is the same each time, and so is the answer. And the forgiving at Capernaum came by trust: “seeing their trust, Jesus said to the paralysed man, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven’” (Mark 2:5; Matthew 9:2; Luke 5:20), before the man had said or done anything. We forgive sins against us, and that is what every command to forgive is about: “if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he changes his mind, forgive him; and if seven times in a day he sins against you … you will forgive him” (Luke 17:3–4); Peter’s question, “how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?” (Matthew 18:21), with the warning at 18:35; “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (6:12), and “if you forgive people their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (6:14–15); “when you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone” (Mark 11:25); “forgiving one another, as God in the Anointed forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32; Colossians 3:13). When the assembly at Corinth forgave the man who had wronged it, Paul added his own: “whom you forgive anything, I also” (2 Corinthians 2:7, 10); the wrong was against them. And when Stephen was being stoned he did not forgive the sin against God himself; he asked God to: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).

1 John, and the “if we say” lines. The one verse that tells believers to confess is 1 John 1:9, and its setting decides how it is read. The letter says who it is written to, “to you who trust in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know you have eternal life” (5:13), “not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it” (2:21), and who it is written against, people who had left: “they went out from us, but they were not of us” (2:19), “I have written these things to you about those who are leading you astray” (2:26), who deny that Jesus is the Anointed (2:22) or has come in flesh (4:2–3). Chapter 1 answers three claims in a row: “if we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness” (1:6), “if we say we have no sin” (1:8), “if we say we have not sinned” (1:10). Between the last two stands 1:9: the one who admits sin is the one God, “faithful and just”, forgives and cleanses “from all unrighteousness”. This note reads the “if we say” lines as the leavers’ claims, which John does not label as quotations; what is plain either way is that the confession in 1:9 is made to God, that its answer rests on God’s faithfulness and not on a man’s act, and that three verses later John tells the believers the standing result in the perfect tense: “your sins have been forgiven you” (2:12), with an advocate for the believer who does sin, “Jesus the Anointed, the righteous one; and he is the propitiation for our sins” (2:1–2). The scriptures do not contradict themselves; 1:9 and 2:12 are two sentences of one letter. The other “confess” verse is to one another: “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another” (James 5:16, allēlois), mutual, with no officer named.

John 20:23, the verse the absolution rests on. “Whoever’s sins you forgive, they have been forgiven them; whoever’s you hold, they have been held” (John 20:23, an tinōn aphēte tas hamartias, apheōntai autois; an tinōn kratēte, kekratēntai). Four things are in the text. The “you” is plural and the hearers are “the disciples” (20:19); Thomas, one of the twelve, was not there (20:24), and Luke’s account of the same evening has “the eleven and those with them” in the room (Luke 24:33, 36), so the words were not said to the apostles alone. Nothing in the passage speaks of successors, priests or an office. Both verbs of result are perfect passives, “have been forgiven”, “have been held”, which can mean that heaven confirms what the disciples do, or that the disciples declare what God has done; the grammar alone does not choose. And Luke reports the same commission as preaching: “a change of mind for forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all the nations” (Luke 24:47). What the apostles then did is in Acts: they announced it, “everyone who trusts in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (10:43), “through this one forgiveness of sins is announced to you” (13:38); and when Simon sinned, Peter did not absolve him but sent him to God, “change your mind … and beg the Lord, if perhaps the intent of your heart will be forgiven you” (8:22). The other texts Rome adds are of the same kind. Matthew 16:19 is singular, to Peter; 18:18 is plural and follows 18:15–17, where the matter goes to “the assembly” and the assembly decides; both have the same debated perfects. 2 Corinthians 5:18–20 gives “the ministry of reconciliation” to “us”, and says what it is: God “not counting their trespasses against them”, and an appeal, “be reconciled to God”. Two counts bear on it. The word for priest, hiereus, occurs 31 times in the New Testament and is never used of a Christian minister; outside the Gospels, Acts and Hebrews it occurs only in this book, and there it is every believer: “priests serving his God and Father” (1:6), “a kingdom, priests” (5:10), “priests of God and of the Anointed” (20:6). And the believer’s approach is direct: “let us come with boldness to the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16).

Before the ascension, and after Pentecost — Jon’s reading. Jon reads John 20:23 by when it was said, and reads what it gave as a temporary gift that is not found anywhere after Acts 2. That same morning Jesus told Mary, “I have not yet gone up to the Father” (John 20:17, oupō anabebēka), and he had already said the Spirit could not come until he went: “it is better for you that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (16:7), and John had explained, “the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (7:39). After John 20 the disciples are still told to wait: “not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father … you will be immersed in the Holy Spirit not many days from now” (Acts 1:4–5; Luke 24:49), and Peter at Pentecost gives the order, “exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this” (Acts 2:33). The good news is first preached in Acts 2, and from then on, Jon says, no disciple forgives sins, including the ones who heard John 20.

What the record shows. From Acts 1 to the end of Revelation the two verbs for forgiving, aphiēmi and charizomai, occur in 16 verses each, and in none of them does an apostle or an elder forgive a sin against God. Every sin against God forgiven in those books is forgiven by God: “blessed are those whose lawless deeds were forgiven” (Romans 4:7), “having forgiven us all the trespasses” (Colossians 2:13), “as God in the Anointed forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32), “he is faithful and just to forgive” (1 John 1:9), “your sins have been forgiven” (2:12). When a man asks, he is sent to God: “beg the Lord, if perhaps the intent of your heart will be forgiven you” (Acts 8:22). When the elders pray over the sick, “the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, it will be forgiven him” (James 5:15), a passive, with the Lord as the one acting in the same sentence. The only people who forgive in those books forgive what was done to them: the assembly at Corinth, and Paul with it (2 Corinthians 2:7, 10), Paul’s ironic “forgive me this wrong” (12:13), and “forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:32; Colossians 3:13). What the apostles did with forgiveness after Pentecost was announce it: “change your minds … for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38), “everyone who trusts in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (10:43), “through this one forgiveness of sins is announced to you” (13:38), as Luke’s account of the same evening as John 20 said they would: “a change of mind for forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47). John 20:23 does not itself say “announce”; the reading rests on the timing and on this record. Readers differ on what the breathing at 20:22 was, a first giving of the Spirit or a sign of the giving to come, and the text does not say. Rome’s answer to the record is that the absence of a narrated absolution is silence and not proof, and that the apostles held the power Trent describes whether or not Acts shows them using it.

Rome’s own words. The Code of Canon Law gives the rule without a verse: “A priest alone is the minister of the sacrament of penance” (canon 965); “Individual and integral confession and absolution constitute the only ordinary means by which a member of the faithful conscious of grave sin is reconciled with God and the Church” (canon 960); the faithful are “obliged to confess in kind and number all grave sins committed after baptism” (canon 988 §1), “at least once a year” (canon 989). The verses are supplied by the Council of Trent and the Catechism. Trent, Session 14, reads John 20:22–23 as the moment “the power of forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the apostles and their lawful successors” (chapter 1), says the absolution is given “after the manner of a judicial act” by the words “I absolve thee” (chapters 3 and 6), requires “all the mortal sins … even though those sins be most hidden” to be told (chapter 5), and puts an anathema on anyone who says those words of John “are not to be understood of the power of forgiving and of retaining sins in the Sacrament of penance” but of preaching the gospel (canon 3), on anyone who says secret confession to a priest alone “is a human invention” (canon 6), and on anyone who denies that it is necessary “of divine right” to confess every mortal sin (canon 7). The Catechism opens its own account with the scribes’ sentence, “Only God forgives sins” (1441, citing Mark 2:7 and John 20:21–23), and then says bishops and priests, by ordination, “have the power to forgive all sins” (1461, citing John 20:23 and 2 Corinthians 5:18), with Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 at 1444. Rome’s answer to this note, in its own terms, is that the priest acts in the person of Christ and does not forgive by his own power, that John 20:23 was given to the apostles and passed to their successors, and that the penitent is protected by the seal: “The sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason” (canon 983 §1), and a confessor may not use “knowledge acquired from confession to the detriment of the penitent” (canon 984 §1). Those texts were read on vatican.va and in the Waterworth translation of Trent (history.hanover.edu).

Control, and lording over — Jon’s reading. Jon reads the requirement to confess every sin to a priest, and the priest’s “I absolve you”, as a method of control and deception: it gives Rome a power and an authority it does not deserve, and he asks what kind of power is implied by a system in which everyone’s sins must, in principle, be told to you. Peter himself said not to lord over people, and Jesus said it first; to act as if one can forgive sins against God is, in Jon’s reading, exactly that. The texts he points to: “not as lording over those allotted to you, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3, katakyrieuontes); “you know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It is not so among you” (Matthew 20:25–26; Mark 10:42–43), the same verb, and Luke’s form, “the kings of the nations lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you” (Luke 22:25–26). Beside them: “not that we lord it over your trust, but we are fellow workers for your joy; for by trust you stand” (2 Corinthians 1:24); “they tie up heavy loads and lay them on people’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4); false brothers who slipped in “to spy out our freedom which we have in the Anointed Jesus, so that they might enslave us” (Galatians 2:4); “you put up with it if someone enslaves you, if someone devours you” (2 Corinthians 11:20); and the rules of men that Paul calls a show of wisdom with no value (Colossians 2:20–23).

Where this stops. The verses on forgiveness are quoted where they stand, from the Greek of Nestle 1904 and the Hebrew of the Leningrad Codex, and Revelation’s from this translation; Rome’s texts are quoted from its own documents. Three things the note does not claim. Matthew’s crowd, after the paralysed man was forgiven, “glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9:8, tois anthrōpois); it is Matthew’s telling of the Capernaum scene, the sentence is the crowd’s, said of Jesus standing among them, and Matthew says nothing about the authority passing to anyone; the words are there and Rome reads them, so they are stated here. Hebrews 10:26, “if we go on sinning wilfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins”, is used on both sides of this question and is not resolved here. And the believers’ own confessing and asking, “forgive us our debts” (Matthew 6:12), 1 John 1:9 and James 5:16, is real; this note says what those verses do and do not contain (a confession to God and to one another, none to an officer) and does not say what the daily asking is for beyond that. It does not say that anyone who has confessed to a priest is lost, or that a priest who hears a confession means it as control.

Red flag That the gift at John 20:23 was temporary and ended at Pentecost. No verse says it was temporary, and none says when it ended; what the text shows is that it is never seen in use, before Pentecost or after it, and that the apostles announced forgiveness and sent the sinner to God (Acts 2:38; 8:22; 10:43; 13:38). Against the word “temporary”: the sending it comes with is open-ended, “as the Father has sent me, I also send you” (John 20:21), and Matthew’s form of the sending ends “I am with you all the days, until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). What is stated, and what this note rests on: God alone forgives sins against himself (Mark 2:7; Isaiah 43:25), the Son of Man did it on earth (Mark 2:10), and after Pentecost no one else in the scriptures does.

Red flag That Rome’s confession is a method of control and deception, and that absolving sins is the lording over Peter and Jesus forbade. No verse says it; the identification is Jon’s. The nearest texts are the ones above (1 Peter 5:3; Matthew 20:25–26; Luke 22:25–26; 2 Corinthians 1:24; Matthew 23:4; Galatians 2:4; 2 Corinthians 11:20; Colossians 2:20–23), and 1 Timothy 4:1–3 for teaching that binds what God has freed. Against the step: none of those verses names confession or absolution, Rome’s own law forbids a confessor to use or reveal what he hears (canons 983 §1, 984 §1), and the Catechism itself says “Only God forgives sins” (1441). The question Jon asks about the power implied by hearing everyone’s sins is a question about a system, and scripture does not describe that system.

How sure I am — Jon. I am not fully confident of the readings flagged above. They are my best explanation of what I have studied here. If I learn otherwise, I will take them down, and my email is on the About page of this site if you want to show me.