Walk into any congregation that prays the Lord’s Prayer aloud and listen at one particular line. You’ll hear a small cacophony: some say debts, some say trespasses, some say sins. It’s one of the few places in Christian worship where the words actually differ by denomination. The split traces back to a single Greek word — ὀφείλημα (opheilēma) — and to the Aramaic underneath it.

The Greek of Matthew 6:12 uses opheilēmata, literally debts — the things owed to a creditor. The NIV, ESV, and most modern translations preserve it: forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Luke’s version of the prayer (Luke 11:4) uses a slightly different word, hamartias — sins. So the New Testament itself gives us debts in Matthew and sins in Luke.

Where does trespasses come from? From William Tyndale, in 1526. Translating the first English New Testament from the Greek, Tyndale rendered the line forgeve us oure trespases, apparently harmonizing it with Matthew 6:14 three verses later, where Jesus uses a different Greek word that does mean something closer to trespasses. When the Book of Common Prayer was compiled for the Church of England in 1549, it adopted Tyndale’s wording. The King James Bible of 1611 went back to the Greek and printed debts — but the Book of Common Prayer had already shaped a generation, and trespasses was locked in for English-speaking Catholics and Anglicans. Most Protestants followed the King James and say debts. All of them are translating the same line.

What matters is what sits underneath. In Aramaic, the language Jesus actually spoke, there is a single word — ḥōbā — that means both debt and sin. To owe money and to commit a moral wrong were two shades of one idea. Sin was a debt run up before God; forgiveness was God cancelling it. This is why so many of Jesus’s parables work both ways at once — servants who owe enormous sums and are released, stories of debt and remission. He wasn’t switching between metaphors. In Aramaic the metaphor lived inside the word.

So the line in Jesus’s own language was forgive us our ḥōbā as we forgive those who run up ḥōbā against us — debts and sins in one breath. And then he tied the halves together: as we forgive our debtors. The link isn’t decoration; it’s the architecture of the line. Whether your tradition taught you debts or trespasses or sins, you’re praying the same hard, ordinary thing — asking to be forgiven in the very measure you forgive.