“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” — Matthew 6:15
The final words their trespasses are absent from a notable early stream. Sinaiticus omits them; Vaticanus keeps them. The Textus Receptus and the broad Greek tradition also keep them.
That split alone corrects the lazy phrase “the two oldest manuscripts omit.” Here the famous pair divide.
Verse 14 says, “if ye forgive men their trespasses.” Verse 15 then says, “if ye forgive not men their trespasses.” Critics can call the second phrase an addition made to balance the two conditions.
Balance can be Matthew’s craft. The positive and negative clauses are meant to answer one another. Repeating the object leaves no room to redefine the second line as a vague failure to be pleasant.
The same repetition can cause loss. An eye that has just copied “men” may jump ahead to the next main verb, especially when the familiar object seems supplied by memory. The shorter sentence remains grammatical: “if ye forgive not men, neither will your Father forgive you.”
Jesus does not sell pardon in exchange for our pardon. A heart made merciful by grace cannot settle into final, cherished refusal of mercy. The warning exposes a profession that asks God to cancel ten thousand talents while strangling a fellow servant over a hundred pence.
“Their trespasses” keeps the issue concrete. Forgiveness concerns real wrongs, not imaginary offenses alone. It may coexist with truth, discipline, restitution, and protection. It cannot coexist with a heart that needs the debt kept alive for vengeance.
The received phrase has strong early support through Vaticanus, broad later continuity, and exact parallel function. The omission can be explained without accusing a scribe of softening doctrine. Matthew’s full warning should stand: the trespasses we refuse to forgive reveal what we think of the pardon we ask.
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are often invoked together because they agree in many important readings. Their split here shows why sigla must be read verse by verse. “The earliest manuscripts” may hide disagreement between the very witnesses being summarized. Accurate description is not pedantry; it prevents prestige from replacing evidence.
The repeated phrase also belongs to oral teaching. A hearer who cannot see punctuation needs the object restated: forgive men their trespasses; refuse to forgive men their trespasses. What can look redundant on a printed page can carry the balance when the sermon is heard.
The warning finally drives the Lord’s Prayer into community. “Our Father” and “our debts” cannot coexist with a private treasury of grievances. The text names the stored items. They are trespasses—real crossings of God’s boundary—and precisely those must be placed under the mercy one asks from him.
Further reading
- Matthew 6:12–15; 18:21–35; Mark 11:25–26.
- Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus at Matthew 6:15.
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, note on Matthew 6:15.