Thursday Theology: Doubting Thomas? Retaining Sins? Dissenting Notes on John 20

Co-missioners, 

Today I’m following a nudge from my co-editor, Robin Lütjohann, to recycle a piece I wrote ten years ago. It addresses two details in the Gospel for this coming Sunday, John 20:19-31. Both are commonly mishandled in treatments of this text, or so I will argue. Where one of the details is concerned, mine is a distinctly minority opinion. I stick to it anyway for the reasons I lay out here. If others find it helpful or at least intriguing, I’ll be glad. As with anything I dare to post in this venue, my prayer is that other students of the Word will catch a fresh glimpse along the way of the Gospel’s wild wonder. 

Peace and Joy, 

Jerry Burce, Co-editor, 
for the Crossings Community

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Doubting Thomas? Retaining Sins? Dissenting Notes on John 20 

by Jerome Burce  

First published on June 22, 2016. Retitled and updated.. 

 

 

1. On “Doubting” Thomas

Propounders of Biblical texts do well to keep their eyes peeled for translators’ blunders. There are plenty of these laying around in most any English translation. NRSV makes an egregious one when, on Easter’s second Sunday. it has Jesus telling Thomas not to “doubt” (Jn. 20:27). As I’ve grumbled in the past, the Greek word here is apistos. That’s an adjective. KJV renders it neatly with “faithless.” Why, one asks, did the NRSV revisers not stick with that? And why did the re-revisers of NRSV-UE fail to fix it? Doubt and faithlessness are not the same thing. Doubt presumes a modicum of believing. This would account for the marvel of Matthew 28:17-18, where Jesus ignores the doubts of his feckless apostles and simply tells them to get to work. Come to think of it, that’s a move he’s still making in 2026, whenever any batch of his adherents gets together. There’s not one of us who isn’t of two or more minds about him. A bit of honesty on this score would be refreshing, especially to anyone who ever been rebuked for being a “doubting Thomas.” It would certainly honor our Lord by making us more quick to exult in his ridiculous patience with us. 

So why is honesty about our doubts so rarely forthcoming? The culprit, I’m convinced, is a stubborn, ingrained apistia of the worst kind. In its Lutheran version it says all the right things about justification by faith—then treats faith itself as a justifying work. One is right because one believes rightly. C.F.W. Walther warned against this very move in the fourteenth of his famous Theses on Law and Gospel. Even so, all too many of his Missouri Synod descendents keep making it as a matter of course. ELCA types do the same, with the twist that ethical assumptions are substituted for doctrinal formulations as the thing to be firmly swallowed. Still, the point remains the same: it’s in the firmness of the swallowing that one is justified, appearing in the eyes of God and right-minded humankind as the right kind of person. No wonder children are loathe to pipe up in confirmation class with their deepest, most troubling questions, these being the ones that would seem to challenge whatever assumptions the teacher is peddling. 

If only those teachers would content themselves with peddling Christ, the One in whom we come out just fine, no matter what questions our minds and innards are roiling with on any particular day. 

2. On “Retaining”Sins 

Speaking of questions, here is one that every Easter 2 preacher does well to wrestle wish.  

Could it possibly be that Christians have been reading John 20:23 incorrectly for the past umpteen centuries? 

Most all of you will know the text by heart. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” That’s the NRSV version. It follows obediently in the English path that KJV charted. Jerome and Luther appear to have taken the same track in their respective translations, though my Latin and German are too shaky to say this with unflinching certainty. 

In any case, the point appears obvious, at least in ecclesiastical theory if not so much in practical application. On Easter night our Lord Christ, having commissioned his reclaimed disciples (“As the Father has sent me, so I send you”), now imbues them with the Holy Spirit and a consequent authority to do one of two things with respect to the sinners they’ll encounter. They can forgive their sins, or they can choose not to forgive them. There’s a cheekier way to put that. They can flick sins away (cf. Psalm 103:12) or they can stick them to the sinners responsible. Their call: flick ’em or stick ’em, the promise being that God will back them up whatever they decide. 

Now this is wonderful to hear if you’re the penitent on the receiving end of an absolution. It’s tougher to credit when church authorities try to put the second clause into play and stick somebody with an anathema. Leo X was doubtless convinced that Luther would fry in hell on his say so. Wasn’t God obliged, on Christ’s say so, to enforce his pontiff’s excommunicating bull? Luther scoffed at that idea as he dropped Leo’s paper in the flames. His followers have kept the scoffing up over the centuries, at least where Roman pretensions are concerned. That hasn’t kept them from groping for their own method of exercising Clause Two in a way that isn’t risible to anyone beyond their immediate subgroups. They haven’t found it yet. I think that no one has. The Amish may shun a miscreant, but who outside the shunning community imagines that God endorses this? In the days when Lutheran congregations excommunicated members for consorting with Masons, the ex-communicants simply strolled down the street and signed on with the Methodists. In Fort Wayne they started their own congregation and enrolled it with the ULCA. So which of God’s Fort Wayne groups was God backing up, the stickers or the flickers? I say this tongue in cheek, of course, but you’ll get my drift. 

History aside, what does one make of a “retaining of sins” in 2026?  

And here I press the prior question I tumbled to ten years ago. Might the translators who blew it with Thomas have been blowing it here too? Suppose our Lord is saying nothing at all in this text about sticking sinners with their sins? Suppose, indeed, that he’s saying quite the opposite? 

After all, as Raymond E. Brown points out in his commentary of Johannine commentaries, the Greek of 20:23 is opaque. Here he confirms something I had already noticed on my own. “If you forgive the sins of any, their sins are forgiven.” That much is plain. Then: “If you hold (kratein) them, they are held,” or, per Brown, “held fast.” To which Brown adds, “It is not clear whether the object held is the men [sic] who committed the sins…or their sins. The latter is more likely by reason of parallelism with the first part of the verse. The phrasing ‘to hold sins’ is strange in Greek even as it is in English.” (The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI (Anchor Bible, Vol. 29, Part A), 1024.) 

When I first encountered this, I checked out kratein in the second edition of the definitive English lexicon (i.e. dictionary) of New Testament. Greek. It was first compiled by a German, Walter Bauer. The Americans William Arndt, Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick Danker would later translate, revise, and augment it. Verbs are listed there with their first-person singular, present tense inflection, krateo in this case. The second edition entry runs to nearly a full column (8.25″ x 2.75″) of fine print and accounts for every instance of the verb’s use in the New Testament. The first basic definition is “take into one’s possession.” The second is “hold.” The nuances are many and varied. Under the first definition one gets “Arrest, take into custody, apprehend”; “take hold of, grasp, seize”; “attain.” With the second definition come these: “hold with the hand”; “hold in the hand”; “hold upright, support“; “hold back or restrain from, hinder in”; “hold fast.” To this last are appended sub-nuances: “prevent from escaping”; “hold in one’s power”; “hold fast to someone or something and hence remain closely united to it or him“; “keep hold of something that belongs to oneself so that it cannot be taken away.” “keep to oneself.” 

And after all these one gets at last to “retain,” where the one and only Scripture reference is—you guessed it—John 20:23. 

Fred Danker was one of my seminary profs. I wish he were still with us so I could ask about this. In particular I’d want to know how he and his second-edition colleagues settled on “retain.” Was it out of deference to the prior English translators, or did they themselves see something in the structure and grammar of 20:23 that supported a separate listing, appended as a caboose of sorts to the main senses of the verb? 

I now own a copy of the lexicon’s third edition, of which Danker is the sole editor and revisor. He reworks krateo significantly. Notably for present purposes, the word “retain” has been replaced with “to cause a condition to continue, hold in place”; but again the sole citation for this reading is John 20:23. The question remains: why? 

Back to Raymond Brown, and his mention of a parallelism between the two clauses of the 20:23. He uses this to resolve his own question about what’s being “held” in Clause Two, the sinner or the sin. He opts for the latter. This supports the standard reading, in which the clauses stand in contrast, sins either being forgiven (Clause One) or not forgiven (Clause Two). In a subsequent extended discussion of the verse (p. 1039ff.), Brown calls on Matthew’s contrast between “binding” and “loosing” (16:19, 18:18) to buttress this further.  

Some other time I’ll ask impertinent questions about what those Matthean verses are driving at. For now, consider a different kind of parallelism, the one that abounds in Hebrew poetry. We encounter it weekly in the Psalms. An idea is expressed. The same thought—not a contrasting one—is immediately recast in different words that underscore and amplify it. “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof; / the world, and they that dwell therein” (Ps. 24:1). Here both clauses say the same thing: “It’s all the LORD’s.” Clause Two underscores that this includes all human beings, as in (presumably) not just the Yahweh crowd but the folks next door who bend the knee to Baal. 

So suppose the same kind of interplay is at work between the clauses of John 20:23? Clause One: “If you forgive someone’s sins, God forgives them too.” Clause Two, repeating, amplifying: “If you hang onto that someone, God hangs on to that someone too.” Here, of course, I’m making hay with the opacity and oddity of the Greek’s “if you hold them,” opting against Brown to see the sinner and not the sin as the object held. Were I somehow able to discuss this with Brown—so sorry, he too is recently with the Lord, and making merry with Fred, I’ll bet—I’d want respectfully to point him to his own rule of thumb that the verse be interpreted “in the light of the immediate context and of the major themes of Johannine theology” (1042). Both of these, I’d argue, support the spin I’m applying to it. 

Take the immediate context. It is Easter night. Jesus appears from nowhere amid the fear-addled disciples. “Peace be with you.” This opens the conversation and makes it plain that their sins of doubt, denial, and blatant apistia are suddenly a non-issue. Imagine that! 

Then Jesus displays his wounds. There is joy in the room—and now he says it again: “Peace be with you.” Note the repetition, followed immediately by “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” With that he grabs hold of these sinners. He makes them his agents (cf. again Mt. 28:18). And now the empowering—this wondrous breathing of the Holy Spirit that authorizes them to do for others as he has just done for them.  

Note: this does not include sticking it to sinners. If anything, it means getting stuck on sinners, the way Jesus is stuck on them (cf. 15:12). It’s as if verse 23 is saying, “Being sent as I’ve been sent, you’ve got two related jobs and the Spirit to pull them off. First job: forgive sins. Second job: hang onto the sinner.” Kratein. Grab hold of them. Embrace them as you would a brother or a sister, and don’t ever let go. 

As to Johannine theology as a whole, isn’t this what Jesus is doing from beginning to end in the Gospel? Again and again the two great moves: dismiss the sin; glom onto the sinner. Think Nicodemus; the Samaritan woman; the Bethesda invalid; the man born blind. Above all think Peter, who even after Easter night decides with others to slink off and go fishing again. Along comes Jesus to deal with his denial once and for all and after that to hold him tight. Kratein indeed. 

Brown for his part uses John’s context and theology to defend the older, standard reading. I’ll leave it to you to see how he does that. If you don’t own the book, perhaps an older colleague has a copy. The price you’ll  pay at Amazon will seem substantial. It’s a bargain even so considering what you’ll get. (See abebooks.com for today‘s second-hand  prices.) The relevant pages are 1024 and 1039-45. Those who don’t know Brown will quickly see what a meticulous scholar he is. They’ll also spot how careful he is to honor the church’s long-established teaching. One expects nothing less of a faithful Jesuit, and I say that with great respect. One likewise expects the sassy Lutheran to press, prod, and challenge tradition on the grounds of its evangelical fidelity. That’s what I’m doing here. I can’t help but imagine that Brown, for his part, would have been thoroughly gracious in respecting this.  

The point of points: Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! 

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