John
20:23
They
are forgiven translates a verb in the perfect tense in
Greek. Some Greek manuscripts have the present tense here and others the future
tense, but virtually all scholars accept the perfect tense as the original
reading. In general it may be said that the perfect tense expresses a past
action which results in a present state, and on that basis it has been argued
that God’s action of forgiveness (they
are forgiven) is therefore said to have taken place prior to the offering
of forgiveness through Jesus’ disciples (if
you forgive people’s sins). But in a conditional sentence the perfect
tense is used with essentially the same meaning as the present and the future,
except that it emphasizes the continuous character of the action (note, for
example, NEB “they stand forgiven”). So
the first part of verse 23 may be rendered “If you forgive people’s sins, God
also forgives them, and they remain forgiven.”
If
you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven is
more literally “if you hold (the sins) of any people, they are held.” “To hold”
is used here with the meaning of “not to forgive”; the two halves of this verse
are simply a kind of parallelism. NEB
renders “if you pronounce them unforgiven, unforgiven they remain.” Phps translates “and if you hold them
unforgiven, they are unforgiven.”(Barley Moon Newman and Eugene Albert Nida, A
Handbook on the Gospel of John [UBS Handbook Series; New York: United Bible
Societies, 1993], 615-16, emphasis in bold added; cf. D&C 132:46)
