The Councils of Orange and Carthage had closed the door on this doctrine. But what was closed there was opened at Trent. The Magisterium’s reaction to the Reformation placed the pre-modern and now modern church that remains tied to Rome in contradiction with orthodoxy. This is hard for Roman Catholics to hear. Because no one likes being wrong. Or mislead. Yet, often as humans we don’t mind justifying what we find too hard to let go of. There is another, perhaps more glaring problem, that Scripture itself says nothing about penance. 

The Reformation did not begin with Luther’s hammer. It began with a single Greek word, metanoia, mistranslated in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and built into a system of penance that contradicted what the historic church had already settled. This article traces that mistranslation from Jerome to Trent, dismantles Trent’s use of John 20:23 as a proof text for the Sacrament of Penance, and shows that the Council of Orange had closed the door on this doctrine nearly a thousand years before Trent opened it again.

For every student who is serious about their Protestant tradition, there is perhaps no more a nostalgic feeling than imagining a young and bullish Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg. Plain as the actual moment probably was, they would rather remember the hammer sounds as thunderous booms than sharp even raps. And this moment for many Protestants signifies the opening beat of the Reformation. But the Reformation did not begin there. It began with one word. One Greek word, mistranslated, absorbed into a Latin Bible, preached across Christendom for a thousand years and built into a system so crushing that a German monk nearly lost his mind trying to satisfy it. The word is metanoia. It means repentance. What the church had been teaching for centuries was something else entirely.

The word in the original Greek is found in Matthew 3:2; 4:17 and Mark 1:15. The Greek verb that many of our Bibles today translate as repent, is metanoeite, the noun is metanoia. In the popular reference work known as BDAG, the only two headings we find that help us define the word are: change one’s mind and feel remorse, repent, be converted.[1]

The Vulgate Bible which dominated the medieval church used the Latin word poenitentiam. That word in Latin gives us penance in English. Penance and repent are not the same thing. The debate over penance vs repentance is not a modern controversy. And upon a closer look they are much further apart than one would think.

Penance carries the meaning of doing acts that one does out of contrition for sins. This idea is very familiar to us. It is practical and doable in many instances. We practice a form of penance as children when we know we’ve angered mother and must do something to get back in her good graces. Applied in contexts like these, the term is harmless, even helpful. Applied to Matthew or Mark, a whole doctrine is born. A doctrine that in its outworking determines how we engage God regarding our sins. The Greek word metanoia however is a strange concept to us. Almost mystical. If one thinks of changing one’s mind, at first, it seems simple enough. I want to go to the park, and a moment later, no, the coffee shop. But how does one change their mind when you are angry at someone? A colleague who has spited you? A loved one who has been unfaithful? Can you simply change your mind? Can you truly repent? How do you change your feelings, when they seem to control us? Metanoia broadly speaking is to make our mind anew. But that is not a process that can be undertaken with acts of penance. As the TDNT points out, if that was all it took, it would be magic.[2]

The clear mistranslation in the Vulgate, that one word, and the teaching that comes from it, gave us the Reformation.

When Martin Luther rose to challenge the Vulgate, and by default the magisterium, he did so in some sense with Jerome’s blessing. It was Jerome after all in his letter to Pope Damasus who wrote about his commission to do the Vulgate translation; “The labour is one of love, but at the same time both perilous and presumptuous; for in judging others, I must be content to be judged by all.”[3]

This same letter gives us all we need to know that Jerome was a serious scholar. Who did not take his work lightly and would have been careful in his selection of words. But he knew the limits a man had. It is odd that such a man of great learning as Jerome would blunder a word that by natural reading is to mean change of mind with a word that describes acts of contrition. Jerome tells us in the preface of Matthew that for the “last three months” he had been ill, being hardly able to walk. He admits “neglecting the authority of ancient writers” since he had no opportunity of reading or following them. Instead, he confined himself “to the brief exposition and translation of the narrative” which Eusebius of Cremona had “particularly requested.”[4]

Whether this affected his final work we do not know, but it gives us an insight into the man himself, that this task was arduous and required minute attention to detail. Jerome’s work was a serious, respected translation from Hebrew and Greek. He spent years on it. It was not careless work. But it was not infallible. Yet the problem does not lie entirely with Jerome. He would have accepted the correction had it come. The larger problem is what the institution did with Jerome’s work after he was gone. The church canonized it, protected it, and eventually made it untouchable even as scholarship advanced and the original languages became available again.

It is strange that such steps were taken in regard to the Vulgate edition. How can one canonize a translation? Particularly one that had at least one obvious persistent error pointed out? One can only wonder that more than zeal for God’s word was at play here. It would be understandable for the church to have anathemized a person for rejecting the books of the Bible (in their original languages) that the church had always held as the true Canon, even if the list presented at the Council of Trent is debated until today. We would at least be somewhat amenable to that. Though Peter in his second letter warns us of how often Scripture can be very hard for us to accept (2 Pet. 3:16). The push to add the Vulgate edition to the language of anathema is precise but inappropriate. The original languages had become a threat.

The essential meaning of the word metanoia in its common Greek use is “seldom a function of the intellect alone.”[5]

It also can affect the feelings, will or thought.[6]

Yet the meaning that the New Testament gives the word is all its own. “Whether linguistically or materially, one searches the Greek world in vain for the origin of the New Testament understanding of μετανοέω (metanoeō/repent) and μετάνοια (metanoia/change of mind).”[7]

It is then to the New Testament that we have to look to find the real meaning. But the instant we change the word from repent to penitence, we are no longer dealing with the actual words of Jesus and the Gospel writers. We err.

What we are being told to do turns a real change of not just the mind, but the whole man; to a ritualistic expression for how we feel, not about who we are as rebellious creatures towards the Creator, but about a specific sin or perhaps even set of sins. That is not a difference in degree, but in category altogether. In Protestant circles it is common to hear repentance be described as a change of direction, where the man stops moving away from God towards Him. This is right, not because Protestants say so, but because that is the simple meaning of the word.

Repentance references then a state of being, for the change of direction is not a physical one in itself. To conflate this with an act is wrong. To do that is to say one is describing metanoia when one is really describing the Latin poenitentiam agite, to do penance. Penance can involve many things, including the supervision of priests and as in the Old Testament even the whole community. But repentance is the person and God. This was the experience of Paul on his way to Damascus, Nathaniel as he came to Jesus, Peter after the miraculous catch of fish. Augustine as he lay in a garden with a Bible, Justin Martyr as he spoke to a Christian man by the sea and Cyprian at the waters of his baptism.

It is true, penitence has its place in the life of a Christian. When we fast, when we pray for long hours, when we devote ourselves to resist evil and buffet the flesh, we practice something biblical that can be aptly called penitence. But we cannot forget the words of Joel 2:12 “Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “Return to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, weeping, and mourning; and tear your heart and not merely your garments.” True penitence requires true repentance, but repentance requires nothing but a contrite heart. Repentance tells you what you did wrong, penance tells you what you can do right. Repentance makes you let go. Penance lets you hold on to human achievement. They are not variations of the same idea. They are opposites dressed in similar clothing.

The System Built on the Error

A mistranslation does not become a system on its own. Systems in religion need human nature and institutional incentives to meet and to find the system useful to the ends of the institution and those who wield its power. This is foreign in Scripture where the institution of the church is not a system building enterprise, but a disciple making one. Its aims are in a word orthodoxy.

The system of penance is built on a bad translation. But this does not stop it from actually building something with real world power and influence. To tell anyone at the top of the power structure of penance that it’s been built on a bad translation, is to invite an onslaught of accusations and scorn. To tell it to an adherent, the “spiritual” beneficiary of the system, this is to bring offense and risk alienation.

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1. William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 640.
2. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976), 4:983.
3. Jerome, “Preface to the Four Gospels,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893), 488. Available at CCEL, ccel.org.
4. Jerome, “Preface to the Commentary on Matthew,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893), 496. Available at CCEL, ccel.org.
5. Kittel and Friedrich, TDNT, 4:978.
6. Kittel and Friedrich, TDNT, 4:978.
7. Kittel and Friedrich, TDNT, 4:980.