tfSNT 19 (1983) 37-42]

THE UNFORGIVABLE ¿IN

J.C. O'Neill
Westminster College, Cambridge

Ernst Bammel once said to me that, when he himself begins to tackle

any difficult verse in the gospels, he looks first at what Julius
Wellhausen, Adalbert Mere, and Emanuel Hirsch have to say; and
that when he has done that, he has already seen more than most of
the other commentators. Because Dr Bammel has always known the
difference between the classics in ourfieldand the rest, many of his
own articles have themselves become classics—I think especially of
his "Erwägungen zur Eschatologie Jesu' in Studia Evangelica III
(Texte und Untersuchungen, Band 88), 1964.
The reason we are right to busy ourselves with the classical writers
in ourfieldis not, however, that they have said the last word, but that
they are good judges of the evidence; part of their good judgment
consists in their knowing how tentative are their conclusions. They
do not overawe us; rather, they invite us to join them in being
attentive to every scrap of evidence and in applying our mind to the
problems.
In this tribute to Dr Bammel, I wish to discuss once more a saying
on which Wellhausen and Mere hold different opinions and on which
Eh* Bammel himself asks some extraordinarily interesting questions;
but a saying which I think is not yet properly explained.1
The saying about the unforgivable sin occurs in two forms. In the
first of these forms all sins will be forgiven men bar one, blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12.31; Mark 3.28f.), and in the second
form everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be
forgiven, but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be
forgiven (Matt. 12.32; Luke 12.10). I wish to argue that the Son of
Manform,the second one above, is a misunderstanding of the first
38 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 19 (1983)

form, which is closer to the original. The misunderstanding involved

a misreading of the construction in the original Hebrew or Aramaic
saying; and the construction was misread because scribes wanted to
see a reference to Jesus the Son of Man wherever they could. The
original had no such reference.
So far, I am repeating some of Wellhausen's arguments. I wish to
go further. I shall argue that not only was the reference to the Son of
Man misunderstood in the first half of the saying by some scribes,
but also that the reference to the spirit in the second half was also
misunderstood, and misunderstood in much the same way. The
original saying of Jesus said something like, blasphemy against this
spirit, the spirit in which all sins may beforgiven,is alone unforgivable;
ail our Greek versions of the saying then made 'this spirit' refer to the
Holy Spirit. All our versions of the saying thought Jesus was
referring to the Third Person of the Trinity; some thought he was
also referring to himself as the Second Person of the Trinity (but as
Man); and one of our versions even took thefinalstep of making him
refer to the First Person of the Trinity as well: 'He who blasphemes
against the Father will be forgiven, and he who blasphemes against
the Son will be forgiven; but he who blasphemes against the Holy
Spirit, will not beforgiven,either on earth or in heaven' (Gospel of
TTiomas 44). I shall argue that the same type of move is wrong in all
three cases; Jesus did speak about an unforgivable sin, but it was as
little a sin against the Holy Spirit as the forgivable sins were sins
against the Son of Man or against the Father.
That is my hypothesis. How can I show that this hypothesis is
likely to beright?First I must show that no Jewish teacher of the
time would have been likely to say either of the two forms found in
the Synoptic Gospels. Then, I must show that a Jewish teacher of the
time could have said the sort of words I conjecture. Then I must give
a convincing account of what and how the words I conjecture came
to be turned into the words we have. Finally, I must ask whether this
same Jewish teacher is credited with other thoughts similar to the
thought I conjecturally attribute to him. If the arguments at each
stage are good, and if they are independent of each other, their
conjunction will provide a very strong case indeed.
First, I argue that no Jewish teacher of the time is likely to have
said the words in either form of the saying as we have it. No Jewish
teacher would argue that slander against a man was forgivable but
slander against the Holy Spirit not, because all he could mean by that
 O'NEILL The Unforgivable Sin 39

was that blasphemy was far more serious than slander, which no one
would ever have thought to deny. Nor would a Jewish teacher have
drawn a distinction between slander of the Son of Man and slander of
the Holy Spirit. He would have meant by that either that the Son of
Man was not God, in which case he would have been making the
previous point, and who would deny that? Or he would have meant
the Son of Man was God, and then he would have had to imply that
the Son of Man was God hidden in the form of man. But then the
saying would be beside the point: why emphasize that the Son of
Man could be so well disguised you would think him only a man, by
stating that if the Son of Man were only a man a slander against him
would beforgivable?Why would such a teacher do this if he really
wanted to teach that the Son of Man is only disguised as a man, and
that anyone who knew the truth would know that slander against
him was really against the Holy Spirit? The same objection holds if
the speaker were also implying that he himself was this heavily
disguised Son of Man.
The other form of the saying, the form that does not refer to the
Son of Man, is also unlikely to have been spoken by a Jew of the time.
The distinction between 'all sins' and 'the sin against the Holy Spirit'
is absurd in Jewish terms. Of course direct sins against God are more
serious than the sins against God's law that are against men (1 Sam.
2.2S; Lev. 24.15f). But the distinction can hardly consist in the
ability of judges to forgive them. A human judge has to punish as the
law directs and he has no power to forgive (though he may have
discretion to exercise mercy). The divine judge, God himself, can
forgive everyone, and there could not be a crime in law that would be
unforgivable to him: 'For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive;
and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee' (Psalm
86.5; Nehemiah 9; etc.). There can be no legislative prohibition on
God, restricting his forgiveness. There may be a religious restriction
God places on himself in the case of some sinners, but that is another
question, and can have nothing to do with a class of sin classified
according to the party injured, in this case sins against the Holy
Spirit.
We must conclude that either form of our saying in the Synoptics
is unlikely as the teaching of a Jew of the day.
The next question is, could a Jew of the day have said what I
conjecture to be the original form lying behind the two Synoptic
versions? This, you will remember, was something like: Every
40 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 19 (1983)

blasphemy will be forgiven men except blasphemy against this spirit.

The specific question is, could a Jew of the day have used the words
'this spirit' to mean 'this attitude of mind'? The answer is, yes. The
Psalmist uses the term with this meaning: 'Create in me a clean
heart, O God; and renew arightspirit within me' (Psalm 51.10). A
Jewish-sounding list of ways a young leader is to be an example to
believers includes 'in spirit' alongside 'in word, in behaviour, in love,
in faith, in purity' (1 Tim. 4.12, textus receptus). A saying of Jesus
rebukes the disciples for wanting to call downfirefromheaven on a
Samaritan village that would not receive him: 'Ye know not what
manner of spirit ye are of (Luke 9.55, textus receptus). Ecclesiastical
tradition was not much interested in this linguistic usage, and that
perhaps explains why some lines of manuscript tradition omit the
two last examples, but the usage exists and is abundantly present in
the required Jewish speech tradition.
The next question is, Could a saying in the conjectured form have
been easily and understandably altered into our present Synoptic
forms? The answer is again, Yes. The mistake that produced the Son
of Man form found in Matt. 12.32 and Luke 12.10 must have
occurred as the saying was translated into Greek, but the change we
are now particularly interested in, the changefrom'this spirit' to 'the
Spirit' or 'the Holy Spirit' probably occurred after the original had
been translated. The change would be quite simple. The word 'spirit'
occurs in either the accusative or in the genitive. In the conjectured
original, the article-plus-noun would have been preceded or followed
by one of two words, the Greek accusative ΤΟΥΤΟ or the genitive
ΤΟΥΤΟΥ. I conjecture that scribes who were determined to take
every reference to spirit as a reference to the Holy Spirit either
omitted the demonstrative (see Matt. 12.31) or added the adjective
'holy'. If they added the adjective 'holy', subsequent scribes would all
the more easily omit the demonstrative, because the adjective would
need to be preceded by the article, either TO or TOY, and the
redundant TOY (of ΤΟΥΤΟ or ΤΟΥΤΟΥ) would be regarded as a
mistake and subsequently omitted. There exists a manuscript, 489 in
Trinity College, Cambridge, which reads at Matt. 12.32 TOY TOY
before the adjective 'holy'. ThefirstTOY is erased, but it looks to me
as if TOY TOY was not just a mistake; rather, the master copy in
this line of tradition could well have once read ΤΟΥΤΟΥ, and a
subsequent glossator have added the word 'holy'.
On other grounds we can see that the word 'holy' is almost
 O'NEILL The Unforgivable Sin 41

certainly an intrusion. Matt. 12.31 does not have the word except in
the Syriac Curetonian version, and some Old Latin manuscripts
have dei instead. In Matt. 12.32 the adjective 'holy' occurs either
before or after the noun, and thefirsthand in the Codex Bezae put
the adjective after the noun, but without the grammatically required
article—sign of a gloss. In Mark 3.28 and in Luke 12.10 the
manuscripts again divide in their placing of the adjective, and in
Luke 12.10 the adjective is omitted by X 213 565 1313, and 1780 has
the adjective after the noun without the grammatically required
article, as in D* of Matt. 12.32.
Although the addition of 'holy' and the omission of 'this' has
obscured the sense of the saying, the result is plausible enough to
have satisfied the pedantic and reverential mind of the typical
glossator. The glossator knew the Old Testament severe warnings
against blasphemy (Lev. 24.15f; 1 Sam. 2.25); he knew the distinction
between ordinary sins and sins Svith a high hand' (Num. 15.27-31; cf.
Heb. 6.4-6; 10.28f.; 1 John 5.16); and he knew the New Testament
story of the summary punishment of Ananias for 'lying to the Holy
Spirit' (Acts 5.3; cf. 7.51). The nonsense produced by the glossator
was passable nonsense.
Finally, is Jesus reported to have said similar things to the saying I
conjecture? Noticefirst,that he very rarely spoke of the Holy Spirit
in the Synoptic Tradition; I suppose Matt. 10.20; Mark 13.11; Luke
12.1 If. is the only good case; and we must note anotherformof the
same saying that does not refer to the Holy Spirit, Luke 21.14f. When
we turn to positive statements about the need to forgive others if we
ourselves would receive forgiveness from God, we are struck by the
number and variety of sayings. The petition for forgiveness in the
Lord's Prayer makes willingness to Uve according to the spirit that
knows God is always ready toforgivea condition for our receiving
God's forgiveness; the parable of the Unmerciful Servant teaches the
lesson in graphic form; and the casuistic saying, 'If you forgive men
their offences, your heavenly Father will forgive you; if you do not
forgive men, neither will your Father forgive your offences', makes
the point explicit (Matt. 6.14f.; cf. Mark 11.25f).
Jesus was not restricting the Father's power to forgive. He was
simply repeating the Old Testament maxim that to the merciful he
will show himself merciful. All blasphemies are forgivable—except
blasphemy against this spirit.
42 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 19 (1983)

NOTE
1. J. Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Matthaei (Berlin, 1904), pp. 62f.; Das
Evangelium Lucae (Berlin, 1904), p. 64; Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien
(Berlin, 1905), pp. 74f., 2nd edn (1911), pp. 66f.; Das Evangelium Marci, 2nd
edn (Berlin, 1909), pp. 26f.; E. Bammel, JTS, rus. 22 (1971), pp. 192-4.
 ^ s
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