What sin (New Testament) actually means
Hamartia is the Greek word printed as sin in the New Testament. It began as an ordinary term for missing what you aimed at, a spear thrown wide or a decision that went wrong. Writers use it three ways: a specific wrong act, the human condition of falling short, and in Paul, a power that occupies and rules people.
Where the word comes from
In Homer, when a spear goes past the man it was thrown at, the verb is hamartano. The noun hamartia grew out of that: a miss, a failure to reach the thing aimed at. Classical Greek then used it for going wrong in general, from a bad tactical call to a wrong guess about someone's character. It carried no religious charge at all.
Aristotle put the word to work in the Poetics, where the tragic figure comes apart through hamartia, an error of judgment rather than a moral crime. That usage is why English literature classes still teach the term, and why a student who first met hamartia in a Shakespeare seminar arrives at Romans expecting a character flaw.
The change came from the translators. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria turned the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in the third and second centuries BCE, they used hamartia and its relatives for chattat and its family several hundred times. Chattat had the same archery picture behind it, and it also named the offering brought when a person had gone wrong. So the Greek word took on an altar, a priest, and a working system for putting things right. By the time Paul writes, hamartia arrives with all of that attached to it.
Paul then does something with the word that the classical writers never did. Across Romans 5 to 7 hamartia takes the definite article and starts behaving like an agent: it enters the world, it reigns, it deceives, it takes up residence inside a man, it pays wages. Whether Paul means an actual power or is running a sustained metaphor is argued over. The grammar is not in dispute. In those chapters hamartia has a will of its own, a territory it occupies, and a payroll.
Why "sin (New Testament)" gets in the way
Sin in current English has narrowed to two things: a list of forbidden behaviors, a large share of them sexual, and the tone of voice used by people enforcing the list. Watch what people type into a search box next to the word: which sins are worst, which are unforgivable, which ones count as sexual. Almost nobody arrives asking about a missed target.
That narrowing costs a reader two separate things. It hides the ordinary sense, in which the word covers falling short of what a person was made to be, including failures of nerve and plain neglect that no list of prohibitions would catch. And it makes Paul unreadable, because corruption living inside me becomes a description of a bad habit rather than of an occupying power, and the argument of Romans 7 collapses into a man feeling guilty about himself.
There is a third cost. Since sin is a word most people only meet in church, it works as a badge of who is inside and who is outside. A reader who has already decided the church is not for them hits the word and stops, having filed the sentence before it finished.
What this translation prints instead
The translation does not print sin. That decision was made at the guideline level and applied throughout, on the view that the word now functions as dead vocabulary, fully understood by fluent churchgoers and by nobody else. What goes in its place depends on what the Greek is doing in the sentence.
Where hamartia names the personified power, the translation prints corruption: corruption living inside me, sold under corruption's power. Where it names a person's particular wrong, it prints failure, usually with the relationship named, so the reader can see what was failed and whom. Where the emphasis falls on lawlessness, it prints rebellion or breaking faith. Where the emphasis falls on damage done to somebody, it prints harm.
Failure is a lighter word than sin, and in some sentences it lands softer than the Greek does. The translation takes that trade in exchange for sentences a reader can parse on first pass. Clear the churchy word out of Genesis 4:7 and the picture the Hebrew was drawing comes back: failure is crouching at your door. It wants to control you, but you must master it. That is an animal in a doorway, which is what the Hebrew actually says.
Read it in place
Death's sting is our failure, and what gives failure its power is the law.
1 Corinthians 15:56
So if you know what's right to do and you don't do it — that's failure.
James 4:17
Then he said to them again, "I'm going away, and you'll look for me, but you'll die stuck in your failure. Where I'm going, you can't come."
John 8:21
So I'm telling you: every kind of failure and slander will be forgiven people, but speaking against the Breath of God will not be forgiven.
Matthew 12:31
Questions people ask
What does sin mean in Greek?
The Greek word is hamartia, written ἁμαρτία, from a verb meaning to miss what you aimed at. Before the New Testament it was an everyday term for error or going wrong, used of missed spear throws and bad decisions. Greek-speaking Jews used it to translate the Hebrew chattat, which brought the sacrificial system with it. Paul also uses it for a power that rules people.
What does hamartia mean in the Bible?
In the New Testament hamartia covers three things at once: a specific wrong act, the condition of falling short of what humans were made for, and in Paul, a power that occupies and controls. Romans 6 and 7 use the third sense, where it reigns, deceives, and pays wages. Context decides which of the three is in play in a given verse.
What does hamartia mean in literature?
In literary criticism hamartia is the tragic hero's error, a term taken from Aristotle's Poetics. Aristotle meant a mistake in judgment rather than a moral defect, though later critics turned it into the fatal flaw taught in schools. It is the same Greek word the New Testament uses, but biblical writers use it for wrongdoing against God and other people, not as a device for building a plot.
What does sin mean in Hebrew and Greek?
The main Hebrew word is chattat and the main Greek word is hamartia, and both picture missing a target. The Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible chose hamartia to render chattat, so the two run together in the New Testament. Neither word originally belonged to religion. Both described going wrong in any ordinary way before they described going wrong against God.