The Roman Catholic practice of confession, also called the Sacrament of Penance or Reconciliation, teaches that a person must tell their sins to a priest to receive forgiveness. The priest then speaks absolution. Penance is assigned. Mortal sins, in kind and number, are to be confessed or the forgiveness is said to fail.
When examined against God's words, it falls apart. Forgiveness comes from God. A man cannot hand it out.
The scribes were right about the principle. Only God forgives sins. They were wrong about the man, because the man was God. Jesus forgave because of who He is. A priest is not who He is. When a man says "I absolve you," he is taking the sentence the scribes called blasphemy and speaking it as an office.
Who is he? God. Not a priest. David confessed the same way. "I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." Psalm 32:5. Unto thee. Unto the LORD. No booth. No third party.
The advocate is named. Jesus Christ the righteous. There is not a second advocate in a collar.
Boldly. To the throne. The high priest who opens that way is Jesus, touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Hebrews 4:14-15. A system that puts a sinner between the sinner and the throne has added a mediator the verse does not have.
The old priesthood ended. "But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood." Hebrews 7:24. Unchangeable. Not passed down a line of men who hear lists of sins and speak absolution. "Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD." Jeremiah 17:5. Priests are men. Romans 3:23 includes them.
This is the verse the system hangs on. Read the room. Jesus has just risen. He breathes on the disciples and says, receive ye the Holy Ghost. Then He speaks of remitting and retaining. He is not building a booth. He is sending men to preach the gospel. The one who believes is remitted. The one who refuses is retained. The apostles announced what God had already done. They did not become the ones who do it.
The same charge sits in Matthew 16:19 and Matthew 18:18. Binding and loosing. Keys of the kingdom. Given to Peter, then to the group. It is the authority to preach the terms of entrance, not a private power to hear a list and clear a soul. Acts shows them using it that way. Peter tells the crowd to repent and believe. He does not sit them down one by one and absolve them.
Nothing in the verse says this office passes to a later line of priests. Apostolic succession is assumed, then read back into the text. The text does not have it. A man-made chain cannot inherit an authority the Book never transferred.
Catholic notes under this verse tell the reader it founds the sacrament. The words say the disciples are sent with the gospel. The note says a priest can forgive. That is the step-over. The verse is made to say what the surrounding sentences do not.
"Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed." One to another. Mutual. A brother to a brother. Not a penitent to a priest who then absolves. There is no absolution in the verse. There is prayer, and there is healing. Turning "one to another" into a one-way booth is the opposite of what it says.
"And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds." Believers telling what they had done, openly, as they left the old life. Not a sacrament. Not a priest speaking forgiveness. A public owning of deeds, after belief.
They were baptized of John, confessing their sins. Confession accompanied repentance and baptism. John did not say "I absolve you." He pointed at the one coming after him. The pattern is confession toward God, not a man clearing the record.
Absolution is not the end of the Catholic rite. Penance follows. Prayers, works, satisfactions, said to pay what the confession opened. That is works added to a finished payment.
Once for all. Not of works. A penance that satisfies for sin says the offering did not. "Having forgiven you all trespasses." Colossians 2:13. All. Nothing left for a priest to assign.
The people Jesus forgave in the Gospels received it without a booth and without a penance. The woman in Luke 7. The man let down through the roof. The thief on the cross. The publican who would not lift his eyes. "God be merciful to me a sinner." He went down justified. Luke 18:13-14. No priest in the sentence.
Where a false doctrine is helped by a changed rendering, the change belongs next to God's words.
God's words say repent. Matthew 3:2. Matthew 4:17. Mark 1:15. Luke 13:3. Acts 2:38. Acts 3:19. The Greek is metanoeo. A change of mind. Turn. The thing required is inward, toward God, and it is tied to belief.
Jerome's Vulgate does not say repent. It says poenitentiam agite. Do penance. A work. An outward satisfaction. The Douay-Rheims follows it: "Do penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Matthew 4:17 in that Bible. The same swap sits on Matthew 3:2, Mark 1:15, and Luke 13:3.
That one Latin choice builds the sacrament. If the command is "do penance," then a priest assigning prayers and works is obeying the text. If the command is "repent," the sacrament has nothing to stand on. The meaning is not close. Repentance is a turning of the mind. Penance is a payment. God's words require the first. The Catholic Bible prints the second, and the confessional is the result.
Later Catholic editions sometimes put "repent" back in the verse and keep the doctrine in the note. The damage is already done. The system was built on "do penance," and it still treats repentance as incomplete until a priest has heard the list and assigned the work. God's words never say that. They say repent, and believe the gospel. Mark 1:15.
Private confession to a priest, with absolution spoken and penance assigned, is not how the first churches dealt with sin. Believers confessed to God. Serious public sin was sometimes owned before the church. The booth, the formula, the requirement to list mortal sins in kind and number, and the claim that a priest's words complete the forgiveness, grew up centuries later.
"Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition." Mark 7:13. A tradition that puts a man in God's place, adds works to a finished cross, and tells the conscience it is not clear until a priest has spoken, is not a help. It is another gospel.
None other name. Not the priest's. "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Romans 5:1. Peace. Not a standing appointment.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the scriptures. Come to Him. No booth required.