a sinful deed: a single wrong act someone commits, counted as one concrete offense rather than sin as a state or power
This word names a sin you can point to and count: a particular wrong act, a deed that has been done. Greek built it from the verb "to sin" the same way it built "the thing made" from "to make" or "the thing written" from "to write." The word form marks the finished product of an action, so the sense is roughly "the thing sinned": one committed offense, not sinfulness in general.
That sets it apart from its far more common relative, hamartia (ἁμαρτία), the ordinary Greek word for sin that English also renders "sin." Hamartia can mean the single act too, but it stretches much further, covering sin as a settled condition and even, in Paul's letters, sin pictured as a ruling power that holds people captive. This word never carries that larger, personified weight. It stays at the level of the concrete deed.
Scholars caution that by New Testament times the two words overlapped a good deal, so the concrete-deed sense here is a strong tendency rather than an ironclad rule, and only the surrounding context can confirm it in a given verse. But in every place the New Testament uses this word, the context does confirm it:
- the many forgivable sins and the one unforgivable sin in Mark
- the specific offenses committed before Christ that God had passed over (Romans)
- Paul sorting one kind of wrong act from another (1 Corinthians)
In each case the point turns on individual deeds, not on sin as a force.
Disputed
How firmly the concrete-deed nuance signaled by the noun's -μα ending should be pressed, given that ἁμάρτημα and ἁμαρτία overlap heavily in Koine.
- minorityThe -μα form marks a genuine, theologically weighty distinction: ἁμάρτημα is sin only ever as a discrete concrete act, never as sinfulness or the act of sinning in the abstract.; R. C. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, §66
- majorityThe concrete sense is a Koine-era default tendency confirmed by the New Testament distribution, not a rule the lexeme can bear on its own; syntax and context, not the ending, carry the theological weight.; James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961); Moisés Silva, Biblical Words and Their Meaning, rev. ed.; TDNT I:267-316, s.v. ἁμαρτάνω κτλ. (Quell, Bertram, Stählin, Grundmann)
- minorityThere is no lexical distinction worth marking; ἁμάρτημα and ἁμαρτία belong to one undifferentiated semantic domain for translation.; Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 88.289