Mar 2:5 Son, your sins be forgiven you.
Alternative: Child, your errors have fallen away.

Our modern sense of sin, guilt, and forgiveness is not the sense of the Greek words used in the Gospel. The choice of words is extremely significant because most of the reason that people criticize Christianity today is because they see it as harshly judgmental. Christ's words do not have that feeling at all in the original Greek.

The word translated as sin, hamartia, and all associated words, carries the sense of failure and error but not the sense of intentional wrong-doing. In Greek, the Gospel writers would use the many words related to alitria (sinfulness)--including alitoxenos, alitêrios=sinning, alitainô=sinful, aleitês=sinner, adikeô=sinned, alitros=sin, sinner, sins, alêtheia=sincerity--which all carry more of our modern sense of sinning and wrong-doing. Similarly, the word translated in the Gospels as Christ talking about "evil" means "burden" and "worthless." In Greek, another word, kakia, seldom used by Christ's, means evil in the sense of malicious.

In a similar vein, the word translated here as "forgiven" is used very broadly in Greek and the Gospels for a number of different ideas. It basically means to get rid of something. A number of other word for letting go and loosening can also be use to mean "forgive," but this was not a common idea in the Greek. The word for "give," didômi was used more commonly for giving pardon or condoning an action.

"Son" is teknon (teknon), which means "that which is born," "child," and "the young."

"Sins" is from the Greek hamartia, which means "to miss the mark," "failure," "fault," and "error." Only in religious uses does it become "guilt" and "sin."

"Forgiven" is from aphiêmi (aphiemi), which means "to let fall," "to send away," "to let loose," "to get rid of," "to leave alone," "to pass by," "to permit," and "to send forth from oneself." This is the same word that is translated as "leave" and "forgive" in the New Testament.