Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” ...
f you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld
Isn’t it odd that the apostles were given the ability and the job of forgiving sins? By the way, they also passed it along to others by laying on of hands.
There are no longer any apostles on this earth. What God instructed them to do in their dispensation is for that dispensation. Nowhere is the gift of apostleship transferred to any other as there were certain qualifications necessary to be one.
“Wherefore of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, Beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:21-22).
I’m happy to see you are being specific with Scripture, so how about this one . . . from the lips of Jesus Christ Himself.
“And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9).
“It is imperative that we make sense of this verse in light of all that has come before it. Too many mistakes have been made in the past by those who have read John 20:23 in isolation or with a sloppy connection to the unrelated words of Matthew 16:19. We must attend to how the Johannine Jesus has already characterized the problem of “sin,” the role of the Holy Spirit, and the nature of his ministry. If not, we risk perpetuating a legacy of misuse and polemic that has muddied this verse across the history of its interpretation.
Jesus is not appointing the church as his moral watchdog; nor does he commission it to arbitrate people’s assets and liabilities on a heavenly balance sheet.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus talks about sin as unbelief, the unwillingness or incapacity to grasp the truth of God manifested in him. To have sin abide, therefore, is to remain estranged from God. The consequence of such a condition is ongoing resistance. Sin in John is not about moral failings; primarily it is an inability or refusal to recognize God’s revelation when confronted by it, in Jesus. (Note what Jesus, says, concerning the world, in John 15:22: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.” Cf. John 9:39-41).
Consequently, the resurrected Christ tells his followers (all his followers) that, through the Spirit that enables them to bear witness, they can set people free (”set free” or “release” is a better translation than “forgive” in 20:23) from that state of affairs. They can be a part of seeing others come to believe in Jesus and what he discloses.
Failure to bear witness, Jesus warns, will result in the opposite: a world full of people left unable to grasp the knowledge of God. That is what it means to “retain” sins (”retain” is the opposite of “set free”). Jesus is not—at least, not in this verse—granting the church a unique spiritual authority. He is simply reporting that a church that does not bear witness to Christ is a church that leaves itself unable to pay a role in delivering people from all that keeps them from experiencing the fullness that Jesus offers.”
https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=887
Also see: https://carm.org/john2023-priests-forgive-sins
https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/763-can-man-forgive-sins
I think it is important to remember how John describes salvation:
“18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” - John 3
John has no tally sheet of sins to be forgiven (or to condemn) as individual sins. If you believe, you are not condemned. If you refuse to believe, you “are condemned already”. We bear witness - all of us. And if we follow the scripture, we offer forgiveness for those who believe, and condemnation for those who refuse.
The links posted as describe the Greek implications, which are hard to see when reading it in English.