“all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”

The verse

Romans 3:23 (BSB):

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

Greek: pantes gar hēmarton kai hysterountai tēs doxēs tou theou

Two verbs. Two tenses. The English flattens them.

hēmarton — aorist (past completed)

Hēmarton (ἥμαρτον) is the aorist of hamartanō (ἁμαρτάνω, to sin). The aorist tense in Greek typically describes a completed action without specifying duration — a single event viewed as a whole.

The verb hamartanō itself is built on an archery image. Hamartia — the noun for “sin” — literally means “missing the mark.” The metaphor is of an arrow shot at a target and failing to hit. BDAG s.v. hamartanō documents this etymological background. The Greek concept of sin as missing the mark is part of the picture.

Translated literally: all sinned. A past event, completed.

hysterountai — present (ongoing)

Hysterountai (ὑστεροῦνται) is present tense passive — “are falling short, are lacking, are coming behind.” The present tense in Greek imperative-indicative contrasts indicates ongoing or habitual action — not “fell short once” but “are continuously falling short.”

BDAG s.v. hystereō glosses it: to fall short, lack, come behind. The verb is used in non-religious contexts for being late, missing out, lacking what others have, coming up short in a comparison.

Translated literally: and are falling short. A present, ongoing state.

What gets lost in flat English

Most English translations render the two verbs without preserving the tense difference:

The tense distinction — past completed sinning, present ongoing falling-short — is in the Greek but largely invisible in English. A translation closer to the grammar might read: for all sinned and are falling short of the glory of God.

Why the distinction matters

The two tenses describe two different things:

• Past completed: all sinned — a historic, completed action. The reference is plausibly to the universal human reality of having sinned.
• Present ongoing: are falling short — a continuing state. The reference is to the present condition of falling short of God’s glory.

The two together describe both the historic and the ongoing. Sin is not only something people did (past) but the state of falling short continues (present). A reader who hears only the past — “all sinned” — misses the continuing dimension.

”The glory of God”

The standard the verse measures human falling-short against is tēs doxēs tou theou — the glory of God. Doxa in Greek means opinion, reputation, appearance of magnificence; in NT usage it absorbs the Hebrew kavod (weight, honour, glory). To “fall short of the glory of God” is to fail to reflect the image (eikōn) of God that humans were created to embody (Genesis 1:27).

This connects to the broader Pauline framework — humans created in God’s image, falling short of that image, restored in Christ to bear that image once more.

What the verse does not specify

The verse does not specify:

• The mechanism by which the past sinning happened (Augustinian original sin? Adamic federalism? Irenaean recapitulation? Each tradition reads the past tense differently)
• The trajectory — whether the present falling-short is increasing, stable, or decreasing in any specific case
• The remedy — though the surrounding chapters of Romans address this extensively

The verse names the diagnosis, in two tenses. The further work is the rest of Romans.