"Christianity is all about guilt" -- fact-check

In a message forum this week I saw someone post that "Christianity is all about guilt" and went on from that basis to the rest of her message. But she lost me at the start with the claim that "Christianity is all about guilt." That does not match Christianity as I know it, learn it, and experience it in the church. 

I understand there is room to ask: Who gets to say what Christianity is about? But for a Lutheran like me (we're the Sola Scriptura bunch), that is answered in the Bible where we have received what we know of Christ and the apostles, passed down to us from those who knew first-hand. 

So if I take my favorite freeware search tool and ask it to give me all the Bible verses containing the word "guilt", I get these results. If you were prepared for a long list, you'll be disappointed. Here they are: 

The first point that caught my eye is that there are only 2 verses in the whole "King James" translation that contain the world "guilt": two verses in the book of Deuteronomy, and none in the New Testament or anywhere else in the Old Testament. Looking closely at the two (2) verses found, the search results show the word italicized, which is how it flags the reader that a word was added by the translator. That is, the only 2 occurrences were considered to be implied in the translator's judgment, rather than being part of the original text. That's far from being something that Christianity is "all about"; it has only a slim excuse to be included in the conversation. 

But what about Christianity's emphasis on forgiveness? What's forgiveness about, if not guilt? First a perspective-check: forgiveness is a positive, healing action, so using an emphasis on forgiveness as a pretext to say there's something negative is a distortion. 

Forgiveness is usually associated with sin or wrongdoing, whether the person has the feeling of guilt or not. So I ran another search for "sin" (including variations like sin(s) and sinner(s)). I found the results interesting enough that I wanted to share the results. Below is a chart listing the books of the New Testament and the number of times "sin" was mentioned in each book. It's interesting that the book of Romans discusses it the most by far. The emphasis of Paul's letter to Rome is an outlier among the books of the New Testament. I wonder (without having a way to get the answer) whether the "all about guilt" poster's experience had an over-emphasis on that one book. 

As for the books which pass along the life and teachings of Jesus, I've previously shared a word-cloud of the 4 gospels and, reviewing that today, I see that "guilt" and "sin" are not among the top 100 most-used words in the gospels. The gospels are about the kingdom of heaven among us through the presence of Christ.