The crowds (plural in Greek) is translated collectively in New Jerusalem Bible and New American Bible as “the crowd”; Good News Translation and New English Bible have “the people.”

The people saw it, that is, “what happened” or “what the man did.”

In place of they were afraid, some Greek manuscripts have “they were amazed.” However, the manuscript evidence for the verb “amazed” is weak; the change was probably made by scribes who failed to understand the real meaning of were afraid and wanted to substitute what they felt to be more appropriate. Part of the sense of were afraid can be seen by what the people did: they praised God. Thus the fear here refers to awe, to the kind of fear and respect felt in the presence of such a demonstration of power and authority. So translators may have “they were filled with awe.”

Glorified God is here equivalent to “praised God” (Good News Translation). The verb is used with this same sense in 5.16; 6.2; 15.31. As in those verses, some languages will most naturally use a short phrase such as “They began to say how great God was” or “They said, ‘God is truly great.’ ”

Matthew uses the plural form men. To shift to the singular (“for giving such authority to a man”), as in Living Bible, is an intentional distortion of the meaning of the Greek. It is possible that the phrase to men means “for the sake of men,” but such exegesis is extremely doubtful. Elsewhere in the Gospel, Matthew clearly indicates that Jesus’ followers have been given the authority to forgive sins (Matt 16.19; 18.18). This story is an excellent example of an event from the life of Jesus that is narrated in such a way as to reflect its relevance for the life of the community represented by the author of the Gospel.

Men should be translated by a word or phrase that means “human beings.” A word which refers only to males or to one man will not be correct.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1988. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .