Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? translates a negative rhetorical question. Since the particular form of the question expects the answer “yes,” Good News Translation shifts to a statement and translates “For only a penny you can buy two sparrows.” Barclay renders “Everyone knows that two sparrows can be bought for one farthing.” The question form can sometimes be retained with questions such as “It’s true, isn’t it, that two sparrows only cost a penny?” or “It only takes a penny to buy two sparrows, doesn’t it?”

Sparrows may not be known, in which case translators can say “two common birds” or “two small birds.”

The Greek word penny refers to a Roman copper coin worth about one sixteenth of the coin that was the workman’s average daily wage. Translators may have a small unit of currency like penny that they can use. Sometimes “a small coin” is possible, and “very little money” is another common translation.

Will fall to the ground may need to be present tense, as in “falls to the ground.” Other translations render it as “dies.”

Without your Father’s will (Good News Translation “without your Father’s consent”) is literally “without your Father.” Scholarly opinion supports this interpretation, which is followed in Good News Translation, Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, An American Translation, Moffatt, and New American Bible. But other scholars interpret the phrase to mean “without your Father knowing” (New Jerusalem Bible; similarly Phillips and Barclay). The context seems to favor the first of these possibilities, and Hellenistic Greek literature uses the phrase “without the gods” to mean “without the will of the gods.” Without your Father’s will may be rendered “unless God your Father has agreed” or “without your Father willing it.”

The sentence may be more natural if the order is different, as in “And yet, unless your Father agrees to it, not one of them will even fall to the ground.”

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 .