The culmination in the hostility against God and God’s people will come in the form of the appearance of false Messiahs and false prophets. Verses 23-28 warn against being deceived by such pretenders.

Lo is not current English, and most translations do the same as Good News Translation: “Look.”

In some languages indirect speech will be natural, as in “Then if anyone tells you that some person in this place or someone in that place is the Messiah, do not believe it.” Other translators will find it natural to reverse the order of the sentence, as in “So you must not believe people when they tell you ‘Look, here is the Messiah’ or ‘There he is.’ ”

The Christ (so also New Jerusalem Bible, New International Version) is translated “the Messiah” by Good News Translation, New English Bible, and New American Bible. Scholarly opinion is unanimous that the term is used here in the technical sense of the promised savior king, a meaning which should come through clearly in translation. The term was first discussed at 1.12.

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 .