By the addition what God was going to do the Good News Translation links the promise that God made (v. 30) to its fulfillment in the resurrection of the Messiah. The Greek expression of “foreseeing” is very elliptical, and particularly in this type of context it requires some degree of redundancy, even as in the Good News Translation.
The nominal phrase he spoke about the resurrection of the Messiah may be rendered as “he said that the Messiah would rise from the dead.” The difficulty with this expression is that it requires some verb of speaking, but this produces a conflict with the following verb of speaking, which introduces direct discourse. Hence, to relate the two expressions it may be necessary to say, “David was really talking about the fact that the Messiah would arise from the dead when he said, He was not abandoned….” In other languages it may be necessary to reverse the order, for example, “When David said, He was not abandoned in the world…, he was really talking about the fact that the Messiah would rise from the dead.”
Messiah is the same word which is translated elsewhere “Christ”; but where the term occurs as a title the Good News Translation renders it Messiah. The Messiah (meaning “the anointed one”) was a technical name for one whom God had promised to send to save his people. In popular Jewish thought of the first century A.D., the title had political overtones and implied a descendant of David who would come and overthrow the Roman rule. Here, of course Messiah is used apart from its political connotations; it is used rather to link Jesus to a spiritual fulfillment of the Jewish hope.
In many languages a term for Messiah is simply borrowed, but this does not make much sense, unless the meaning is taught or the reader is referred to a note in the glossary. In a number of languages Messiah is translated as “God’s specially chosen one.” Literally, of course, Messiah refers to anointing, but since the process of anointing to symbolize the selection of a person for some divinely appointed task is very rare, a literal rendering can rarely be employed. In any event, the meaning and significance of the term Messiah should be explained in the glossary.
Though in the quotation from the Old Testament the pronoun he must be so used as to refer to the Messiah, it is not warranted to introduce the noun “Messiah” into the quotation. One can, of course, always change the passive to the active, for example, “God did not leave him in the world of the dead.”
Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on The Acts of the Apostles. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1972. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .