1:23a

Paul was not thinking about killing himself in this verse. He was not the one who would decide whether he lived or died. God would decide that. Even the Roman court could only put Paul to death if God permitted it. But Paul had time in prison to think about dying, and here he expressed his deepest feelings about how he loved Christ and wanted to be with him.

I am torn between the two: A literal translation of the Greek is “I am constricted/enclosed by the two.” This means that it was hard for Paul to know which of these two things he preferred. The Berean Standard Bible has used an equivalent English idiom to translate this meaning. Another similar idiom is “I am pulled in two directions.” Some languages have idioms with this same meaning, but if you do not have such an idiom, it may be better to say simply:

It is hard for me to choose
-or-
I don’t know which would be better.

1:23b

I desire to depart: This means “I want to leave this life,” that is, to die. Paul felt that it would be wonderful if he could die and be with Jesus as a result of his trial in the Roman court. There may be some appropriate idiom in your language such as “I want to leave this life.” Or you may need to say simply “I wish to die.” However, make sure that your translation does not imply that Paul was discouraged and tired of living. He was not. He was happy to continue living and serving Christ (as 1:24 makes clear). But he would be even happier to go and be with Christ in heaven.

and be with Christ: Paul wanted to die in order to go and live with Christ in heaven. In some languages it may be necessary to avoid implying that Christ is dead. If when you test your translation, you discover that people think that Paul meant Christ was dead, you could say:

so that I can go and live with Christ in heaven

which is far better indeed: The phrase far better indeed shows how deeply Paul felt about this. If in your language you must make explicit what Paul considers dying to be better than, then you could translate it as “much better ⌊than continuing to live on earth⌋.” If your language does not use comparative expressions like “better” or “better than,” you could perhaps translate this as “which would be extremely good.”

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