SIL Translator’s Notes on John 7:44

7:44a

Some of them wanted to seize Him: The phrase Some of them means “some people in the crowd.” These were the people who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They wanted to stop him from teaching the people by getting the police to arrest him. They did not want to arrest Jesus themselves, but rather they wanted the temple police to arrest him. For example:

Some even wanted him arrested (New Living Translation (2004))

7:44b

but: The Greek conjunction that the Berean Standard Bible translates as but here introduces something that happened that is the opposite of what you might expect. Even though some people wanted to have Jesus arrested, no one did so.

no one laid a hand on Him: This idiom means “they did not arrest/capture him.” The temple police were there listening to Jesus (see 7:32b), but they did not arrest him. In some languages it may be more natural to not use an idiom like this. For example:

he was not touched
-or-
that did not happen

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Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.

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