20:44a

Thus David calls Him ‘Lord’: David was a great king. Yet he referred to the Messiah as “my Lord.” So Jesus implied that the Messiah must be even greater than King David. In some languages it may be helpful to make it explicit that David was a very important man, a king. For example:

⌊The great King⌋ David calls him ‘Lord.’

In some languages it may be helpful to translate the clause without expressing the word Lord as a quotation. For example:

⌊King⌋ David says that he is ⌊his⌋ Lord.

See Lord, Context 2, in the Glossary.

20:44b

So how can He be David’s son?: This question is similar to the one that Jesus asked in 20:41. Jesus knew the answer to his own question, but he wanted his listeners to think about who the Messiah was.

The answer to this question is that the Messiah was both a descendant of David and David’s Lord. This suggests that the Messiah must be God as well as man. Jesus did not imply here that the Messiah was not David’s descendant. You may need to include a footnote here to show what Jesus was implying.

Some ways to translate this are:

…how, then, can the Messiah be David’s descendant? (Good News Translation)
-or-
Can it be that he is just a descendant of David?

© 2009, 2010, 2013 by SIL International®
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.