In Greek this verse is actually one sentence, a rhetorical question. Good News Translation inverts the Greek order, making the first part of the sentence into a statement, followed by a question, how, then can you believe me? The question is the first part of the Greek text.

The clause you like to receive praise from one another must sometimes be restructured to indicate clearly the subject of the praise and the effect it has upon the persons in question, for example, “When the people praise you, you like it” or “… this makes you happy.” On the other hand, one may speak of praise as the goal of a desire, for example, “You desire that people praise you.” But such renderings omit the concept of reciprocity in praise. Accordingly, one may prefer to translate “When you are exchanging praises, you are happy.”

In the one who alone is God (literally “the only God”), some Greek manuscripts omit the word “God.” Most translations include it as an original part of the text, though New American Bible places the word “God” in brackets. Nowhere else in John’s Gospel is God referred to as “the only one,” and therefore the word “God” seems to be required. In a Greek manuscript, in which the letters were all capitals and there were no spaces between words, a scribe could easily have omitted the two letters which were the abbreviation for “God.”

But you do not try to win praise from the one who alone is God often involves difficulties in translation, since the one who alone is God must be made the subject of the process of praise, and to win indicates a causal relation. One may sometimes translate “You do not try to cause the one who alone is God to praise you,” but this translation is relatively unsatisfactory, since it suggests some kind of pressure put on God to praise men. It seems better, therefore, to employ such an expression as “You do not try to act in such a way that the one who alone is God will praise you.”

In this context it may be useful (and in some languages even necessary) to introduce a grammatical goal for the verb believe, for example, “How is it possible, then, for you to believe me?”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of John. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1980. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .