Text:

Instead of kai ‘and’ before peran tou Iordanou ‘beyond the Jordan’ of the great majority of the modern editions of the Greek text, Textus Receptus and Soden have dia tou ‘through the,’ so that the whole clause reads ‘through the other side of the Jordan.’

Exegesis:

anastas erchetai (cf. anastas apēlthen 7.24) ‘rising, he comes,’ i.e. ‘leaving that place (ekeithen ‘thence’) he went.’

horia (cf. 5.17) ‘boundaries,’ ‘region’: the phrase eis ta horia does not mean ‘to the boundaries’ but ‘into the region.’ The route indicated by the words of the text goes through Judea, across the river Jordan into Perea (cf. Goodspeed).

peran tou Iordanou (cf. 3.8; 4.35) ‘beyond the Jordan,’ ‘Perea.’

sumporeuontai palin ochloi pros auton ‘again crowds come together to him.’

sumporeuomai (only here in Mark) ‘go along with’; with reference to many people, as here, ‘come together,’ ‘flock,’ ‘gather.’

ochloi ‘crowds’: here only, in Mark, is the plural used.

eiōthei (only here in Mark) ‘he was accustomed’: the form eiōtha is the perfect of ethō but has a present sense ‘to be accustomed’: the pluperfect eiōthei, therefore, has an imperfect sense. The meaning here is not ‘as he had been accustomed,’ but ‘as he was accustomed,’ ‘as his custom was.’

Translation:

Beyond the Jordan identifies ‘the region on the other side of the Jordan’ (or ‘Jordan river,’ if a classifier is required).

Crowds involves certain difficulties, since in, many languages there are two types of plurals, aggregates and distributives. In Greek, however, it is not certain whether the plural actually denotes different crowds or whether it is a so-called augmentative plural, i.e. a plural which emphasizes the extent or size rather than the actual number of objects or occurrences. If, therefore, the Greek term ochloi is taken to mean simply the size of the crowd, then ‘many, many people’ or ‘very large crowd’ may be used. However, the use of the Greek form may indicate a distributive plural, implying that Jesus met with crowd after crowd wherever he went, in which case, of course, a distributive – whether of time or space – may be used. One must, however, avoid the mistake made in some languages of using an aggregate plural, for Jesus would not be addressing himself to several crowds at the same time.

As his custom was is translatable in many languages by a habitual, or customary, aspect of the verb. However, in some languages the idea of customary action can only be expressed by a separate verb phrase, e.g. ‘he was accustomed to teach; he began to teach again’ (Tzeltal).

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1961. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .