Text:

Instead of elabete ‘you received’ of all modern editions of the Greek text, Textus Receptus has lambanete ‘you receive.’

Exegesis:

panta hosa (cf. 6.30; 12.44) ‘all things whatsoever.’

proseuchesthe kai aiteisthe ‘you pray and ask for’: as Lagrange points out, this is a Semitic construction meaning simply ‘you ask in prayer,’ ‘you ask for as you pray.’

proseuchomai (cf. 1.35) ‘pray.’

aiteō (cf. 6.22) ‘ask for,’ ‘request.’

pisteuete hoti elabete ‘believe that you received it’: American Standard Version and Revised Standard Version ‘you receive it’ is obscure because of the tense forms. Most translations accurately give the sense of the aorist elabete: cf. especially Moffatt and Manson ‘you have got it.’

kai estai humin ‘and it shall be done for you’: the phrase is identical in construction and probably parallel in meaning to estai autō of the previous verse, though in this context it could mean ‘it will be yours’ (cf. Goodspeed and Moffatt).

Translation:

Ask in prayer may require expansion into two verb constructions, e.g. ‘ask as you talk to God’ or ‘ask for when you talk to God.’

There is a subtle use of the aorist tense of elabete ‘received,’ which cannot always be indicated in another language. Where possible, however, it is well to translate this as ‘believe that you have surely got it and it will be yours.’ On the other hand, such an idiom is not always possible, and one must settle for an emphatic future in the first clause, e.g. ‘believe that you will indeed receive it, and it will be yours.’

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 .