Exegesis:
dedōkei ‘he had given’: the pluperfect has here its full force.
ho paradidous auton (cf. v. 10) ‘he who delivered him.’
sussēmon (only here in the N.T.) a prearranged ‘sign,’ ‘signal.’
philēsō (only here in Mark) ‘I shall kiss’ (cf. for this meaning of phileō ‘love’).
kratēsate auton (cf. 1.31) ‘you are to seize him,’ ‘you arrest him.’
apagete (14.53; 15.16) ‘you are to lead (him) away’: the verb is used of prisoners or condemned men being taken away under guard .
asphalōs (only here in Mark) ‘safely.’
Translation:
The betrayer is often rendered as ‘the one who was going to betray Jesus.’
Given them a sign may need to be shifted to ‘give the crowd a sign’ for otherwise them will refer to the immediately preceding third person plural referents, namely, the chief priests, the scribes and the elders.
In most languages there are ways of describing a secret sign which is given to persons in advance of an event. However, in some cases one must simply describe the circumstance, e.g. ‘he had already told them how he was going to do’ (Tabasco Chontal).
Kiss constitutes a problem, not only because kissing is not practiced in many parts of the world, but even where it is, there is a tendency to associate kissing with strictly sexual practices. In order to avoid a wrong connotation one may add a classifying expression, e.g. ‘shall greet by kissing.’
Part of the difficult with the word kiss may be avoided if one does not imply the necessity of kissing on the mouth, for undoubtedly the kiss by Judas was on the cheek, since this would be the normal manner of greeting. In one early translation the rendering ‘kiss (literally ‘suck’) on the mouth’ was very offensive, but a shift which meant only ‘to suck’ was considered quite acceptable, when it was accompanied by a classifying phrase ‘greeted him by sucking.’ In Amganad Ifugao a solution has been found in the expression ‘the one I shall greet by smelling his face.’ The Amganad Ifugao people do not themselves kiss, but they call foreign kissing ‘smelling the face.’
Safely is surprisingly difficult to render literally. Certainly, the safety implied was not a matter of Jesus’ own safety, as some translations have declared. Rather, it was a caution for the men to guard Jesus carefully lest he do something which would thwart their purposes. In Tzeltal this type of action is described as ‘lead him away between persons,’ that is, guarded on all sides. In other instances, ‘guard him carefully’ would be an equivalent of the Greek term asphalōs.
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 .