Text:
The reading eis … en … en ‘in … in … in’ of the Nestle text is also adopted by Westcott and Hort, Merk, and Vogels: Textus Receptus, Lagrange, Kilpatrick, and Taylor have hen … hen … hen ‘one … one … one’ (cf. Vulgate unum … unum … unum); Soden has heis … heis … heis ‘one … one … one’; Swete, Souter and Tischendorf have eis … eis … eis ‘in … in … in.’ Although there is considerable division of opinion over the exact form of the expression, there is no doubt as to the meaning (cf. Exegesis, below). Lagrange and Taylor consider the Nestle reading intolerable and bizarre; in light of probable Semitic correspondence, it is probable that their reading hen … hen … hen is to be preferred.
Exegesis:
alla ‘other seeds’ (in contrast with ho … allo … allo (vv. 4, 5, 7) ‘some … other … other,’ which speak of portions in general): the plural is here used since different individual returns are to be listed.
tēn gēn tēn kalēn ‘the good soil.’
kalos “primarily of outward form, fair, beautiful” (Abbott-Smith): from this primary meaning there developed the sense of ‘good,’ ‘useful.’ In Mark the word is used in three different ways: (1) ‘good,’ ‘useful,’ ‘fine’ 4.8, 20; 9.50; 14.6; (2) ‘advantageous,’ ‘fitting,’ ‘right’ 7.27; 9.5; and (3) the comparative sense ‘better’ 9.42, 43, 45, 47; 14.21.
kai edidou karpon … kai epheren ‘and it yielded grain … and bore’: the two imperfects are coordinate, the second explaining the first.
pherō (cf. 1.32) ‘bear (fruit).’
anabainonta kai auxanomena ‘springing up and growing’: the two participles modify alla ‘other seeds’; as to time, they are properly simultaneous with edidou karpon ‘yielded grain, as they sprang up and grew, (and bore).’ Translator’s New Testament “and coming up and growing produced a crop and bore…” admirably ties together the two verbs and the two participles.
anabainō (cf. v. 7) ‘come up,’ ‘spring up,’ ‘sprout.’
auxanō (only here in Mark) ‘grow,’ ‘increase,’ ‘develop.’
eis … en … en (Nestle) ‘in … in … in’ (or, better, hen … hen … hen ‘one … one … one’ – see Text). The use of heis ‘one’ as a distributive is patterned after the Semitic fashion: hen triakonta kai hen exēkonta kai hen hekaton means ‘one, thirty, and one, sixty, and one, a hundred,’ i.e. ‘thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold.’
Translation:
Because of the complications of temporal order involved in the sequence as translated in the Revised Standard Version, it is preferable to shift to an approximation of the Translator’s New Testament order, which however must be rendered in some languages as four coordinate expressions, ‘sprang up, grew, bore mature seeds, and gave thirtyfold … ’ (Central Tarahumara).
The statements of ratio (thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold) almost always cause certain complications in translating, unless one is fortunate enough to discover some ready-made formula for this type of expression. However, the ideas expressed in this verse can always be stated, even if they seem somewhat paraphrastic: ‘some plants produced thirty grains, other plants produced sixty grains, and still other plants produced one hundred grains’ (Tzotzil, Tetelcingo Nahuatl, Farefare, Amganad Ifugao, and Barrow Eskimo). In Loma (Liberia), however, one must refer to the head of wheat, e.g. ‘one head of seed had thirty seeds, another had sixty seeds….’ A different perspective is used in Highland Totonac, ‘people got thirty grains from some plants, sixty from other plants….’ Statements which describe the increase in terms of the number of seeds produced by various plants are quite justified, since each plant results from a single seed and hence a plant producing thirty, sixty, or a hundred seeds would represent this extent of increase.
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 .