Text:

Instead of mēde eis tēn kōmēn eiselthēs ‘do not even enter the village’ of the great majority of modern editions of the Greek text, Taylor and Kilpatrick have mēdeni eipēs eis tēn kōmēn ‘do not tell anyone in the village.’

At the end of the verse Textus Receptus adds mēde eipēs tini en tē kōmē ‘nor tell (it) to anyone in the village,’ which is omitted by all modern editions of the Greek text; cf. Taylor and Kilpatrick, however, above.

Exegesis:

The words in this verse have already been dealt with: apostellō (1.2) ‘send,’ ‘send away’; eis oikon autou (8.3) ‘to his home,’ ‘home’; kōmē (6.6) ‘village.’

The ‘village’ is Bethsaida (v. 23): the man did not live in the village, however (v. 22).

Translation:

He sent him away must be rendered in some instances as ‘Jesus sent the man away,’ since there is again a shift of subjects from the preceding clause.

Sent him away must not contain the connotation of rejection. An equivalent may be ‘told him, Go to your home and do not go right back into the village.’

Do not even enter the village must not be translated by a verb form which would imply a permanent prohibition of such an action. What Jesus evidently wished to avoid was the man’s immediate return to the waiting crowd.

Negative commands, such as contained in the expression occurring in the Textus Receptus and the Kilpatrick text, may contain several negatives, depending of course upon the grammatical constructions of the receptor language in question. The following rendering in Copainalá Zoque is not unusual, ‘nor do not say nothing to nobody,’ in which the negatives reinforce, rather than cancel out, each other.

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 .