Exegesis:

katabainontōn autōn ‘while they were coming down’ (cf. embainontos autou ‘as he was entering’ 5.18).

For katabainō ‘come down’ cf. 1.10; diastellō … hina ‘command … that’ cf. 5.43; diēgeomai ‘narrate,’ ‘relate’ cf. 5.16; ek nekrōn ‘from the dead’ cf. 6.14; anistēmi ‘rise’ cf. 8.31.

ei mē hotan ‘except when’: in this context the meaning is ‘until after.’ As Arndt & Gingrich point out, in such a construction as this the action of the subordinate clause (in this case anastē ‘should rise’) precedes that of the verb of the main clause (here diēgēsōntai ‘they should say’): therefore, not until after the Son of man should rise from the dead were they to narrate what they had seen on the mountain.

ei mē ‘except’: introduces a condition, or exception, to a statement or command.

hotan (cf. 2.20) ‘when.’ For a similar construction cf. 12.25 hotan gar ek nekrōn anastōsin ‘for when they rise from the dead.’

Translation:

The pronominal referents of they, them and they must be made clear. The first they refers to Jesus and the disciples, while the following them and they denote the disciples. In many languages it is not necessary to be so careful about pronominal reference, as would seem to be implied in this and other notes with regard to pronouns, since the context seems to “sort out” the referents adequately. However, in some languages one may be completely misled by inexact pronominal elements, since the language requires very specific identification in any potentially ambiguous situation.

Charged them to tell must be shifted into direct discourse in many languages, e.g. ‘commanded them, Do not tell anyone….’

Some languages do not have a syntactic construction corresponding closely to the negative exception implied in the relationship no one … until. This can only be rendered by a paraphrastic construction, e.g. ‘he commanded them not to tell anyone what they had seen, but he said they could tell when he, the Son of man, had risen from the dead’ (Kekchi).

Rise from the dead is in Greek literally ‘arise from among the dead.’ A literal rendering is not always possible, for it might very well imply (as it has in some translations), ‘to stand up in the cemetery.’ The idea is of course ‘come back to life,’ ‘live again after being dead,’ or ‘to regain life.’

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 .