So have no fear of them: the pronoun them may be interpreted either as a reference to people in general or more specifically to those who oppose the Christian message. “You must not fear any man” is the choice of Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch. Some translators understand them to refer to those in verse 25 who say bad things about the members of the family, that is, Jesus’ followers. Thus they render them as “those people.”

The negative construction of the Greek (for there is nothing covered that will not be revealed … not be known) is reconstituted as a positive statement in Good News Translation: “Whatever is now covered up will be uncovered, and every secret will be made known.” Jerusalem Bible does similarly (“For everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear”), as does Barclay (“What is veiled must be unveiled, and what is hidden must be made known”). This shift to a positive form does not make the saying more easily understood, but it does resolve all the problems of communication. There still exists the difficulty of the impersonal form, which tends to make this sound like a proverbial saying. The proverbial form would certainly be satisfactory for the translation of the saying in its other contexts (Mark 4.22; Luke 8.17) but not here, where it functions as a command. That this is the case is clearly shown by what is said in verse 27, and so the text may be rendered “Whatever I now tell you in secret, you must tell in the open. Everything must be made known.” Or “… in private, you must tell to everyone. You must make everything known.” Translators who want to keep the sentence less specific can render this slightly differently: “For what people haven’t known, you will tell about these things; you will make people know everything” or “You must tell people about all the things that are now secret; leave nothing hidden.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1988. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .