For many languages it will be advisable to begin a new sentence with this verse.

Lawyer (so also New American Bible) represents the traditional rendering of English translations; both Good News Translation and Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch prefer “a teacher of the Law,” in which “Law” is used of the Jewish Scriptures. “An expert in the Law” is the wording of An American Translation and Phillips (New International Version with lower case “l”), while Luther 1984 has “a teacher of scripture.” The word is found nowhere else in Matthew’s Gospel, and it is absent from some major witnesses to the Greek text. Both New English Bible and New Jerusalem Bible assume that it was introduced here from the parallel passage in Luke 10.25, and so they omit it from the body of their translations and place it in the margin. In the UBS Greek text the word is placed in square brackets, signifying a “considerable degree of doubt” concerning the original reading.

Most of the translations in English set a lawyer off from the first part of the sentence with commas. However, in some languages a short sentence will be better, as in “One of them was a teacher of the Law. He asked….”

Test was first used in 4.1 (see there), where it was given the meaning “tempt”; more recently it was translated “put to the test” in 22.18. Since it is used here in a negative sense, Good News Translation renders “tried to trap,” and New American Bible has “one of them … in an attempt to trip him up, asked him.” Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch‘s restructuring is similar to that of Good News Translation. Many translators will be able to translate this in a way similar to 22.15.

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 .