Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard draws the readers’ attention back to verse 58: “But Peter followed him at a distance, as far as the courtyard of the High Priest, and going inside he sat with the guards….” Translators may drop the Now or render it “At that time” or “During these events.”

The outside refers to outside the place where Jesus was on trial. “Out in the courtyard of that house” may be good.

A maid (compare “a maid” of Luke 22.56) appears in Mark as “one of the maids of the high priest” (14.66). The noun maid is the feminine noun related to the one translated “child” in 2.8; normally it means “servant girl” or “slave girl,” which is what we recommend for the translation. Since there is no basis within Matthew’s Gospel to make further identification possible, one should not follow the model of Good News Translation, which identifies the servant girl as “one of the High Priest’s servant girls,” unless the language requires naming whose slave she was.

Came up to him can be “approached him” or “went up to him,” if that is more natural.

In place of Jesus the Galilean, Mark has “the Nazarene, Jesus” (14.67), information which Matthew introduces as the comment of the second servant girl who approaches Peter. Moreover, Mark adds the two interesting details, that Peter was “warming himself” and that the servant girl “looked at him.”

You is emphatically marked in the Greek text. To translate You also or “You, too” may imply for some readers that someone else has been previously mentioned in the conversation. The function of also is better understood as either a simple transitional marker or else as a further means of emphasizing the pronoun You; for example, translators may have “You! You were with Jesus from Galilee.”

To have been with Jesus in this context means more than just having been where he was. It has the idea of “you were one of the people of Jesus of Galilee.”

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 .