Text:
Instead of kai paragōn ‘and passing along’ of all the modern editions of the Greek text, Textus Receptus has peripatōn de ‘and walking.’
Instead of the unusual compound verb amphiballontas ‘casting a net’ of all modern editions of the Greek text, Textus Receptus has the more common ballontas amphiblēstron ‘casting a net.’
Exegesis:
paragōn (2.14; 15.21) ‘passing along’: the present participle, modifying ‘he’ (Jesus), indicates manner, and in time is simultaneous with the main verb eiden ‘he saw’: ‘as he passed along … he saw.’ The phrase paragō para ‘along-passing along’ is rather unusual: Arndt & Gingrich translate ‘pass by along’ and Lagrange describes it as going by along the lake from the south to the north.
hē thalassa tēs Galilaias (7.31) ‘the Sea of Galilee.’ The use of thalassa ‘sea’ for the more precise limnē ‘lake’ is characterized by Black and Lagrange as a Semitism. hē thalassa occurs further in 2.13; 3.7; 4.1; 5.1, 13, 21 – all referring to the Lake of Galilee.
amphiballō (only here in the N.T.) ‘cast a net’: it is the word used to describe the throwing out of the circular casting-net, called the amphiblēstron (cf. Mt. 4.18). The net was wound around the arm and thrown out in a rapid circular movement of the arm; this, as Lagrange says, is the meaning of amphiballō without a direct object.
en ‘in’ equals eis ‘into.’
Translation:
Passing along must be rendered in some languages by a more specific ‘walking along.’
Sea must be changed in many languages to ‘lake,’ since this was an inland body of fresh water. The use of the Greek thalassa for both lake and sea is simply a Semitism (see above and compare Luke’s use of ‘lake’).
Along by may be rendered as ‘walking along the shore of the lake.’
Sea of Galilee must in some languages be ‘lake in the province (or region) of Galilee.’
The phrase the brother of Simon tends to cause complications for the translator, for languages reflect such utterly different systems for the classification of family lines relationships. For example, the words for brother may differ depending on such factors as (1) relative age (a younger or an older brother), (2) sex of the person to whom the ‘brother’ is related (brother of a woman or brother of a man), and (3) father or mother’s line (i.e. brothers by the same father or brothers by the same mother). Because of the general practice among Jews of Biblical times to list the name of the older brother first, we may assume that Simon was older than Andrew, and that both had the same father and mother. However, the order of the expressions ‘Simon and Andrew’ and ‘the brother of Simon’ must be arranged in accordance with the natural form of expression in any language into which one is translating (the receptor language), e.g. ‘Simon and his brother Andrew,’ ‘Simon and Andrew his brother,’ ‘Simon and Simon’s brother Andrew,’ ‘the brothers Simon and Andrew,’ or ‘Simon and Andrew; they were bothers.’
It must be noted that both men were casting nets into the lake, but these nets were the circular variety (as much as twenty feet across) which were thrown by a single person in relatively shallow water along the shore. In areas where people are not accustomed to catching fish by nets, one can, however, almost always describe a net (e.g. ‘a large fish-trap made of strings’).
Fishermen may be translated in languages which do not have an equivalent specialized term as ‘men who customarily caught fish’ or ‘those who lived by catching fish.’
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 .
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