Text:

allachou ‘elsewhere’ is omitted by Textus Receptus; all modern editions of the Greek text, however, include it.

Exegesis:

agōmen (13.11; 14.42) ‘let us go’: the subjunctive mode, in this context, has almost the force of an imperative. Here it is not so much a plea, a request, as an exhortation.

allachou (only here in the N.T.) ‘elsewhere.’ Arndt & Gingrich prefer the meaning ‘in another direction’ for this passage.

eis tas echomenas kōmopoleis ‘to the neighboring towns.’

tas echomenas (cf. Lk. 13.33, Acts 20.15, 21.26) ‘neighboring.’ The present participle of the verb echomai ‘have’ is used in the specialized sense of ‘next,’ ‘adjoining,’ ‘neighboring’ either with reference to time or to space.

kōmopolis (only here in the N.T.) ‘town,’ ‘village,’ ‘market town’ . Swete quotes Lightfoot who defines the word as referring to a small country town.

kai ekei ‘and there’: kai here has the meaning of ‘also.’

kēruxō ‘I may proclaim,’ ‘I may preach’ (see v. 4).

exēlthon ‘I came out.’ The ordinary meaning of ‘I came out (from Capernaum)’ is understood by most commentators (Gould, Turner, Rawlinson, Manson, The Modern Speech New Testament); Vincent Taylor takes it to mean ‘I came out (on the Galilean mission).’ Swete and Lagrange, however, see a theological meaning ‘I came forth (from the Father)’; this meaning, however, has not commended itself to many (although it appears that Luke understood the words in this sense; at least that is what Lk. 4.43 means).

Translation:

If it is necessary to be more specific in the pronominal reference he and them may be translated by the appropriate noun expressions. However, all such substitutions, whether of nouns for pronouns or pronouns for nouns must conform to the syntactic requirements of the receptor language in question.

Towns (in Greek a compound word meaning literally ‘village-city’) in this context refers to places half-way between cities and villages. In some languages this would be ‘big villages’ and in others ‘small cities,’ depending of course upon the more acceptable way of designating such a place.

For preach see 1.4, but note that in this context there is no object of the verb. In many languages, however, one must add a grammatical object to the verb of speaking, e.g. ‘to hand down the Way’ (Union Version in Chinese), ‘declare the word’ (Kekchi), or ‘speak God’s word’ (Kpelle).

If it is possible to preserve the ambiguity of ‘that is why I came out,’ well and good, but for the most part one must be more specific about the meaning of came out, hence stating specifically either ‘I came to this earth’ or ‘I came out of the city.’ The second meaning is recommended, though some translations have followed the first, e.g. Balinese.

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 .