Text:

Verse 8. Before peri ‘about’ Textus Receptus and Soden (in brackets) add hoi ‘the (people)’; it is omitted by all other modern editions of the Greek text.

Exegesis:

anechōrēsen (only here in Mark) ‘he withdrew,’ ‘he retired’: whether flight is implied is a debated question; Moulton & Milligan cite examples from the papyri with the meaning ‘take refuge.’

tēn thalassan ‘the sea’ is the Lake of Galilee (see 1.16).

plēthos (in these two verses only) ‘quantity,’ ‘large number’: used generally of a crowd.

The ‘great multitude’ comes from Galilee and all points of the compass; Judea, Jerusalem and Idumea, in the south; beyond the Jordan, to the east; and the regions of Tyre and Sidon, to the northwest.

peran tou Iordanou (10.1) ‘beyond the Jordan’: a set phrase in the New Testament to designate the country east of the river Jordan called by Josephus and others Peraia ‘Perea.’ peran is an adverb of place and means ‘on the other side.’

peri Turon kai Sidōna ‘the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon.’

akouontes ‘hearing’: either temporal ‘when they heard’ (Translator’s New Testament), or possibly causal ‘because they heard.’

hosa ‘how many things,’ ‘everything that’: indicates quantity.

Translation:

Withdrew may be rendered as ‘went away with.’

A multitude is simply a ‘very large crowd’ or ‘many, many people.’

Followed should be translated in the sense of ‘went along with’ (or ‘behind’), but not in the meaning of ‘tracked down’ (see 1.17) or in the sense of ‘to be his disciples.’ The crowd is composed of interested listeners, but not committed adherents.

The order of the elements in the clause also from Judea … came to him must frequently be changed, because of the awkward relationship of constituent parts, e.g. ‘Also those which were of the land of Judea and the city Jerusalem and the land Idumea and from the land on the other side of the Jordan river and from the country around the cities Tyre and Sidon they heard all that Jesus did; therefore very many of them came to him.’ This type of recasting may be necessitated by several syntactic requirements: (1) the use of classifiers with unfamiliar place names, e.g. Tyre, Idumea, Sidon, etc., (2) the shift from subordinate (hypotactic) to paratactic structure (rather than, ‘… when those which … heard … that Jesus did … they came,’ a structure containing three dependent clauses which telescope one within another and are all dependent upon the last clause), and (3) the parallelism of subject-predicate structure (what is important is not the relative order of constituents but the tendency toward parallelism, which tends to re-enforce correct interpretation, rather than produce confusion).

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 .