4:4a

many who heard the message believed: This clause indicates that of all the people who heard Peter and John tell about Jesus (3:12–26), many of them believed. Here are some other ways to translate this clause:

many of those who had listened to their message became believers (New Jerusalem Bible)
-or-
But the people who heard the words of Peter and John earlier, many of them believed in Jesus

the message: This refers to what Peter and John told the people about Jesus (4:2). In some languages some of the information would be helpful for the readers. For example:

the message ⌊about Jesus⌋

believed: Here the word “believe” means to accept that something is true. The people believed that the message about Jesus was true. See how you translated a similar word in 3:16 (“faith”).

4:4b

and the number of men grew to about five thousand: Below are two possible interpretations of the word men:

(1) Many scholars think that this word refers to the men only who had become believers in Jesus. That is, it does not include the women and children who also had believed in him. For example:

so the number of men who believed grew to about 5,000 (God’s Word)

(Berean Standard Bible, Revised Standard Version, New International Version, New Jerusalem Bible, God’s Word, English Standard Version, King James Version, New American Standard Bible, NET Bible, New Living Translation (2004), Revised English Bible, New American Bible, Revised Edition)

(2) Some scholars think that the word may have been used here in a generic way, referring to all the people who had believed in Jesus. For example:

and the number grew to about five thousand (Good News Translation)

(Good News Translation, New Revised Standard Version, Contemporary English Version, New Century Version)

It is recommended that you follow interpretation (1), because that is the usual meaning of the word.

Here are some other ways to translate this clause according to interpretation (1):

so the number of believers now totaled about 5,000 men, not counting women and children (New Living Translation (2004))
-or-
Therefore counting only the men, the number of believers had now reached five thousand.

grew: The Greek verb that the Berean Standard Bible translates as grew is literally “became.” It implies that the number of believers had increased from more than 3,000 on the day of Pentecost (2:41) to over 5,000 at this time. Here are some other ways to translate this word:

came to (Revised Standard Version)
-or-
increased/rose to

© 2001, 2021 by SIL International®
Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.