Either make … and … or make … and …: New Jerusalem Bible omits Either; some versions use a hypothetical statement, “If…”; one commentator suggests “Suppose the tree is good…”; Good News Translation restructures as “To have … you must have … if you have … you will have….”

Barclay links verse 33 with the previous section, where Jesus accused the Pharisees of not acknowledging that God’s Spirit is in work in him. Thus he tells the Pharisees that they cannot have it both ways; either the tree and the fruit are bad or they are both good, because the fruit from a tree reveals what kind of a tree it is. By implication, therefore, if he, Jesus, is doing good, then his source of power, God’s Spirit, must be good too. To convey this, Barclay inserts “You must make up your minds” at the end of verse 32, and goes on with a hypothetical statement of the type “If … then….”

Many translators will not feel comfortable with this type of addition, but they can begin this verse by saying “Either you must decide that the tree is good, and then so will the fruit be good, or that the tree is bad, and then so will its fruit be bad. Because you can only know how the tree is by the fruit it bears.”

Tree … fruit … tree … fruit: in the first part of the verse Good News Translation inverts the order to “fruit … tree,” thus destroying the parallelism and making a more complicated structure. It is possible to retain the order of Good News Bible‘s initial statement and to make the second parallel to it, which will result in a less complex construction: “To have good fruit you must have a healthy tree; you will have bad fruit if you have a poor tree.”

The adjective good is the same one used to modify “fruit” in 7.17; a different one is used there to modify “trees,” though it is obvious that there is no difference in meaning in the two passages. The adjective bad is the same one used of the “tree” in 7.17 but not of the “fruit”; but here again it has the same meaning as in 7.17, namely, “decayed, rotten,” or simply “bad.”

To speak of a tree as good and bad, translators may have to say “healthy” and “diseased” or “strong” and “weak.” But in most languages “good” and “bad” will be satisfactory.

As for good and bad fruit, this can be “fruit that can (or, cannot) be eaten” or “fruit that is tasty (or, sweet)” and “fruit that tastes bad.”

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 .