He said to them: Good News Translation identifies the subject, saying “Jesus answered.”

What man of you is the beginning of a long hypothetical question; that is, it pictures an event that may or may not happen to any one of his hearers. New Jerusalem Bible translates “If any one of you,” and Good News Translation “What if one of you.”

Pit can be “big hole” or “deep hole.”

Will not lay hold of it and lift it out? translates a rhetorical question in Greek which implies an emphatic positive response: “Any of us would take hold of it and lift it out.”

Good News Translation attempts to ease the difficulty of the lengthy negative question by dividing it into two questions, the second of which is an answer to the first. However, it may be better still to reply to the first question with a statement: “What if one of you … on the Sabbath? You would certainly take hold of it and lift it out.” Or a complete shift away from the question form will perhaps be even clearer: “If any one of you has a sheep and it falls … you would surely take hold of it and lift it out.”

There are actually many ways to handle long, hypothetical questions like this, and translators should consider carefully the demands of the receptor languages. Here are some more examples: “Suppose one of you has a sheep, and it falls into a hole on a day of rest. What would you do? You would take hold of it and lift it out (wouldn’t you?),” “If any of you had one sheep and it fell into a big hole on the day of rest, wouldn’t you take hold of it and lift it out?” and “Any one of you, if you had a sheep and it fell into a deep hole on a Sabbath, you would surely take hold of it and lift it out.”

Note that the text seems to indicate that this hypothetical person has only one sheep. A clause like “If you had a sheep that fell” may indicate that it was one of many he had.

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 .