5:11 “Blessed are you when people 1 insult you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things about you falsely 2 on account of me.
6:22 “Blessed are you when people 3 hate you, and when they exclude you and insult you and reject you as evil 4 on account of the Son of Man!
9:1 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing out threats 11 to murder 12 the Lord’s disciples, went to the high priest
1 tn Grk “when they insult you.” The third person pronoun (here implied in the verb ὀνειδίσωσιν [ojneidiswsin]) has no specific referent, but refers to people in general.
2 tc Although ψευδόμενοι (yeudomenoi, “bearing witness falsely”) could be a motivated reading, clarifying that the disciples are unjustly persecuted, its lack in only D it sys Tert does not help its case. Since the Western text is known for numerous free alterations, without corroborative evidence the shorter reading must be judged as secondary.
3 tn This is a generic use of ἄνθρωπος (anqrwpo"), referring to both males and females.
4 tn Or “disdain you”; Grk “cast out your name as evil.” The word “name” is used here as a figure of speech to refer to the person as a whole.
5 tn Grk “if you were of the world.”
6 tn The words “you as” are not in the original but are supplied for clarity.
7 tn Grk “because you are not of the world.”
8 tn Or “world, therefore.”
9 sn I chose you out of the world…the world hates you. Two themes are brought together here. In 8:23 Jesus had distinguished himself from the world in addressing his Jewish opponents: “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.” In 15:16 Jesus told the disciples “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you.” Now Jesus has united these two ideas as he informs the disciples that he has chosen them out of the world. While the disciples will still be “in” the world after Jesus has departed, they will not belong to it, and Jesus prays later in John 17:15-16 to the Father, “I do not ask you to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” The same theme also occurs in 1 John 4:5-6: “They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us.” Thus the basic reason why the world hates the disciples (as it hated Jesus before them) is because they are not of the world. They are born from above, and are not of the world. For this reason the world hates them.
10 tn Or “because of my name.” BDAG 1031 s.v. ὑπέρ 2 lists Acts 9:16 as an example of ὑπέρ (Juper) used to indicate “the moving cause or reason, because of, for the sake of, for.”
11 tn Or “Saul, making dire threats.”
12 tn The expression “breathing out threats and murder” is an idiomatic expression for “making threats to murder” (see L&N 33.293). Although the two terms “threats” and “murder” are syntactically coordinate, the second is semantically subordinate to the first. In other words, the content of the threats is to murder the disciples.
13 tn Or “nothing to say in opposition.”
14 tn Grk “And” Here καί (kai) has been translated as “so” to indicate the logical sequence of events.
15 tn Or “they arrested”; Grk “they laid hands on.”
16 tn Or “prison,” “custody.”
17 tn Grk “It is not for you to know.”