23:15 “Woe to you, experts in the law 2 and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You cross land and sea to make one convert, 3 and when you get one, 4 you make him twice as much a child of hell 5 as yourselves!
1 tn Grk “be sons of your Father in heaven.” Here, however, the focus is not on attaining a relationship (becoming a child of God) but rather on being the kind of person who shares the characteristics of God himself (a frequent meaning of the Semitic idiom “son of”). See L&N 58.26.
2 tn Or “scribes.” See the note on the phrase “experts in the law” in 2:4.
3 tn Or “one proselyte.”
4 tn Grk “when he becomes [one].”
5 tn Grk “a son of Gehenna.” Expressions constructed with υἱός (Juios) followed by a genitive of class or kind denote a person belonging to the class or kind specified by the following genitive (L&N 9.4). Thus the phrase here means “a person who belongs to hell.”