⚠ “REPENT” — and the word that started a Reformation. Metanoeite is a mind-word: meta + noeo, to think again, to change the mind that is set. Behind it stands Hebrew shuv, to TURN — the prophets’ own summons, and the thing John is asking for is a reversal of direction, not a mood. ⚠ Douay reads “do penance,” because it translates the Vulgate’s poenitentiam agite — and that rendering is one of the most consequential in the history of translation: Erasmus argued in 1516 that the Greek meant a change of mind rather than an act of satisfaction, Luther read him, and the first of the Ninety-Five Theses is an argument about this verb. KJV, Geneva, ASV and NIV read “repent”; NWT also “repent.” Mister keeps “repent” as the word English has settled on, with the note carrying what the Greek actually says — and flags that Douay’s reading is Latin, not Greek.

“The kingdom of the HEAVENS.” Matthew’s hē basileia tōn ouranōn is genuinely plural — the heavens, as the Hebrew shamayim is plural — and Matthew uses this phrase some thirty times while almost never saying “the kingdom of God,” which is what Mark and Luke say. The usual explanation is Jewish reverence: “heaven” stands in for the divine name, exactly as it does in the prodigal’s “I have sinned against heaven.” KJV, NIV and Douay flatten it to the singular “kingdom of heaven”; ASV and NWT keep the plural, and the NWT’s “kingdom of the heavens” is the most exact phrase on the shelf. This library has used the plural since the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3) and keeps it here. ⚠ Note also that John’s message is, word for word, the message Jesus will begin preaching at 4:17 — the herald and the king say the same sentence.

⚠ The most famous punctuation argument in the Bible. The Hebrew of Isaiah 40:3 sets two phrases in parallel — in the wilderness prepare the way, in the desert make a highway — so the wilderness belongs to the preparing: “A voice cries: in the wilderness prepare the way.” The Greek Old Testament shifted the pause one clause earlier, giving “a voice of one crying in the wilderness,” and Matthew follows the Greek — which is how the wilderness became the preacher’s address rather than the road’s location. Both are readings of the same consonants; neither is a mistake, and this translation prints Matthew’s. ⚠ A second change is easy to miss: Isaiah ends the couplet with “a highway for our God,” and so does the Greek Old Testament — but Matthew writes “make his paths straight.” The substitution quietly lets “the Lord” whose road is being cleared be the one walking up to the water in verse 13. ⚠ And the wilderness was not an empty metaphor in that generation: the community at Qumran quoted this very verse as its charter for going out into the desert — “they shall separate from the habitation of unjust men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him” (Community Rule VIII) — which puts John within a recognizable first-century movement without making him a member of it.

⚠ The clothing is a costume, and every reader was meant to recognize it. “Camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist” is not local colour; it is a quotation. When Ahaziah’s messengers describe the prophet who met them, they say: “a hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins” — and the king answers, “It is Elijah the Tishbite” (2 Kings 1:8). John is dressed as Elijah, and Malachi had promised Elijah before the day of the Lord (Malachi 4:5 in English Bibles — 3:23 in the Hebrew, where Malachi has only three chapters). Matthew will make the identification explicit later (11:14; 17:12); here he simply describes the clothes and lets a reader who knows the story do the work. Locusts and wild honey is desert food and, importantly, clean food — locusts are the one insect the Law permits (Leviticus 11:22), so the diet is austere without being irregular.

“They were BAPTIZED in the Jordan river.” Baptizō means to dip, immerse, plunge — a plain word for putting something wholly into water, used of sinking ships and of dyeing cloth. The Jordan is a modest river, and the crowds come out to a stretch of it in the wilderness rather than to the temple twelve miles away, which is itself a statement. KJV and ASV transliterate, “baptized”; NWT also “baptized,” with its footnote tradition of “immersed.” Every English version keeps the loanword, so a reader has to be told what it means, which is what this note is for.

⚠ What was new about it. Ritual washing was ordinary: the Law prescribes it, Qumran practised it daily, and a Gentile converting to Judaism was immersed. But those washings were self-administered and repeated. John’s is administered by another (“by him”), happens once, and — the sharp point — is demanded of Jews, who by descent already belonged. He is treating the children of Abraham as though they needed the convert’s bath, which is precisely the offence he goes on to name in verse 9. “Confessing their sins” (exomologoumenoi, saying the same thing out loud, agreeing) makes it a spoken transaction, not a silent one.

The Pharisees and Sadducees arrive together, which almost never happens. Their first appearance in this Gospel, and they are opposites: the Pharisees a lay movement of scrupulous law-keeping who believed in resurrection, angels and the oral tradition; the Sadducees the priestly aristocracy who ran the temple, worked with Rome, and rejected all three. Matthew brackets them in one phrase and John addresses them as one crowd — the earliest hint of the alliance that closes around Jesus at the end.

“BROOD OF VIPERS! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” Gennēmata echidnōn — offspring of poisonous snakes, and the insult has a bite an English reader can miss: they have just claimed descent from Abraham, and John assigns them a different parentage. The image underneath is a field being burned off and the snakes running out of the stubble ahead of the fire — hence “flee from the coming wrath” (orgē, settled anger, not a flare of temper). KJV “O generation of vipers” — “generation” in 1611 meaning offspring, which it no longer does; ASV and NIV “brood of vipers”; NWT “offspring of vipers.”

⚠ “From these STONES” — a joke that only works in Hebrew. They say we have Abraham as our father; John says God can raise children for Abraham out of the stones at their feet. In Hebrew and Aramaic those two words are a syllable apart: banim, sons, and avanim, stones. The wordplay is invisible in Greek and invisible in English — which is a small piece of evidence that the saying was first made in a Semitic language and translated, not composed in Greek. ⚠ It is also an argument, not just a quip: the whole claim of descent is being answered by pointing out that God has made children of Abraham out of unpromising material before, and can do it again without them.

“Already the axe LIES at the root.” Keitai — it is lying there, propped against the trunk; the woodsman has arrived and set his tool down, and the next motion is the swing. The tense is the sermon: not the axe will come but the axe is already here. Note too that John never says who the coming one will judge and who he will save — he says every tree without fruit, which leaves his hearers inside the sentence.

“Whose sandals I am not worthy to CARRY.” Matthew’s verb is bastasai, to carry; Mark and Luke both write “to untie the strap” (Mark 1:7; Luke 3:16). Untying a sandal was a slave’s job; carrying them was the job of a slave’s errand-boy. The difference is small and worth keeping visible rather than harmonizing, and this translation prints what Matthew wrote. KJV “whose shoes I am not worthy to bear”; NIV “whose sandals I am not worthy to carry.”

⚠ “With the Holy Spirit and FIRE” — and English has to make a decision the Greek does not. The Greek is en pneumati hagiō kai pyri — no article, and no capital letters, since the oldest manuscripts are written entirely in capitals. So “the Holy Spirit” versus “holy spirit” is a choice English forces on a translator and Greek grammar cannot settle: KJV, ASV, NIV and Douay capitalize; NWT prints “holy spirit,” which reflects the missing article but also carries its own doctrine. Mister keeps “the Holy Spirit” for consistency with Matthew 1:18 and 1:20, where the Greek is equally without the article — and states plainly here that the capital is the translator’s, not the manuscript’s. ⚠ On “and fire”: a part of the later Greek tradition omits the phrase, leaving only spirit. Kept here with the majority of the earliest witnesses — and it matters, because the fire is not a warm feeling: verse 12 is about burning, and the two halves of the sentence are the wheat and the chaff.

The winnowing fork, the floor, and the chaff. A ptyon is a wooden fork for throwing threshed grain into the evening wind so the heavy kernels drop and the husks blow off. So the picture is not a judge choosing but a farmer separating what is already mixed on his own floor, and the sorting is the point of the harvest, not an interruption of it. ⚠ The chaff here answers something the library has already met: “the wicked are like chaff that the wind drives away” (Psalm 1:4), where the Hebrew is motz — the same threshing-floor image standing at the head of the Psalms and in the mouth of the last prophet before Jesus. “Unquenchable” (asbestos, the word behind the mineral’s name) describes fire that cannot be put out; whether it describes fire that never finishes its work is a separate question the word itself does not answer, and readers who disagree about it disagree about other verses, not this one.

⚠ “I have need to be baptized by YOU, and you come to ME?” John’s objection is the reader’s objection, and Matthew is the only evangelist who records it — Mark simply reports the baptism. The difficulty is real and ancient: John’s washing is “for repentance” (v11), and a man with nothing to repent of is standing in the queue. The imperfect diekōluen is worth keeping: he “was preventing him,” an attempt in progress, not a single refusal.

“ALLOW it now… Then he ALLOWED him.” One verb, twice, three words apart — aphes, then aphiēsin — and this translation keeps the same English word in both so the exchange closes on the word it opened with. The second is another historic present (“he allows him”), the fourth in three chapters, and it is kept rather than smoothed. This is also the first sentence Jesus speaks in Matthew’s Gospel, and it is red-lettered here on the convention that began with the Sermon on the Mount.

⚠ “To fulfil all RIGHTEOUSNESS” — and the readings, with their pedigrees. Plērōsai pasan dikaiosynēn. Why the sinless one submits to a sinner’s washing has been answered several ways and the library does not choose: (1) solidarity — he stands where his people stand, and the whole chapter has been about Israel going down into water in a wilderness, which is the exodus run again; (2) obedience — dikaiosynē in Matthew is characteristically the doing of God’s revealed will (5:20; 6:1), so “all righteousness” means everything God has asked, and God has asked this; (3) commissioning — the baptism is the moment the spirit comes and the voice speaks, so it functions as an anointing to office rather than a cleansing; (4) the older sanctification-of-the-water reading of the Greek fathers, that he is not cleansed by it but consecrates it. ⚠ What the text will not support is that Jesus was repenting: Matthew has just spent two chapters establishing who this is, and the sentence Jesus speaks makes the reason a matter of fittingness, not need. Note the pronoun: “it is fitting for us” — John is included in the doing of it.

“The heavens were OPENED… like a dove.” A large part of the manuscript tradition reads “were opened to him,” which makes the vision private — something Jesus saw, with the crowd left out; the earliest witnesses lack the phrase, and this translation follows them, leaving the sentence as open as the sky. The dove is a comparison, not a costume (“like a dove”), and the older suggestions for it — the dove over the flood water (Genesis 8), the spirit hovering over the deep at the creation (Genesis 1:2) — are offered here as resonances a first reader might hear, not as things Matthew says.

⚠ “THIS is my Son” — where Mark and Luke have “YOU are.” A genuine difference between the Gospels, and not a trivial one: at Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22 the voice addresses Jesus (“you are my beloved Son”); at Matthew 3:17 it addresses everyone else about him (“this is”). Matthew’s version turns a private commissioning into a public declaration — which is what his whole opening has been building: the genealogy, the magi, the titles. Kept as Matthew wrote it, with the difference named rather than harmonized.

⚠ The sentence is three Scriptures at once. Every clause has a pedigree:

— “This is my SON” — Psalm 2:7, the coronation psalm: “Jehovah said to me, you are my son, this day I have begotten you.” The words that made a king.

— “my BELOVED” — agapētos, which is the word the Greek Old Testament uses for Isaac at the binding: Hebrew “your son, your only son, whom you love” (Genesis 22:2) became, in Greek, “your beloved son.” The overtone is the son a father takes up a mountain.

— “in whom I am WELL PLEASED” — Isaiah 42:1, the first Servant song: “my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” ⚠ And the clause that follows it there is “I have put my spirit upon him” — which is what has just happened, one verse earlier. The voice quotes the half a reader can hear and the descending dove supplies the other half.

So the royal son of Psalm 2, the only son of Genesis 22, and the suffering servant of Isaiah 42 are laid over one man in a single sentence, and the rest of the Gospel is the working out of all three. KJV “in whom I am well pleased”; ASV “in whom I am well pleased”; NIV “with him I am well pleased”; NWT “whom I have approved,” which catches the aorist eudokēsa as a settled verdict rather than a present mood — the most exact of the four on the tense.

A note on the red letters. Only verse 15 is printed in red. The voice from the heavens in verse 17 is the Father’s, not the Son’s, and stays in ordinary type — the same rule that leaves divine speech in the Old Testament unmarked. John’s preaching, which is most of this chapter, is likewise ordinary type: he is the voice, not the Word.