Michael D. Morrison

This is a paraphrase, designed for easy reading, not for serious study. Paraphrases are commentaries in disguise - people put their own ideas into the text. This is unavoidable - even a translation must make choices about the meaning of words. But in a paraphrase, we must often ask, What does this mean? We want to say the same thing, in the way that we might explain it to a child who lives in a city, not the agricultural world of first-century Judea.
In this paraphrase, we explain theological words, ancient customs, and background information the original readers would have already known but modern readers might not. We also avoid familiar religious terminology (such as "faith") so that people do not think they already know what it means.