Exegesis:

paretēroun (only here in Mark) ‘they were watching’: it is not necessary to suppose with Turner that this is an impersonal plural ‘people were watching.’ The context indicates that it was the adversaries of Jesus who were watching, identified as the Pharisees in v. 6.

paratēreō ‘watch closely,’ ‘observe with care’: when used in a hostile sense, as here, it means ‘lie in wait for’ . Moulton & Milligan quote an example of the word in the papyri in the sense of keeping a careful watch over criminals.

ei … therapeusei ‘if … he shall heal’: the future tense is used from the point of view of the spectators. Though the use of the future tense of the verb in such a construction as this is rare, it is perfectly correct (cf. Lagrange).

ei ‘if’: here it is used as an interrogative particle, in an indirect question, ‘whether.’ In direct form, it would be ‘Will he heal?.’

hina katēgorēsōsin autou ‘in order that they might accuse him.’

hina ‘in order that’ goes back to paretēroun: ‘They were watching him … in order that….’

katēgoreō (15.3, 4) ‘accuse,’ ‘bring charge against’: a technical term meaning to bring charge in court against someone.

Translation:

They (identified specifically as Pharisees in verse 6) may probably be best rendered as ‘the people there,’ for no doubt more than just the Pharisees were intent to see what Jesus would do, since they would be acquainted with his fame as a healer and his reputed defiance of certain Sabbath traditions.

The succession of pronouns him, he, him, may require some clarification in languages which do not have the same system of pronominal reference as Greek, e.g. ‘the people watched Jesus in order to see whether he would heal the man on the sabbath.’

Verbs for healing are not infrequently quite specific in their area of reference, e.g. internal disorders vs. external ones, sores vs. dislocations, organs of movement vs. those of sense, etc.

Accuse may be translated simply as ‘to say that he had done wrong.’

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1961. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .