EN If we should say, ‘From men’”—they feared the people, for all held John to really be a prophet.
ES Y si dijéremos, de los hombres, tememos al pueblo: porque todos juzgaban de Juan, que verdaderamente era profeta.
ZH-HANS 若说『从人间来』，却又怕百姓，因为众人真以约翰为先知。」
ZH-HANT 若說『從人間來』，卻又怕百姓，因為眾人真以約翰為先知。」
Greek ἀλλ᾽ ('but') is omitted in both Peshitta and Vulgate, which proceed directly to the conditional clause. The adversative force is contextually implied rather than explicitly marked in the Semitic and Latin traditions.
Greek uses conditional ἐὰν εἴπωμεν ('if we should say'); Vulgate employs Si dixerimus ('if we shall have said'), a future perfect construction; Peshitta integrates the conditional particle into the verbal form ܘܕܢܐܡܪ ('and if we say'), a typical Syriac synthetic construction.
Greek ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ('from men') and Latin Ex hominibus are prepositional phrases; Peshitta uses ܡܢ ܒܢܝ ܐܢܫܐ ('from sons of men'), a characteristic Semitic idiom employing 'sons of' as a construct for human origin.
Greek uses imperfect verb ἐφοβοῦντο τὸν ὄχλον ('they were fearing the crowd'); Vulgate employs present timemus populum ('we fear the people'), shifting to first-person plural and present tense; Peshitta uses nominal construction ܕܚܠܬܐ ܗܝ ܡܢ ܥܡܐ ('fear [is] from the people'), a substantival clause with copula, fundamentally restructuring the syntax while preserving the semantic content.
Greek εἶχον τὸν Ἰωάννην ('were holding John') uses article + accusative; Vulgate habebant Joannem mirrors this structure; Peshitta employs ܐܚܝܕܝܢ ܗܘܘ ܠܗ ܠܝܘܚܢܢ ('were holding to-him to-John'), using a resumptive pronominal suffix ܠܗ before the proper name, a characteristic Syriac anticipatory pronoun construction.
Greek uses ὄντως ὅτι προφήτης ἦν ('truly that a prophet he was'), with adverb + ὅτι-clause + copula; Vulgate employs quia vere propheta esset ('that truly a prophet he might be'), using subjunctive esset in indirect discourse; Peshitta uses ܕܫܪܝܪܐܝܬ ܢܒܝܐ ܗܘ ('that truly a prophet he [is]'), with adverb modifying the nominal predicate directly, omitting the Greek ὅτι as a separate particle.