Maranatha: Bilingual Believers

Word of the Week

December 28, 2024

Maranatha: Bilingual Believers

 

If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed.  Maranatha!

1 Corinthians 16:22 NASB2020

 

When we visit our daughter in Japan, we have been delighted to find that most Japanese can converse in basic English.  There are limits, however.  One moment they are speaking English in a way we can understand, but the next moment they throw in a burst of Japanese – and we’re lost!  Once you get past sushi and sayonara, we reach the end of our Japanese vocabulary very quickly.  It’s all part of the adventure of spending time in a bilingual culture.

Christians in the first century lived in a multilingual culture as part of the Roman Empire.  Latin was the language of government, but Greek was the universal means of communication.  Most people knew the tongue of their local region, but used Greek to talk with people from other areas.  That’s why the New Testament was written in Greek.

Occasionally, New Testament writers used words from other languages – words that would have sounded foreign to a Greek-speaker, just as they seem foreign to us.

This week we are going to study one of those words.  Even though it is found in the Greek New Testament, it’s not Greek at all!

The word is “Maranatha.”  It occurs only in 1 Corinthians 16:22 as part of Paul’s closing message to the Corinthian church.

When we see that word in English, no definition comes to mind.  You will sometimes find it as part of the name for a church (“Maranatha Bible Church”) or ministry (“Maranatha Christian Camp”), but the word doesn’t have an English meaning.

Similarly, it has no meaning as a Greek word.  It has been borrowed from Aramaic, the other common trade language that was commonly used in the Eastern part of the Mediterranean area.  The Aramaic language is closely related to Hebrew, and there are even a few parts of the Old Testament that were written in that tongue.

Obviously, maranatha had a meaning, even though it was a foreign word written with Greek letters.  So what did it mean?

In Aramaic, it came from two words: maran or marana (“our Lord”) and atha (“come”).

Paul drops this foreign word into his concluding statement with no explanation. That suggests to me that the Corinthians were already familiar with it.  It was likely a phrase that they already used, so Paul was free to use it.  In fact, it might have been a recognized thing to say during worship, just as many churches have a customary Easter interchange:  “Christ is risen – He is risen indeed.”  In Corinth, there were times when it was appropriate to say “Maranatha!  The Lord comes.”

According to linguistic experts, the Aramaic grammar allows for three possible translations, each one highlighting a core part of our faith.

1. “The Lord has come” – His coming in the past: Jesus has already come to earth to become a human being and provide salvation through His death and resurrection.
2. “The Lord is come” – His coming in the present: Jesus is present with His people today as they worship together and He abides in them daily.
3. “Lord, come” – His coming in the future: Jesus has promised to return as King of Kings to destroy sin once and for all and to fulfill all His promises.

Maranatha appears only once in the New Testament, but it was also used in the Didache, an early church writing that dates around the end of the first century.  That document shows that it became a standard part of the ritual for the Lord’s Supper, a reminder of the Lord’s presence that was repeated every time they shared the bread and wine.

When Paul taught the Corinthians about that sacred meal, he pointed out that communion is a way of proclaiming Christ’s death “until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26).  It not only points back to the cross, but it points forward to His return.

Maranatha is a powerful reminder of the fact that Jesus has promised to come back one day literally and physically.  It has been two thousand years, and the delay may blunt the edge of our anticipation, but we can use this Aramaic word as a reminder that our hope lies with Him.  The early Christians reminded each other regularly that “this world is not our home.”  We can do the same.

 

Study Hint:

Aramaic uses the same alphabet as Hebrew. In a Hebrew Bible, both languages will look the same at first glance.  Once you learn more, you will see that Hebrew spells words a little differently from Aramaic and the grammar varies.  For instance, the Hebrew word for “bless” is barak, while Aramaic says berak. [Hebrew scholars, please forgive the clumsy spelling.] You can think of it as being similar to the differences between Spanish and Portuguese.  Most of the Aramaic in the Old Testament appears in the book of Daniel.

 

Coming Up

As we begin 2025, you will have an opportunity to help me select the words that we will study.  Next week, instead of a standard word study article, I will send you a survey with a list of potential words to tackle.  You can tell me which ones intrigue you – or suggest some of your own.  Let’s be partners in this enterprise!

©Ezra Project 2024