Aramaic, used once in the New Testament and left untranslated. It reads two ways depending on where the word is split, and both have long histories.
The maranatha meaning depends on where you break the word, and Aramaic was written without spaces. Split one way it is marana tha, our Lord, come. Split the other it is maran atha, our Lord has come.
It appears once in the New Testament, at the end of 1 Corinthians, untranslated. Paul drops an Aramaic phrase into a Greek letter to a Greek-speaking city and does not explain it, which tells you they already knew it.
That is the interesting part. This is a fragment of how the earliest Aramaic-speaking church prayed, preserved in a letter to people who did not speak Aramaic.
“If anyone does not love the Lord, let that person be cursed. Come, Lord!”
1 Corinthians 16:22Once, in the closing greetings, in Paul's own handwriting according to verse 21. It is the last thing he writes before the final blessing.
An early Christian manual, Didache 10:6, ends a eucharistic prayer with the same word. So it had a liturgical home alongside the Lord's Supper.
Come, Lord Jesus. The same prayer in Greek, at the very end of Scripture, which is why many read the Aramaic as the request form.
Like abba and amen and hosanna, this one crossed language barriers intact. Some phrases were too well worn to bother rendering.
The word is a window. It is one of a small handful of places where you can hear what the first Aramaic-speaking believers actually said out loud.
Ancient manuscripts run words together, so the division is a judgment call rather than something the page settles.
Our Lord, come. An imperative. Favoured by most modern translations and by the parallel with Revelation 22:20, and it fits the ending of a letter naturally.
Our Lord has come. A confession, in the perfect. Kenneth Bailey notes this reading was preferred by early church fathers and that Middle Eastern churches have read it as a confession for sixteen centuries.
Bailey's summary is the honest one: “All three options are linguistically possible, and all three fit Paul's theology”. That is not a dodge. It is what the evidence supports.
We lean with the majority toward the imperative, our Lord, come, because of Revelation 22:20 and the Didache setting. But we are not going to pretend the other reading is a fringe position, because it is not, and the churches closest to the language held it longest.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Here is where we have to be straight, because this word gets used as end-times shorthand and we do not teach end-times that way.
If the reading is our Lord, come, then the question is what the people saying it were asking for. And the answer is in the letters they were writing, not in a calendar somebody built later.
The first church prayed this expecting an answer in their own lifetime, and the New Testament says so without hedging. James 5:8 says the Lord's coming is near. 1 Peter 4:7 says the end of all things is near. Paul tells the Corinthians in 7:29 that the time is short and in 10:11 that the culmination of the ages has come upon them. Revelation opens and closes by saying soon, and 22:10 tells John not to seal up the words because the time is near.
Two options. Either they were wrong, or they got what they asked for. We hold the second. The covenant transition they were living through closed with the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the old order in AD 70, exactly inside the window Jesus named in Matthew 24:34 when He said this generation would not pass away.
So maranatha is not a slogan for a future date. It was a real prayer, made by real people under real pressure, about something that happened. And that is the stronger position, because the alternative requires the apostles to have been mistaken about the one thing they said most confidently, and then requires us to keep repeating their urgency two thousand years after the urgency should have expired.
We know other believers read this differently and read it seriously. We are not calling them careless. We are saying the words soon and near and this generation were chosen by people who spoke the language, and that the first duty of a reader is to let them mean what they mean.
Why are there two readings of maranatha?
Marana tha gives our Lord, come. Maran atha gives our Lord has come. The letters are identical and only the break differs, which is why both readings have long histories.
Take either reading and the word still does real work, and both are worth praying.
Our Lord has come. The decisive thing has already occurred, which is the entire New Testament announcement in three syllables.
Our Lord, come. Not asking Him to arrive from somewhere else, but asking Him to be present and act here, which is what most prayer is.
The Didache puts it at communion, and that is still its best home. He has come, He is present, and we say so while eating.
Paul puts it directly after a warning about not loving the Lord. The word functions as the alternative, which is a striking place to set it.
One thing to drop: the word is not a chant with power in the sounds. It is Aramaic, it means what it means, and treating it as a formula to repeat is the same mistake as treating a divine name as a code. If you want it in your mouth, know what you are saying.
Think about what had to happen for this word to reach you. Somebody prayed it in Aramaic in Judea. It travelled with people who spoke Greek and they kept it in Aramaic. Paul wrote it down to a congregation in Corinth who could not have parsed it and did not need to, because they had heard it.
That is a detail about the early church that no doctrinal statement gives you. Their most-used prayer was a phrase in somebody else's language that they had adopted whole.
And whichever way you break it, the word holds the two things the church has always held at once. He has come, which is settled history. And come, Lord, which is what you say on a hard Tuesday when you need Him present in a room.
The ambiguity is not a defect in the evidence. It may be the most accurate thing about the word.
For related ground, see judgement day, the seven trumpets, what Revelation is about, what hosanna means, the new covenant, what Selah means and abba father.
Maranatha is Aramaic, it appears once in the New Testament untranslated, it reads either as our Lord, come or our Lord has come depending on where the word is split, and the people who prayed it expected an answer in their own generation.
This is one of the places where a small word carries a lot of weight. Send your questions in and somebody at Sound of Heaven will work through them with you.
It is Aramaic, and the meaning depends on where the word is divided, since Aramaic was written without spaces. Marana tha gives our Lord, come, an imperative. Maran atha gives our Lord has come, a confession in the perfect tense. The letters are identical and only the break differs, which is why both readings have long histories in the church.
Once, at 1 Corinthians 16:22, in the closing greetings that Paul says in verse 21 he wrote in his own hand. It sits immediately after a warning about anyone who does not love the Lord. It also appears in the Didache at 10:6, ending an early eucharistic prayer, which gives it a liturgical home alongside communion.
Kenneth Bailey's summary is that all the options are linguistically possible and all fit Paul's theology. Most modern translations favour our Lord, come, because of the parallel with Revelation 22:20. Bailey notes the perfect reading was preferred by early church fathers and that Middle Eastern churches have read it as a confession for sixteen hundred years.
Because his readers already knew it. He writes it to a Greek-speaking congregation in Corinth without explaining it, which only works if the phrase had already travelled. Like abba, amen and hosanna, it crossed the language barrier intact, and it is one of the few places where you can hear what the earliest Aramaic-speaking believers actually said out loud.
The people praying it expected an answer in their own lifetime, and the letters say so plainly. James 5:8 and 1 Peter 4:7 say the coming and the end are near. Paul tells the Corinthians the time is short and that the culmination of the ages has come upon them. We hold that they received what they asked for in the covenant transition that closed in AD 70, within the window of Matthew 24:34.