One Aramaic Word in a Greek Letter

He read it properly, which is the trouble.

It was not a video and it was not somebody being clever. It was a serious piece by somebody who plainly knows the material, arguing that the worship of Jesus as divine is a later development, a Greek overlay laid across something simpler and more Jewish that came first, and that the earliest people would not have recognized what the fourth century made of it.

It was careful. It conceded things. It did the thing good work does, where it says what the strongest objection to itself is before anybody else can.

He read it in March, on a Tuesday evening, at that desk, with the lamp on.

And he has not put it down since.

Fourteen weeks. He teaches on Thursdays and he has taught eleven times since March and every one of them was fine and two of them were better than fine.

He has not said a word about it to anybody, and the reason is precise: he is the one people bring the hard questions to. He is the careful one. If he says he has been carrying something since March, four people will stop sleeping.

So he has read around it instead. Quietly. Four books and a great deal of arguing in footnotes, and what he has found is what a person always finds, which is that serious people disagree and that the disagreement is old and is not going to be settled by him at a desk.

And then, about a fortnight ago, he was reading straight through a letter he has read a hundred times, not looking for anything, and stopped at one word.

They left one word untranslated and it is a prayer

Let me be straight about the article first, because pretending it was weak would insult you and you would stop reading.

It was not weak. The question of how quickly the earliest people came to speak of Jesus the way they later did is a genuine and serious question and it has been argued for well over a century, in both directions, by people who know far more than either of us. Anybody who tells you that is settled is not being careful, and you would hear it.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as an answer: what you found at the end of that letter is worth the fourteen weeks, and it is not a proof and I am not going to pretend it is one. That is not my kind framing of a hard spring, it is what stands written at the close of Paul's first letter to Corinth, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was at your desk with the lamp on.

Read it. He is signing off. He has finished the argument and he is doing the greetings, and then this.

If anyone does not love the Lord, let that person be cursed! Come, Lord!1 Corinthians 16:22

In the Greek that letter is written in, those last two words are not Greek.

They are left in Aramaic, transliterated, sitting untranslated in the middle of a Greek sentence: Marana tha. Our Lord, come.

Now sit with what that is doing.

The letter is Greek, written to a Greek-speaking city, by a man perfectly capable of translating two words. And he does not translate them, which is what a person does when a phrase is already fixed, already familiar, already being said, so that translating it would be like translating a name.

It is a prayer. It is addressed to Jesus. And it is in the language of the first people, not the language of the letter.

So this is yours right now rather than pending the end of a century-old argument: the earliest layer we can reach is already praying to Him, in Aramaic, because the written word preserves that phrase untranslated in a Greek letter, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that one word survived in the wrong language.

And here is the honest boundary, and I will not blur it. That is one word. It does not carry the whole weight of the later formulations and it should not be asked to. Scholars argue about how much it establishes and they are entitled to. What it does is put a prayer addressed to Jesus in the mouths of Aramaic speakers early, which is exactly the thing an overlay account has to account for.

That is a floor. It is not a lid. You will not get a lid, and you would not trust one.