In 1 Cor 16:22, we read:
If any man love not
the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.
The term "Maranatha" is a
transliteration of μαράνα θά (which itself comes from Aramaic). Interestingly,
if one were to change μαράνα θά to μαράν αθά, there is a subtle but important
shift in meaning. As Candido Pozo noted:
It is well known that
the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament do not give any indication that
would allow us to decide how this Aramaic formula should be divided; they make
no separation of the words and simply write them all together as one word. The possibilities
of dividing it are two in theory: μαραν αθα (=Our Lord has come) or μαρανα θα (=Our Lord, come). In
the first case, we would have a profession of faith in the first coming of the
Messiah (one already taken place); in the second case, we would have a prayer
that asks that the Parousia be accelerated. Personally, I don’t hesitate in opting
for the second hypothesis which is by far the most common among exegetes today.
I incline toward it because it seems to me to be more in accord with the
context (the love of the Lord, spoken about in the same verse, is a reason it
would be asking for his return) and furthermore because I believe it better
reflects the whole spiritual ambience of the New Testament in its yearning for
the return of the Lord Jesus. The Apocalypse concludes with a repeated
invocation for the return of the Lord in the form of a petition: “The Spirit
and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come’” (Rv 22:17)
and “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen,
Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rv 22:20). On the other hand, it seems equally decisive
to me that the first post-apostolic generation understood the formula in the
sense of a prayer, as we see in this testimony from the Didache: “Let grace
come and this world perish . . . Maranatha” (10, 6).
Finally, the Aramaic
formula that we find in 1 Cor 16:22, and which reappears in the Didache,
is of great importance due to the fact that it is one of the few cases of
Aramaic formulas being embedded in the Greek of the New Testament (and in this
case also preserved in the immediately post-apostolic cult). All of this
suggests that we are encountering here a prayer formula which is most ancient,
even pre-Pauline, and which could go back to the most primitive liturgy of the
mother Church of Jerusalem.
In any case, this
attitude of prayer, which asks that the second coming of Christ take place as
soon as possible, would be unintelligible without two presuppositions: a) that
the Parousia is desirable for the Christian who strives to be faithful to
Christ and b) that the Parousia can be hastened by prayer. (Candido Pozo, Theology
of the Beyond [trans. Mark A. Pilon; New York: Alba House, 2009], 90-92)
