This Untranslated Word Proves the Resurrection.
I was reading the passion narrative this Holy Week when something stopped me.
When Jesus cries out from the cross, some of the bystanders think he is calling for Elijah. I had accepted this for years as background noise in the story, an odd detail quickly filed under crowd confusion. But this year, I kept wondering, why Elijah? Of all the names, of all the possible mishearings, what would make a group of people standing near a dying man hear the word Elijah?
The answer opened up something I had not expected.
He cried out in Aramaic, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, meaning My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Aramaic was the everyday language of Galilee, the tongue his mother spoke to him. And in Aramaic, Eli (my God) sounds nearly identical to the first syllables of Eliyahu, which is Elijah. They share the same root. Elijah’s name literally means “my God is Yah.” A dying man forcing sound through his chest in the noise of a crowd, and El-ee becomes El-ee-ya fast enough. The confusion is phonetically specific to one language. And that is the detail that opened the first question.
Which languages were actually being spoken that day, and how many of them did Jesus likely understand?
I realize I had never seriously asked this. The first-century world around Jerusalem was layered in a way that is hard to picture now. At minimum, four languages were in active circulation: Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Each one belonged to a different register of daily life, and the story of the cross runs through all of them.
Aramaic was the mother tongue, the language of the marketplace, the household, the fishing boat, the argument with your neighbor, what you spoke without thinking, and almost certainly the language Jesus taught and prayed in.
Hebrew was the sacred language, receding from everyday conversation but preserved in synagogue readings, where a designated translator would immediately render each passage into Aramaic so the congregation could follow.
Greek was the trade language of the empire, the shared medium that allowed commerce across cultures. A craftsman working anywhere in that region would have needed functional Greek to do business, and Jesus grew up only a few miles from Sepphoris, a major Hellenized city that Herod Antipas was rebuilding as his capital during Jesus's childhood. Most scholars conclude he had working Greek.
Latin you would have seen on coins and official inscriptions, the language of empire at its most formal and distant. The superscription nailed above Jesus on the cross was written in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (John 19:20), which is itself a small portrait of that layered world. Nobody in the crowd that day was speaking Latin. When Jesus cried out from the cross, he reached past all of it and chose Aramaic, the language of the home, in which you say what you actually mean when words are running out.
So when Jesus cried out Eli Eli, he was doing something specific. He was reaching for Aramaic, the most authentic expression he could have made. And as I started to understand what he was actually saying in that language, the confusion about Elijah became the smallest part of what I had missed.
He was quoting Psalm 22. In Jewish practice, quoting the first line of a psalm invoked the entire text. Every learned person at the cross who heard that opening verse would have begun running through what comes next.
Psalm 22 was written by David approximately one thousand years before Christ’s crucifixion, and several centuries before it existed as a method of execution. Reading it now, knowing what happened on that Friday, the precision is difficult to look away from. Verses 14 and 15 describe the pain and suffering experienced in crucifixion: joints pulled from their sockets, a heart that melts like wax, a tongue sticking to the jaw from dehydration. The soldiers dividing garments and casting lots appears word-for-word, and John 19:24 pauses the narrative to note these prophetic fulfillments explicitly. The mockers saying “He trusts in God, let God deliver him” are quoting verse 8 nearly verbatim, which Matthew records the chief priests actually saying in Matthew 27:43. And the psalm ends with a single Hebrew verb, asah, meaning “He has done it,” no object, no elaboration. The crucifixion ends the same way, with Jesus’s final Greek word, tetelestai, “It is finished.”
I could spend an entire article on Psalm 22 alone.
But pulling on that thread left me with one more question I had to chase down…
If paying attention to the phonetics of one Aramaic word had unlocked this much, then what else could I be missing? More specifically: when the biblical writers preserved original-language words rather than translating them, were there other instances worth paying closer attention to?
The Gospel writers always faced choices. Matthew and Luke, writing in Greek for Greek-speaking audiences, routinely absorbed Mark’s Aramaic into translation. Where Mark preserved Talitha koum (little girl, arise), Luke gave only the Greek equivalent. The Aramaic kept getting absorbed as the faith moved outward from Jerusalem into the wider world. That is the normal trajectory of how ideas travel. But occasionally, in moments that seemed too important or too ancient or too embedded in practice to dissolve into another language, certain words were left in their original form. When you find those moments inside an otherwise fully translated text, you are usually looking at something the earliest witnesses could not bring themselves to translate away.
I came across one of these moments in a letter Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. The letter dates to approximately 54-55 AD, roughly twenty to twenty-five years after the crucifixion. Corinth was a Greek-speaking city in what is now southern Greece, a Roman commercial hub far from Jerusalem where nobody’s mother tongue was Aramaic. Paul is wrapping up the letter, adding final instructions and greetings, when he writes this: “If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha.” (1 Corinthians 16:22, NASB) Maranatha means “Our Lord, come.”
Maranatha is Aramaic, dropped into a Greek letter without translation, without explanation, as if everyone already knew it… And they did.
How? How does a Greek-speaking congregation nearly a thousand miles from the land where Aramaic was spoken already know this word?
That’s where this story takes one final turn… and I promise it will change how you view Easter forever.
There is a document called the Didache, which in Greek simply means “the Teaching.” What makes it remarkable is not only what it contains but how recently we rediscovered it. For over a thousand years it was lost entirely, known only by name from references in early Church Fathers who cited or commented on it but whose copies had not survived.
Then in 1873, a Greek Orthodox Bishop named Philotheos Bryennios found it in a monastery library in Constantinople, sitting in a codex that had been on a shelf since 1056. Not kidding.
He published it ten years later, in 1883. The Christian world had been operating without it for nearly a millennium, and then, just over 140 years ago, it came back.
Originally composed somewhere between 30 and 70 years after the resurrection, it is classified as one of the oldest non-scriptural Christian documents we have. It is brief and practical: a handbook for new Christian communities covering ethics, abortion, baptism, fasting, the Lord's Prayer, and how to identify false teachers. Think of it as the short manual a new congregation might have received to understand what Christians did together and why. It contains the earliest non-scriptural use of the Trinitarian baptismal formula: "baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" and is the earliest text to use the word "Eucharist" for communion.
… Ok, so how does this explain how Greek speakers understood an Aramaic word?
At the close of that eucharistic prayer in Didache 10:6, just before the congregation received communion, the church prayed this: “Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the Son of David! If anyone is holy, let him come; if anyone is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen.”
There are a few things going on, we need to break down.
This looks a lot like how Paul used it: “If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha.”
This was a prayer, spoken over the bread and the cup, happening so regularly by the earliest Christian communities that it made it into this manual. And it is addressed to Jesus Christ, not about him, not in his memory, but a prayer directly to him. It does not ask Jesus to visit the congregation the way you might ask a rabbi to come to your synagogue, or a guest preacher to come to your church. Those words, “let this world pass away”, are not a polite invitation. They are a call for the final divine reckoning, the Day of the Lord, the moment in Jewish theology when God himself arrives in judgment to make all things right. In Jewish thought, that was something only God does. You do not petition a merely human teacher to arrive as the agent of final judgment. You do not ask a dead rabbi to bring history to its close.
The people praying this prayer were not doing so because they believed Jesus was dead. If the person being invoked in this prayer is simply a dead man, the prayer is not merely unusual; it is theologically incoherent. The only way Maranatha functions in a eucharistic liturgy is if the people praying it believed that Jesus was alive and coming the way God comes. Not symbolically. In the fullest sense of what that means in Jewish eschatological thought.
Don’t confuse this, the Didache doesn’t show us that Maranatha originated with the document, it shows that the practice was prevalent in the Jerusalem church of the 30s and 40s. A group of Aramaic-speaking Jewish believers who had actually known Jesus, who had seen him after the crucifixion, eaten with him, touched him, and heard him say with their own ears that he would come again.
The Didache is significant because it was not written to persuade anyone that Jesus is Lord. It was a church manual. It simply instructed new communities how to worship, assuming they already knew what the prayer meant and already believed what it claimed. You do not write a liturgical handbook explaining convictions people don't hold. The fact that Maranatha appears without commentary, without defense, without explanation, tells you these beliefs were not in dispute.
Here is where it all comes together: The community that originated this prayer spoke Aramaic and had known Jesus personally: the Jewish believers in Jerusalem who were present at the crucifixion and saw him resurrected. They were the source. Maranatha could only have originated with them, which means it originated in Jerusalem, in the 30s or 40s AD, among the people who were closest to what happened.
Larry Hurtado, one of the leading scholars of early New Testament Christology, called this word “the Achilles’ heel” of the theory that Jesus was only called divine years later by people far from Jerusalem. That theory collapses under the weight of a single word. By the time Paul drops it into his letter to Corinth, the word had already crossed languages and communities because it was old enough and sacred enough to survive the crossing untranslated. An Aramaic prayer, born in Jerusalem among eyewitnesses, arriving in Greece without losing a syllable.
Within a generation of the crucifixion, the community that had watched Jesus die was praying to him in their own language as the Lord of the final coming, and that prayer was already ancient enough by the mid-50s to require no translation when it reached mainland Greece.
Maranatha has survived two thousand years and more language barriers than I can count, and is still spoken in some liturgical traditions at the close of the Eucharist, most of the people saying it with no idea what it is, what it means, or how old it is, or that the people who first prayed it were Aramaic-speaking Jews who had known a man who died on a cross and then, by their testimony, did not stay dead.
Happy Easter.
Maranatha.
Our Lord, come.
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
