Stephen Andrew Missick

“In Aramaic “Mar” means “Lord.” “Maran” means “Our Lord.” Maranatha can be translated as either, “Our Lord, Come” (Marana tha) or “Our Lord has come” (Maran atha). Those who argue that Jesus spoke only Hebrew admit that Maranatha is indeed Aramaic but then state that when Paul uses it he “is writing to his non-Israelite, non-Hebrew-speaking audience.”  But Corinth is between Athens and Sparta! This was a Greek and not an Aramaic-speaking region. Paul uses the “Maranatha” prayer because it is a prayer of the Aramaic speaking mother-church in Jerusalem. The Maranatha prayer has greater significance than just a prophetic significance. Ben Witherington III notes the importance of the Maranatha prayer in his book The Brother of Jesus, “In concluding his letter, Paul, in 1 Corinthians 16:22 offers up a prayer in Aramaic, “Maranatha”, which means “Come, Lord.” In other words, Jesus is already called Lord by Aramaic speaking Jewish-Christians, and he is prayed to. Now, early Jews did not pray to people who were merely revered dead rabbis, teachers, or even prophets. They might well pray for a rabbi to be raised on the last day, but they would not pray to him and implore him to come. Yet, that is what Paul is doing here, and he is probably echoing a prayer he heard offered in the Jerusalem church, where such prayers were spoken in Aramaic. The dramatic importance of such a prayer should not be underestimated. Jews were forbidden to pray to someone other than God. This prayer strongly suggests that Jesus was included within the earliest Aramaic Jewish Christians understanding of God. In other words, Jesus was already viewed very early on as divine by his earliest followers, and this included James [the Just]. The notion that seeing Jesus as a divine figure was added only late in the first century and was done so only by Gentiles  is simply not true.”
― Stephen Andrew Missick, The Language of Jesus: Introducing Aramaic