“Come, O Lord! (Maranatha)”
If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be under a curse. Come, O Lord! (1 Corinthians 16:22 BSB)
What it sounds like today
The BSB translates away a word older Bibles kept: Maranatha.
The cultural key
The Greek text carries the Aramaic untranslated: marana tha, 'Our Lord, come!' (divided differently, maran atha, it reads 'our Lord has come'; the imperative is more likely, and Revelation 22:20 echoes it in Greek). Like Abba and Hosanna, it survived translation because it was liturgy: a Greek-speaking congregation in Corinth praying an Aramaic sentence they inherited from the first Jerusalem believers. Which makes it hard historical evidence: within the earliest layer of the church, Aramaic speakers were already addressing prayer to Jesus as Lord.
Recovered meaning
A fossil of the church's first liturgy embedded in a Greek letter: the earliest recorded Christian prayer, in the mother tongue of the first believers, and it asks Jesus himself to come. The Didache still prayed it at the eucharist a generation later.