“Lord, Lord”

A reader writes:

A question I have long wondered about.

In the Gospels (which are historical –as noted by the Church)  various persons refer to Jesus as "lord’ and he himself refers to people saying "lord lord" but not doing what he teaches.

The question is — how are we to understand the usage of these people –who I think for the most part are Jews?  Do they mean ‘lord’ the same way as did the Church later in its profession "Dominus Jesus!"  Jesus is Lord!?

Some thoughts have been:

A. They were inspired by the Holy Spirit.  Thus they really profess that he is God.

B. The Greek they use must mean (in most cases) something else –some title of respect but not a calling Jesus –God.

C. Something else entirely.

Any help would be great!

What people meant in these cases is probably a mix of different things. For some the New Testament references to him as "Lord" are confessions that he is God. We know this because in the Greek text the word kurios is often used of Jesus when giving a quotation from the Old Testament, and when you look up the original in Hebrew it has Yahweh–the divine name–where the Greek quotation has kurios referring to Jesus.

These quotations tend to be later, though, and aren’t in the voices of people who were talking to him during his ministry (e.g., they’re in the mouth of a later author as narrator or epistle-writer), so what consciousnessness there was of Jesus as God during his ministry is not entirely clear.

Certainly there are references by people during the Gospels referring to him to his face as "Son of God," and this is certainly to be understood as reference to him as a supernatural and even a divine figure. Something similar applies (paradoxically) to the title "Son of Man," which is not simply a straightforward reference to Jesus’ humanity. (In some literature of the person "the Son of Man" was also a supernatural figure.)

How much of this conscoiusness is loaded into their use of "Lord," though, is unclear. They certainly weren’t walking around referring to him as "Yahweh" to his face. We know that in this period the divine name had already become taboo, so people showed their reverence for it by not pronouncing it (except on special occasions). That’s a big part of why we have kurios so much in the New Testament–because people used it as a Greek substitute for the divine name instead of writing Yahweh in Greek letters.

So if people didn’t call Jesus "Yahweh" to his face, what did they call him?

Maran.

Or at least Mar.

Mar is the Aramaic word for "Lord," and when you put the –an suffix on it it means "Our Lord." This is where we get Maranatha = Maran athe ("Our Lord comes").

The thing about Mar, though, is that it has a pretty broad semantic range, just like "Lord" does in English. "Lord" can mean God, but it can also be a title of nobility.

There’s also the possibility that in first century Palesting Mar functioned like the Spanish word Senor, which can not only be a title of Christ but also simply a term of polite respect, meaning "Sir" or "Mister."

I don’t know if we know precisely how broad the semantic range of Mar was in the first century, but it had significant flexibility and could certainly be used as a term of respect that did not presuppose either nobility or divinity.

This means that when we’re dealing with people who call Jesus "Lord" in the Gospels that we can’t say with certainty what was in their minds. Some of them (at least some of the core disciples after a certain point in his ministry) may have meant it to have divine overtones, but for many it was more likely undrestood as a term of respect.

I also suspect, though, that the Evangelists may have intended us to understand divine overtones even when the person using the term wouldn’t have had them in mind. In other words, when people called Jesus Maran (or Mari, "My Lord") they were in some fashion acknowledging his divinity without even realizing it. At least it’s possible that the Evangelists want us to hear the word with these unintentional overtones (the same way that the high priest prophesies about Jesus without realizing it in John 11).

In case you’re curious, Mar is still used with several different meanings in contemporary Aramaic. Today it is used sometimes distinctively of God (as in the term Maran for "Our Lord" or as in the greeting Mar hubba, or "The Lord is Love"–used by Maronites) but also of humans, as when it is used as the Aramaic equivalent of the title "Saint" in a name (e.g., Mar Toma = St. Thomas) or as the equivalent of the title "Bishop" in a name (e.g., Mar Ibrahim Ibrahim and Mar Sarhad Jammo = Bishop Abraham Abraham and Bishop Sarhad Jammo, the Chaldean bishops for the eastern and western United States, respectively).

Incidentally, whenever I’ve spoken to a Chaldean or Assyrian bishop, I’ve always greeted him as Mari ("My Lord" = Monsignor, a title used for bishops in Europe) and I’ve never had one blink when I used the term (except over the fact that it was an American cowboy so greeting him).

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin