He took the child by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum,” which means, "Little girl, I say to you, arise!” – Mark 5:41
Why are certain words preserved in Aramaic when the gospel was written in Greek?
That’s a peculiar quirk of Mark. There are at least three places in the gospel where Jesus’ words are given in Aramaic first, followed by a translation into Greek: 5:41 (
Talitha koum(i) “Little girl, I say to you, rise up”), 7:34 (
Ephphatha “Be opened”), and 15:34 (
Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) That’s not counting the Aramaic words scattered in other parts of the gospel like
korban or
hosanna or
abba (the last two are well-known loanwords among Christians anyway).
On one level, we can say that Mark included these phrases because that’s how the first generations of Jewish Christians (or specifically, if we accept the Petrine tradition here, Peter) passed the tradition. The author did not seem to feel the need to remove uncouth ‘foreign’ words yet, unlike the other evangelists. It serves to give the gospel an air of authenticity in that it serves to underscore the historicity of the events Mark was recording.
On another level, we could say that Mark’s retention of these Aramaic phrases may be to serve as a parodic inversion of the nonsense words and incantations uttered by magicians to impel whatever spirit or deity to grant them power to work wonders (
barbarous names, stuff like
abracadabra or the
Ephesia Grammata or even
hocus pocus). Thus, although it may seem that Mark is presenting Jesus as a magician uttering gibberish words of power in these two instances, his providing the translation immediately after the phrase deprives it of its ‘magical’ value. Ergo, it is not the words themselves that have power, but the person of Jesus who possesses this power from God; Jesus has no need to manipulate Him by uttering incantations in order to perform mighty deds.
