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I must admit: the deeper I dig into this, the more confused I get. Your comments sure helped me to sort a few things out, but once more I realised how little I know about naming practice in Israel/Palestine between 200 BCE and 400 CE. I still have no idea how the form MARIA slipped into the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, whether it could be looked upon as Greek as well as Latin and when this may have happened. One more evidence for a Latin influence would be the male name MARIUS, which makes it easy to assume, that Maria should be the feminine form. In later centuries this mistake was made the other way round, I understand.
So thanks for your help and clever thinking! I'll make a new post if I dig up anything more.
One thing I'd like to deal more with is the question: according to what rules did the Greeks adopt foreign names to their own language. I should think the translators of the Septuagint only applied what was in use before, when they changed Hebrew names into Greek. Maybe the problem of transcription and ancient Greek and Hebrew pronuciation comes in here. I remember the vivid discussion between Pavlos und the other guy about the question, how close the scholarly pronunciation of Ancient Greek is to what it actually sounded like back then.