Epiousion
' is a Koine Greek adjective used in the Lord's Prayer verse "Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον". Because the word is used nowhere else, its meaning is unclear. It is traditionally translated as "daily", but most modern scholars reject that interpretation. The word is also referred to by ', its presumed lemma form.
Since it is a Koine Greek dis legomenon found only in the New Testament passages Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3, its interpretation relies upon morphological analysis and context. The traditional and most common English translation is daily, although most scholars today reject this in part because all other New Testament passages with the translation "daily" include the word .
The Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that there are several ways of understanding , including the traditional 'daily', but most literally as 'supersubstantial' or 'superessential', based on its morphological components. Alternative theories are that—aside from the etymology of, meaning 'substance'—it may be derived from either of the verbs , meaning "to be", or , meaning both "to come" and "to go".
Appearances and uniqueness
The word is visible in the Hanna Papyrus 1, the oldest surviving witness for certain New Testament passages.is the only adjective in the Lord's Prayer. It is masculine, accusative, singular, agreeing in gender, number, and case with the noun it qualifies, ἄρτον, . In an interlinear gloss:
In the 20th century, another supposed instance appeared to come to light. In an Egyptian papyrus dated to the 5th century CE which contains a shopping list, a word transcribed as was reported as being next to the names of several grocery items. This seemed to indicate that it was used in the sense of "enough for today", "enough for tomorrow", or "necessary". However, after the papyrus containing the shopping list, missing for many years, was rediscovered at the Yale Beinecke Library in 1998, a re-examination found the word , not . In addition, the document was reassessed to date from the first or second century CE, not the 5th century.
, used in Acts 7:26 and elsewhere to refer to the day, may be a cognate word.
Translations and interpretations
There are several reasons that presents an exceptional translation challenge. The word appears nowhere else in other Ancient Greek texts, and so may have been coined by the authors of the Gospel. Jesus probably did not originally compose the prayer in Greek, but in his native language, but the consensus view is that the New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek. This implies the probability of language interpretation at the outset of recording the Gospel. Thus, the meaning of any such word is often difficult to determine, because cross-references and comparisons with other usages are not possible, except by morphological analysis.The most popular morphological analysis sees prefix and a polysemantic word even though that does not follow the standard Greek form of building compound words. Usually the iota at the end of would be dropped in a compound whose second word starts with a vowel. This is not an absolute rule, however: Jean Carmignac has collected 26 compound words that violate it. Alternatively, the word may be analyzed as a feminine participle from two different verbs.
"Daily"
Daily has long been the most common English translation of. It is the term used in the Tyndale Bible, the King James Version, and in the most popular modern English versions. This rests on the analysis of as for and as being; the word would mean "for the being" with day being implicit.This version is based on the Latin rendering of as quotidianum, rather than the alternative Latin translation of supersubstantialem. This quotidianum interpretation is first recorded in the works of Tertullian, and is the translation found in the Tridentine Mass.
Some translators have proposed slight variations on daily as the most accurate. Richard Francis Weymouth, an English schoolmaster, translated it as "bread for today" in the Weymouth New Testament. Edgar J. Goodspeed in An American Translation used "bread for the day." Another option is to view as an allusion to Exodus 16:4 where God promises to provide a day's portion of manna every day. This verse could be an attempt to translate the Hebrew of "bread sufficient to the day" into Greek.
The word is found in Acts 7:26, 16:11, 20:15, 21:18 and 23:11. This word is typically taken to mean "next" in the context of "the next day or night". It has been suggested that is a masculinised version of.
Today, most scholars reject the translation of as meaning daily. The word daily only has a weak connection to any proposed etymologies for. Moreover, all other instances of "daily" in the English New Testament translate , which does not appear in this usage. Because there are several other Greek words based on that mean daily, no reason is apparent to use such an obscure word as. The daily translation also makes the term redundant, with "this day" already making clear the bread is for the current day.
"Supersubstantial"
In the Vulgate Jerome translated in Matthew 6:11 as supersubstantial, coining a new word not before seen in Latin. This came from the analysis of the prefix as super and in the sense of substance. The Catholic Church believes that this, or superessential, is the most literal English translation via Latin, which lacks a grammatical form for being, the literal translation of the Greek, and so substance or essence are used instead.Advocates
This interpretation was supported by early writers such as Augustine, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyprian of Carthage and John Cassian.This translation is used by some modern Bibles. In the Douay-Rheims Bible English translation of the Vulgate reads "give us this day our supersubstantial bread". The translation of supersubstantial bread has also been associated with the Eucharist, as early as in the time of the Church Fathers and later also by the Council of Trent.
In 1979, the Nova Vulgata, also called the Neo-Vulgate, became the official Latin edition of the Bible published by the Holy See for use in the contemporary Roman rite. It is not an edition of the historical Vulgate, but a revision of the text intended to accord with modern critical Hebrew and Greek texts and produce a style closer to classical Latin. The Nova Vulgata retains the same correspondence-of-meaning for in the Lord's Prayer contained in the Gospel according to Matthew and Luke as in the Vulgate, i.e., supersubstantialem and quotidianum.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are several meanings to, and that is most literally translated as super-essential:
"Daily" occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. Taken in a temporal sense, this word is a pedagogical repetition of "this day," to confirm us in trust "without reservation." Taken in the qualitative sense, it signifies what is necessary for life, and more broadly every good thing sufficient for subsistence. Taken literally, it refers directly to the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, the "medicine of immortality," without which we have no life within us. Finally in this connection, its heavenly meaning is evident: "this day" is the Day of the Lord, the day of the feast of the kingdom, anticipated in the Eucharist that is already the foretaste of the kingdom to come. For this reason it is fitting for the Eucharistic liturgy to be celebrated each day.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, "supersubstantial" is thought to be a more accurate translation. Here is how Father Thomas Hopko of Saint Vladimir's Seminary in New York explains it:
an absolutely unique word. Etymologically , means "on top of" and means "substance" or "being". So it means suprasubstantial bread. Suprasubstantial bread: more-than-necessary bread. In the first Latin translation of the Lord's Prayer, done by Jerome it was , panem supersubstantialem. Somewhere along the way it became "cotidianum, daily". Luther translated "daily" from the beginning: tägliches Brot.
But in all languages that traditionally Eastern Christians use—Greek, Slavonic, and all the Arabic languages: Aramaic, Arabic—it doesn't say that; it just says a word that's similar to that How do they translate it ? they claim that the best translation would be: "Give us today the bread of tomorrow". Give us today the bread of the coming age, the bread that when you eat it, you can never die. What is the food of the coming age? It's God himself, God's word, God's Son, God's lamb, God's bread, which we already have here on earth, on earth, before the second coming. So what we're really saying is, "Feed us today with the bread of the coming age", because we are taught by Jesus not to seek the bread that perishes, but the bread that, you eat it, you can never die.
Eucharist metaphor
This translation has often been connected to the eucharist. The bread necessary for existence is the communion bread of the Last Supper. That the gospel writers needed to create a new word indicates to Eugene LaVerdiere, an American Catholic priest and biblical scholar of the post-Vatican II era, that they are describing something new. Eating the communion bread at the Last Supper created the need for a new word for this new concept.Supersubstantial was the dominant Latin translation of from Matthew for many centuries after Jerome, and influenced church ritual. It was the basis for the argument advanced by theologians such as Cyprian that communion must be eaten daily. That only bread is mentioned led to the practice of giving the laity only the bread and not the wine of the Eucharist. This verse was cited in arguments against the Utraquists. The translation was reconsidered with the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther originally kept supersubstantial but switched to daily by 1528.