Samuel Matthis

The Word Nobody Knew

Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask for our “daily bread.” The word we translate as “daily” is one of the most uncertain words in the New Testament. Nobody knows for certain what it means, and as far back as our records go, nobody ever has.

In Greek the line reads τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον, ton arton hēmōn ton epiousion: “our epiousios bread.” Matthew and Luke both have these words, exactly alike.1 Almost everything else about it is open.

A word with no neighbors

The word already puzzled Origen, who wrote a book On Prayer in Greek in the third century. When he reached the bread, he stopped. “First it should be known,” he wrote, “that the word epiousios is not used by any Greek writer, learned or ordinary, and is not current in everyday speech; it seems to have been formed by the evangelists.”2

He did not give up there. He took the word from ousia, “being” or “substance,” and heard in it “the bread that contributes to our being,” the Word of God who feeds the soul. He also knew another explanation: that the word comes from the verb for what comes next, so that we ask for the bread of the age to come, and “what is, as it were, to be given tomorrow may be given to us today.” He set that view out fairly and judged it the weaker one.3

One translator, two words

Jerome had the same Greek word in front of him twice, and he translated it twice, differently. In his Latin Gospels, Matthew asks for panem supersubstantialem, “supersubstantial bread.” Luke asks for panem cotidianum, “daily bread.”4

In his commentary on Matthew he explained himself, and then he added a discovery. In a gospel he calls “the Gospel according to the Hebrews” he found, in place of epiousios, the Hebrew word mahar, “tomorrow,” “so that the sense is: Our bread of tomorrow, that is, of the future, give us today.” In the same paragraph he offers two more readings: bread that is above all creatures, and, for those who take it simply, the food of the present day.5

I find this very honest. Jerome did not pretend to know more than he did. He laid out what he had found and let the reader see it.

Three ways to read it

Broadly, Christians have read the word in three ways, and each has real support.

The first is “daily,” or “what we need.” Luke points this way: “Give us day by day our daily bread.”6 Raymond Brown notes that the Syriac Bible called the Peshitta has “for our need.”7 John Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew, kept it short: “What is ‘daily bread’? That for one day.”8

The second is “tomorrow’s,” or “the coming day’s.” Jerome’s Hebrew gospel points here, and so does ordinary Greek. In the book of Acts a close relative of the word, τῇ ἐπιούσῃ, tē epiousē, simply means “the day following” (Acts 7:26; 16:11).9 The German scholar Hans Klein reported in 2011 that current research widely prefers this reading.10

The third is “supersubstantial,” the bread for our very being. That is Origen’s reading and Jerome’s Latin in Matthew, and many Christians have heard in it the bread of the altar. Cyprian of Carthage wrote: “For Christ is the bread of life; and this bread does not belong to all men, but it is ours.”11 John Calvin, on the other side, found talk of supersubstantial bread “very little accordant with our Savior’s meaning,” and pulled the petition back to the kitchen table.12 The Catholic Catechism today keeps all three senses open at once.13

What the evidence allows

Could the word turn up somewhere else and settle the matter? For a while it seemed it might. An inscription from Rhodes was once read as containing it, and that reading has since been disproved. A papyrus with a broken word beginning epious- is now missing, so it cannot be checked.14

Colin Hemer, drawing on inscriptions from Lydia, suspected that the word was no church invention at all, but “an isolated outcrop from a large hidden continuum embedded in the massif of contemporary Greek.”15 Ordinary speech, in other words, which happens to surface in our records only here. That is the opposite of Origen’s view, and it may be right.

Brown summed it up in one sentence. Origen could find no example of the word, and “Seventeen centuries later we are not much better off.”16

So the honest word is debated. When someone tells me the meaning of epiousios is settled, I become careful. The evidence does not say that, and the best scholars on the question do not say it either.

A gift, not a puzzle

I pray this prayer every day, slowly, one phrase at a time. I have come to think the uncertainty in this word is a gift. It is not a problem we have to solve before we are allowed to pray.

For me the petition holds all three readings. It asks for the bread the body and the mind need today. It asks for the bread of the kingdom, a little of tomorrow given now. And it is “our” bread, which means it is never only mine. If we knew exactly what epiousios meant, we would probably choose one of these and quietly drop the others. The word does not let us. It keeps the petition as wide as it was given.

Origen could not find the word anywhere else, and neither can we. The church has prayed it anyway, century after century, without first agreeing on a dictionary entry. I think that is how it should be. We ask for bread we do not fully understand, from a Father who understands it perfectly.

In Words Given this word gets two days of its own, Day Fifteen and Day Sixteen, and part of the Second Sunday, which tells its history.

This note, like the book, was drafted with an AI model, and every source in it was checked against the text. The view at the end is mine.

Footnotes

  1. Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3, in Michael W. Holmes, ed., The SBL Greek New Testament (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010), github.com/Faithlife/SBLGNT. ↩

  2. Origen, On Prayer 27.7. Greek text in Paul Koetschau, ed., Origenes Werke, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1899), pp. 366–367, archive.org. The translation is mine, checked against Koetschau’s German, Vom Gebet, Bibliothek der Kirchenväter (Munich, 1926), bkv.unifr.ch. For “the third century,” see Brown (below), p. 195. ↩

  3. Origen, On Prayer 27.7 and 27.13, Koetschau, pp. 367 and 371–373. Our translation. ↩

  4. Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 in the Stuttgart Vulgate, Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, as reproduced at clerus.org. ↩

  5. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, on Matthew 6:11, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 26, col. 43, archive.org. Our translation of the Latin “Panem nostrum crastinum, id est, futurum da nobis hodie.” ↩

  6. Luke 11:3. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

  7. Raymond E. Brown, “The Pater Noster as an Eschatological Prayer,” Theological Studies 22 (1961): 175–208, at p. 196, theologicalstudies.net. ↩

  8. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 19.8, trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 10 (1888), newadvent.org. ↩

  9. Acts 7:26; 16:11. The Greek is in the SBLGNT, as above. ↩

  10. Hans Klein, “Vaterunser,” Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex), 2011, pp. 1–2, bibelwissenschaft.de. In the same paragraph Klein advises giving up any guess at the one “right” meaning and asking instead how the word has been understood. ↩

  11. Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer 18, trans. Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, ccel.org. ↩

  12. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) III.20.44, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845), ccel.org. ↩

  13. Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2837, vatican.va. ↩

  14. Brown, p. 195 n. 86. ↩

  15. Colin J. Hemer, “Reflections on the Nature of New Testament Greek Vocabulary,” Tyndale Bulletin 38 (1987), p. 85, the Tyndale Biblical Archaeology Lecture for 1986, doi.org. His fuller argument is in “Ἐπιούσιος,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 22 (1984): 81–94. ↩

  16. Brown, p. 195. ↩

The book: Words Given

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